The House members in the CBC include a disproportionate share of elderly members whose ability to do their jobs is questionable.
The House members in the CBC include a disproportionate share of elderly members whose ability to do their jobs is questionable.
A merica’s government has an old age problem. It was back in the news again when Representative Kay Granger, a Texas Republican who chaired the House Appropriations Committee as recently as April, was discovered in December living in a home for people suffering from dementia.
The problem might be getting better. The gerontocracy has shed 82-year-old Joe Biden, 84-year-old Nancy Pelosi, and 82-year-old Mitch McConnell from leadership. Clarence Thomas, the oldest Supreme Court justice, is 76. John Thune is 64. Mike Johnson is 52, and his opposite number in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, is 54. Donald Trump is 78, and will be five months older at his inauguration than Biden was at his, but Trump seems to be the end of that line; JD Vance is 40.
Overall, the age of Congress has been holding relatively steady in recent years after rising for decades. The 1980 election swept out an unusual number of Democratic incumbents, after generational shifts and Republican wipeouts earlier in the 1970s; the result was postwar lows in the average age of senators (52.8) and representatives (48.8). Over the past four congresses, the average age of senators has been 62.9, 64.3, and 64, and is now 63.8. The average age of representatives has been 57.6, 58.4, and 57.9, and is now 57.7.
There is still an elderly contingent, and it’s more pronounced on the Democratic side. A third of senators are 70 or older, and six are 80 or older. In the House, 107 representatives (24.3 percent) are 70 or older, and 36 (8.2 percent) are 80 or older. Across the two chambers, 72 of the 262 Democrats (including octogenarian “independent” senators Bernie Sanders and Angus King) are age 70 or older (27.5 percent), and 14 are 80 or older (5.3 percent), while 49 of the 272 Republicans are age 70 or older (18 percent) and seven are 80 or older (2.6 percent).
There is one segment of Congress where the dominance of elderly and infirm members is especially pronounced: the House Congressional Black Caucus. The four Senate members of the CBC are all relatively young, with an average age of 56.3. And the 58-member House caucus (all Democrats, despite the presence of black Republicans in the House) is not, as a whole, geriatric. With eleven members between the ages of 27 and 43, the average age of the House CBC is 59.7. That’s two years older than the average of the House as a whole, but not dramatically so.
The problem is at the upper end. Out of 58 members, 20 are age 70 or older (34.5 percent, significantly higher than in the House as a whole, and six are age 80 or older (10.3 percent). Among the 70-somethings, two are 79, one is 78, and three are 77.
Of course, age alone doesn’t tell the whole story. Much more significant is the representatives who are simply no longer able to do the job. The most prominent example is 79-year-old David Scott of Georgia’s 13th district. In Congress since 2003 following a 27-year career in the state legislature that began in 1975, the ranking member and former chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Scott has a declining mental capacity that has even his own party worried. As Meredith Lee Hill and Garrett Downs of Politico reported in February:
Even in private meetings, Scott frequently reads from a script and at times has trouble carrying out substantive conversations in real time about much of the food and agriculture policy that he oversees, according to more than a dozen lawmakers, congressional staff, lobbyists and agriculture advocates who have spoken with Scott in recent months and were granted anonymity to speak candidly about their concerns. . . . “David Scott is Exhibit A for term limits,” [a] Democratic lawmaker added. “He was a respected, talented member who has become diminished. And it’s painful for people to watch.”
In 2023, Scott’s own caucus “created a separate task force headed by Homeland Security ranking member Bennie Thompson (D., Miss.) to conduct farm bill listening sessions across the country, a job that traditionally would have been left to Scott.” Thompson himself is a mere 76 years old. Mica Soellner and Melanie Zanona of Punchbowl News added in September, when Scott declared his reelection bid, that “Scott’s leadership has come under scrutiny by some Ag Committee Democrats. . . . The 79-year-old’s health has concerned several lawmakers, who have privately complained about both his ability to communicate with members and lead the negotiations on the farm bill. Scott rarely speaks to the press and relies heavily on his staff for assistance on the Hill. One House Democrat told us doubts about Scott’s ability to steer the committee are ‘widely expressed.’”
Predictably, however, “Scott’s allies think the effort by mostly white members to push him out has ‘racial undertones,’ even though the potential candidates to replace him are also Black.” Scott got 71.8 percent of the vote in November. In December, Scott — who is regularly wheeled into hearings – shouted, “Who gave you the right to take my picture, a**hole?” at a Politico photographer who captured him arriving at the Capitol in a wheelchair. Scott’s staff, falling into the protective crouch we have seen so regularly from declining pols, treated the photographer as the problem, saying, “We will be reaching out to your editor, whoever it is we have to reach out to” in order to avoid Scott being photographed going to his job. So much for keeping the voters informed about their own representative.
