The senility of too many powerful leaders in Washington is a silent scandal.
The senility of too many powerful leaders in Washington is a silent scandal.
T he Wall Street Journal rocked Washington last week with a deeply sourced, 3,800-word article detailing how the White House covered up President Joe Biden’s mental decline starting from the day he was inaugurated four years ago.
Among many incidents, the Journal reports that, as early as in spring 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting with Biden needed to be rescheduled: “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow.”
At the top, our federal government is a gerontocracy, and this problem isn’t limited to the White House.
The average age of senators in the incoming 119th Congress will be 64 years. In the House, meant to be “the people’s chamber,” the average age is 59. A majority of the Supreme Court is above or near retirement age. Newsweek bluntly notes that all this raises “questions about whether (top officials) have the mental acuity or fresh ideas needed to lead the country.”
Sometimes the frailty of officials who don’t have the kind of protective bubble that Biden does is on full display. The late senator Dianne Feinstein was a sad example of someone who shouldn’t have served until her death, at age 90. Mitch McConnell finally stepped down from Senate leadership this month, at age 81, after he had frozen in multiple public appearances that prompted concerns of cognitive decline. “We haven’t really had a GOP leader for the last year,” a top Senate Republican told me this month.
Then there is the case of GOP representative Kay Granger, who chaired the powerful House Appropriations Committee until she stepped down in March. Her son tells the Dallas Morning News that his mother has been “having some dementia issues late in the year” and has lived in an assisted-care facility for the last six months. The last time she voted on the House floor was in July, and she has missed more than 300 votes since then. If she had chosen to retire when she left her chairmanship, a special election could have been called that month and a new member seated by May.
The senility of too many powerful leaders in Washington is a silent scandal. Growing public concern about aged leaders who refuse to leave the stage in dignity is exacerbated by a Congress that, seemingly frozen in a bygone era, lacks the experience to tackle modern problems. During this year’s congressional hearings on Facebook and TikTok, for example, tech CEOs had to patiently explain to representatives how Wi-Fi works. In another humiliating moment, in 2018, the late senator Orrin Hatch — who held office for 42 years — questioned how Facebook could exist as a business without charging its customers. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s response? “We run ads.”
Congress has become a living advertisement for term limits. Wax statues such as 84-year-old former House majority leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland can no longer be seen as models of statesmanship. But the infirmities on display in public may only be the tip of the iceberg.
Mike Kim, the owner of Grubb’s Pharmacy in Washington, D.C., told STAT News in 2017 that he routinely ships medication for Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia to Capitol Hill through a contract he has with the Office of the Attending Physician of Congress. “It makes you kind of sit back and say, ‘Wow, they’re making the highest laws of the land and they might not even remember what happened yesterday,’” Kim said.
Polls earlier this year that showed public unease about the ages of Biden and 78-year-old Donald Trump reveal that Kim’s concern is widespread. Two-thirds of U.S. adults back the idea of instituting an age ceiling on candidates for president and for Congress and a mandatory retirement age for Supreme Court justices. In June, for example, 61 percent of North Dakota voters approved a ballot measure that would limit the age of eligibility for representing the state in Congress, though this is will most likely face legal challenge.
In the early 1990s, activists used the initiative process to win passage of term limits on Congress in 23 states, without a single loss at the ballot box. In 1995, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that states cannot unilaterally impose such term limits. But the idea remains as popular as ever, and recent court cases have shown that even long-standing precedents can be overturned.
Senior members of Congress who have built donor networks that have given them impregnable job security always raise the same tired arguments against term limits. They claim that imposing them would result in staff and bureaucrats running the show. But is that not the case today? As senators born during the first half of the 20th century grapple with low physical energy and cognitive decline, a “staff infection” has spread through the legislative branch.
The claim that term limits would further empower bureaucrats is absurd. Our current bureaucracy is the biggest in our history. It consists of more than 400 departments, agencies, and sub-agencies and millions of employees. All of these programs were created, enabled, and funded by a non-term-limited Congress. If we’re going to put anyone on trial for the crime of bureaucracy, it should be the career politicians who created it. Don’t be surprised if the new Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk (who recently reposted a jocular suggestion from a user on his X platform on the best way to get around Congress’s refusal to limit itself), makes an informal recommendation in favor of term limits.
It’s no surprise that members of Congress oppose term limits. “Asking most senators to support term limits is like asking chickens to deliver themselves to Colonel Sanders,” former Pennsylvania senator Pat Toomey, who honored his pledge to retire in the beginning of 2023, told me. But a similar opposition to change had once blocked the popular drive for the direct election of U.S. senators. Then, by 1913, enough pressure had built up to force Congress to end the practice of having corrupt state legislatures select U.S. senators. The clinching argument? Sitting senators would be grandfathered in, and none had to face voters until the end of their six-year term.
It is extremely unhealthy for our republic to allow a potentially highly effective and popular reform such as term limits for Congress to be held back by members’ refusal to surrender power. With more evidence emerging each day that our current leaders have instituted a gerontocracy, it is time to put country first and pass term limits now.