I’ve been mulling over Dan McLaughlin’s proposed constitutional amendment that would impose age limits for elected federal officeholders the last few days.
Dan suggests this language:
No person shall be eligible for election to any federal office who shall have attained to the following Age on the date the person would take office: for president or vice president, seventy-five years; for senator, eighty years; for representative, eighty-five years.
I find myself in general agreement with this proposal for all the reasons Dan states. I do, however, find one flaw in it, and I wonder how he would respond.
The Presidential Succession Act of 1947 places the speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate, after the vice president, of course, second and third in the line of succession.
In today’s 118th Congress, Kevin McCarthy (age 58) and Patty Murray (age 72) are spring chickens compared to some of recent holders of those two offices. But Nancy Pelosi (83) was older than Joe Biden is now when she handed the speaker’s gavel over to McCarthy after the 2022 midterms. And the office of president pro tempore of the Senate — traditionally the senior-most member of the majority party — has been held in recent years by octogenarians such as Patrick Leahy, Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, and Robert Byrd.
I would suggest one alteration to Dan’s proposed amendment:
No person shall be eligible for election to or succession to any federal office who shall have attained to the following Age on the date the person would take office: for president or vice president, seventy-five years; for senator, eighty years; for representative, eighty-five years.
In the terrible circumstance where the U.S. would be on to the third or fourth official in the line of presidential succession, we’d probably be better off if that individual were still in the prime of life.