American politics are oversaturated with senior citizens
RONNIE SAENZ / ASST. OPINION EDITOR
Utah Republican Senator Mitt Romney recently announced on Sept. 13 that he will not be running for reelection in 2024. Senator Romney, age 76, noted several reasons for his withdrawal, but the most prominent was that he felt he was too old for the position.
“I considered my age and the fact that at the end of my second term I would be in my mid eighties, and I think it’s time for guys like me to get out of the way and have people from the next generation step forward,” Romney said.
However, Romney was not directly encouraging his fellow seniors in office to step down. He even claimed if he was as spry as Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley who is 90 years old, he would stay for reelection.
Yet, I don’t share this sentiment. I feel as if Romney should have stepped down six years ago when he was 70, and that should be the standard for any politician at or over 70.
According to a CBS poll from Sept. 2022, 73% of Americans believe that there should be age limits for elected officials. In addition, 47% believe having more young people in office would be better for the U.S., compared to only 12% who believe having more old people in office would be better. This is because at any age older than 70, you are too out of touch to make competent decisions for the country. This is also because there have been some issues concerning the health of senior elected officials.
@Travis_in_Flint/Twitter
This sentiment doesn’t come from nowhere. The average age of senators in the Senate is 63.9 years and in the House it’s 58.3 years, yet the median age of U.S. citizens is 38.8 years. So, the average congressman does not properly represent the average U.S., citizen age-wise.
Looking at the past two presidents, both President Biden (78 years) and former-President Trump (77 years) are older than Romney, yet they both plan to run for reelection. Many in the U.S., myself included, are tired of the oversaturation of senior citizens in office.
Republican Presidential candidate Nikki Haley went on record saying, “the Senate is the most privileged nursing home in the country.”
Senior officials are so much older than the average U.S. citizen that they’re out of touch with many pressing, contemporary issues. One of the best examples of this was the TikTok hearings in March over the app’s data security and harmful content on the platform. These officials were asking about TikTok utilizing the consumer’s public data, as if it were some new nefarious evil, yet it’s a feature that’s been around for decades on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. I often watch those hearings to have a laugh, because the lack of knowledge many of these Senators have on current social media usage is comical.
How can senior officials be expected to deal with emerging issues like AI, high security data breaches and social media, if according to the Pew Research Center, two thirds of seniors (above 65) don’t even know how to navigate social media? Either they need to educate themselves on these kinds of contemporary issues, or we need to get people elected who have lived with technology. Otherwise, tech companies or other individuals can take advantage of the ignorance of our officials, such as in the Pentagon data leak in April 2023.
In summary, the Pentagon data leak happened after a low ranking IT official gained access to multiple highly classified Pentagon documents.
It would be extremely beneficial to the U.S. to have younger elected officials to make decisions on these kinds of contemporary issues. That’s not to say the insight of older officials isn’t valued, but as mentioned earlier they make up most of the seats in the House and the Senate. By setting an age limit of 70, more young people will be encouraged to run for office.
Other than representation, there are a number of health concerns, plaguing older officials. Age often comes with illness, and while there are older senators who are physically and mentally healthy, there are many who aren’t. Being a U.S. elected official is no easy task and takes an enormous stress on the mind and body, no matter your age. As a result, many of the older officials just can’t keep up with the demand that the job asks for, which is not their fault at all. It’s like asking a 12-year-old to work construction; chances are, they simply don’t have the abilities necessary for the job.
Recently, the 81-year-old Republican Senator Mitch McConnell froze up twice while speaking to the media. The cause of his freeze ups are still a mystery, but it reflects a trend of broader health issues among senior officials. The 90-year-old Democratic California Senator Diane Fienstein, the oldest senator in the history of the U.S., also had a number of health issues this year from shingles in May to a fall in August that left her confined to a wheelchair. In July, Feinstein had to be corrected and guided during a Senate Appropriations Committee as she appeared extremely confused and frail.
Things have gotten so bad as of late that, in August, Diane Feinstein gave power of attorney to her daughter Katherine Feinstein. Power of attorney is a legal document where someone gives another person authority to make legal decisions on their behalf. Yet McConnell and Feinstein are still expected to take on the responsibilities of a senator, despite their very glaring health issues.
President Biden is the oldest serving U.S. President in history at 80 years old. Since the beginning of his Presidential campaign in 2019, he has received criticism over his cognitive abilities as he frequently slurs, forgets and misspeaks during speeches and interviews. Biden has a lot of moments where I question his competence for the role, such as just last week on Sept. 21 2023, where Biden mistakenly addressed the Congressional Hispanic Caucus as the Congressional Black Caucus.
There are spry senior elected officials currently serving such as 90-year-old Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, or 82-year-old Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders, who have kept up with the workflow and stayed healthy enough to perform their job. I would say for the most part, they are the exception. Some believe that older people are wiser than younger people, so keeping older people from office would be a disservice to the U.S. Then there are those that believe younger people just don’t have enough knowledge to compete with someone older. After all, more years means more wisdom, right?
In the past, scientists used to believe that our brain development peaked in our 20s and then degraded after that. This is only half true. Scientists now believe brain development is not just a peak and decline, some cognitive functions actually get stronger as you get older while others weaken. According to the article “How memory and thinking ability change with age” by Harvard Health Publishing, as you get older it becomes more difficult to learn new information and remember old information, but it also becomes easier to find relationships between diverse sources of information. Essentially, if you’re young you learn and remember better, and if you’re old you understand big picture ideas better. Becoming 70 years old doesn’t necessarily mean you get smarter, it just means your brain is wired differently than a 20 year old brain.
There are a lot of problems that come with keeping older U.S. elected officials in office. They already overrepresent the country’s senior demographic, and many will deal with health issues that will impair their ability to serve. Adding a maximum age limit of 70 would be very helpful to this effect, but there are so many senior officials above that age that implementation would be extremely difficult. In the meantime, we can help alleviate these issues on our own by going out of our way to support younger officials and discouraging reelections for senior citizens. After all, all these senior officials were voted in, so if we want our officials to represent us better, then we need to use our vote to prove it.
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