“I’ll give up power when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.”
This is the operative principle for today’s politicians.
The examples are so obvious:
- Nancy Pelosi, born in 1940, continues to represent California’s 11th District despite having lost the Speakership for the second time, despite having spent nearly four decades in the House of Representatives.
- Senator Chuck Schumer, a decade younger than Mrs. Pelosi (and thus not yet an octogenarian), is still serving his fifth term as a senator from New York State.
- Senator Dianne Feinstein demonstrated extreme mental fragility before dying in office at age 90 — after serving more than three decades.
There are Republican examples, too, but age, as The Wall Street Journal puts it, “is a bigger headache for Democrats than Republicans for one central reason: Democrats have a lot more old members.” While the median ages are nearly identical between the two parties, “of the 20 oldest House members elected in 2024, 16 were Democrats. In the Senate, where tensions over age are more subdued, nearly all of the oldest senators — 11 of the 14 who were older than 75 at the start of this Congress — were Democrats.”
This may strike a sense of dissonance, I know. The old cliché is that Republicans are tired old men and Democrats are wild young (and female) firebrands. But the true nature of the establishment doesn’t quite fit the old saws and preconceptions.
The Journal notes that 70 percent of Americans support an age limit on holding office.
Sure, as the next best thing to term limits! We know the crux of the problem is not age, it is the advantages of incumbency, and the length of time in power.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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9 replies on “Old as the Hills”
Well, I challenge your use of the verb “serve” and have my doubts about “represent”.
Term limits are an excellent idea, because they change the structure of incentives in a desirable way. Age limits are a bad idea, because age is crude proxy for competence. Most of us know once-able people who become dull-witted by their early seventies, and others who remain sharp into their eighties if not beyond.
I disagree with term limits. Why do these dinosaurs stay in office so long? Because their constituents REELECT them!!! They WANT them to stay in office. The purpose of term limits is to get the OTHER GUY’S representative out of office.
If seventy percent of Americans believe in term or age limits, then they should vote accordingly. We shouldn’t wait for the Constitution to be amended to save us from ourselves. We vote for the same people (and families) over and over again. We bear ultimate responsibility.
Playing a game as if it has different rules is very often a losing strategy.
The flaw in this argument is that, in the absence of formal term-limit, those who would otherwise vote-out a legislator based upon his or her having had enough terms would often be ceding very great power of seniority to a legislator from a different district.
Term limits get us out of a sub-optimal Cournot-Nash equilibrium.
And so if you’re unwilling to vote against an incumbent because, in most cases, the senior member ‘brings home the bacon’, then the responsibility is still yours. Congress isn’t going to pass term limits and probably few non-swing states would ratify it. Entrenched incumbents provide much of their funding.
People are responsible for that to which they consent; consent within a system is very different from consent to the system, and the responsibilities of the former are different from those of the latter.
If people shoot at me, then perhaps my best option is to shoot back; that doesn’t mean that I consented to shooting.
If people vote at me, then perhaps my best option is to vote back; that doesn’t mean that I consented to voting.
If people deploy an four-term legislator against me, then perhaps my best option is to deploy a five-term legislator against them; that doesn’t mean that I consented to a system in which legislators are given power based upon seniority and can be endlessly re-elected.
You are quite possibly correct that term limits will never be effected within the present constitutional framework. But, as I said, the present order is a Cournot-Nash equilibrium; a constituency that imposes term-limits on itself would be engaged in unilateral disarmament, and without a commitment mechanism (such as a constitutional amendment) we are stuck in that equilibrium.
Seriously, I wonder how many of the old fossels are actually *elected by the people*.
Few people deny that the system has been rigged in favor of just two specific parties; and we have seen that the nomination processes within these parties are in turn rigged, albeit imperfectly. So, even if we accept that the voters indeed choose between those nominees, they don’t freely determine who is elected.
Of course, our state-run schools teach us that this two-party system gives us stability.
Term limits, as practiced today, mean limits on a politician’s keeping the same office, so a system of maintaining their power bases while occupying different offices is a commonly-practiced way of keeping the effect of incumbency and maintaining a career in politics. That is what happens in California. What’s needed is cumulative term limits, meaning that a specific limit applies to a politician’s holding of office regardless of what office or offices. I would suggest two terms or twelve years, whichever is less.