Then there’s 70-year-old Dwight Evans of Pennsylvania’s third district, who suffered a stroke in May and did not return to Washington the rest of the year. Evans, who was elected to Congress in 2016 after 35 years in the Pennsylvania legislature beginning in 1981 and sits on the Ways and Means Committee that will be taking up the renewal of the Trump tax cuts this year, missed well over 200 votes in his absence, 63 percent of House votes, putting him ahead of Granger for the second-most-absent member of Congress. That’s become a bigger issue since the end in 2022 of Covid-era proxy voting, but House members in 2023 still cast votes 96.9 percent of the time, making chronic absentees more conspicuous. Yet Evans was reelected with 71.5 percent of the vote.
Al Green of Texas’s ninth district, at 77, has been in office for 20 years. He’s the ranking member and former chairman of the Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. He had to be wheeled into the House in blue hospital scrubs after emergency abdominal surgery to vote against the impeachment of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Green was reelected unopposed in 2024.
The oldest member of the caucus is Eleanor Holmes Norton, the 87-year-old delegate for the District of Columbia who has held her seat for 34 years. During a controversy over football stadium funding in D.C. in December, Dave Weigel noted that Norton “hasn’t been part of the Dems/age conversation, but the absence of a DC delegate who can rush to a camera and explain this is noticeable right now. [She] has been doing some media, but has limited her comments on this to tweets about how she wants the deal included in CR.” Norton was reelected with 80.1 percent of the vote in 2024.
Two members of the caucus (74-year-old Sheila Jackson Lee and 65-year-old Donald Payne Jr.) died in office in 2024. (Lee had missed 107 votes during her illness). While neither was especially old, this is something of a CBC tradition. Payne won his seat twelve years earlier when his 77-year-old father died in office. Alcee Hastings died in office at 84, John Lewis died in office at 80, and Elijah Cummings died in office at 68.
Other aged members of the CBC include:
- Maxine Waters (age 86), who represents California’s 43rd district. Waters, the ranking member and former chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee, has been in office for 34 years after serving 14 years in the California state assembly beginning in 1976. She was reelected with 75.1 percent of the vote in 2024.
- Jim Clyburn (age 84), who represents South Carolina’s sixth district. Clyburn, the third-ranking Democrat in the House until March, has been in office for 32 years after serving 18 years as the state’s human affairs commissioner beginning in 1972. Clyburn was reelected with 59.5 percent of the vote in 2024.
- Danny Davis (age 83), who represents Illinois’s seventh district. Davis has been in office for 28 years, following 18 years in Chicago and Cook County offices beginning with a city council seat in 1979. He sits on the Ways and Means Committee, and is the ranking member and former chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Work and Welfare. He was reelected with 83.3 percent of the vote in 2024.
- Frederica Wilson (age 82), who represents Florida’s 24th district. Wilson has been in office for 14 years, following twelve years in the Florida legislature beginning in 1998. Wilson is ranking member and former chairwoman of the Education Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development. She was reelected with 68.2 percent of the vote in 2024.
- Emanuel Cleaver (age 80), who represents Missouri’s fifth district. Cleaver has been in office for 20 years; he previously served an eight-year term as mayor of Kansas City beginning in 1991. He is the ranking member and former chairman of the Financial Services Subcommittee on Housing and Insurance. Cleaver was reelected with 60.2 percent of the vote in 2024.
Thompson, the ranking member and former chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security and chairman of the January 6th Committee, has been in Congress for 32 years. Bobby Scott, the ranking member and former chairman of the Committee on Education and Workforce, is 77 and has been in elected office since 1978. Gregory Meeks, the ranking member and former chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, is 71, has been in office for 27 years, and was first elected to the New York state assembly in 1993. Kweisi Mfume, who was first elected to Congress in 1987, left to run the NAACP during the Clinton administration, and reclaimed his old seat after Cummings’s death, is 76 and was first elected to the Baltimore city council in 1978.
A layer of very senior members may be hardly unique to the CBC, but that’s still quite a lot of very old and in several cases quite unwell people in important roles within a comparatively small slice of Congress. I suppose we can take it as a marker of America’s racial progress that we have black members of Congress who have been there too long, but that doesn’t make it less of a problem.
Southern Democrats before the 1990s were notorious for electing members who would hang on forever for two main reasons: their disproportionately poor constituents valued the seniority that could bring extra pork home to the district, and they were able to keep their districts uncompetitive by appeals to racial solidarity. The House CBC today exists in similar conditions, abetted by courts mandating the drawing of racially gerrymandered districts. The result is that it is exceptionally difficult to remove members who are no longer up to the job except by their deaths.