(Not So) Long in the Tooth

Hello and thank you for the support! I’m writing this from the road, where I just finished a book talk in the great city of Chicago:

I saw some amazing people that campaigned with us in Iowa.  It was a wonderful group.  Really pumped me up!  I must have done half-a-dozen rallies in Chicago that just got bigger and bigger.

This week I tweeted something that drew a lot of attention:

The average age of a Member of the 117th Congress is 58.4.  For Senators it’s 64.3.  House leadership is 81 and Senate leadership is 70.

Translation: our leaders are kind of old.

These are only averages.  Chuck Grassley is running again for Senate as an 88 year old.  Dianne Feinstein is 88 and has had reported issues with her energy and facility.  America is a gerontocracy.

Last week I wrote about how we are likely going to have a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.  They set a record in 2020 in terms of age – between them they were 150.  If there is indeed a rematch Joe will be 81 and Trump 77.

Our system is becoming absurd in terms of the age of our leaders, where the main variable is their health.

Why are our leaders so old?  In terms of electoral politics, a lot of it is that it takes time to build a following.  In many cases, literally decades.  By the time you get into Congress, you might have already been at it a while.  Climbing the ladder could take 10, 20, or 30 years.  Also, individual members have a re-election rate of 92% and the enormous moat of incumbency.

Congress itself is a seniority system.  The only way to assume leadership is to be there for a long time.  Nancy Pelosi got there in 1987.  Chuck Schumer in 1999.

When I spoke to Ro Khanna, who joined Congress in 2017, he said this:

Your power in Congress is very much based on relationships . . . who is going to have the best chance of convincing people to vote for them?  The people who have been in Congress the longest time . . . if you’ve been in Congress twenty, thirty years you probably know 150, 160 members of Congress.  So what you have is actually institutional static, basically a governing institution that is governed by people who won twenty, thirty years ago catering to people who won ten to fifteen years ago, and they actually hold the power in the institutions . . . Congress is being governed by people who won elections in the ‘80s and ‘90s.  The antidemocratic character of these institutions probably isn’t understood enough, that it’s so seniority based.

This has effects both in terms of understanding new developments like technology and data rights and also keeping the same leaders and ideas entrenched in place for eons.  Also, our representatives get progressively detached from the lived experiences of ordinary people.

So what can be done about this?  The obvious answer is term limits.

74% of Americans are for it.  They’re common sense.  If we send you to Washington, you shouldn’t be there until the day you die.  Do work on our behalf and then come home.

There was actually a significant movement toward term limits in the 1990s.  Voters in eight states in 1994 approved term limits for their members of Congress by wide margins.  Then, in 1995, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in U.S. Term Limits Inc. vs. Thornton that states could not impose term limits on their own members of Congress.  Also that year, the House of Representatives passed a bill 227 – 204 to impose term limits of twelve years in both the House and the Senate.  This fell short of the 2/3rds necessary to pass a constitutional amendment, but demonstrates just how serious the push was.

We should revive this by putting pressure on newly elected members of Congress to agree to support term limits.  And I’ve got a clever way to make its passage more likely: exempt current lawmakers.  They’re grandfathered in.  But eventually they’d age out while new members are subject to limits.  It would take a bit of time, but both the gerontocracy and the super-seniority system would fade.

If this seems like a worthy endeavor to you, term limits are part of the Forward Party’s agenda.  Let’s get behind leaders who want to do the right thing, including seeing to it that the system rejuvenates itself.  Representatives should do what they can for us and then, with our gratitude, gracefully step aside. Join us at ForwardParty.com.

Next up for the Forward Tour, I am heading to Denver, and then San Francisco and Irvine.  I'll be on Bill Maher while I'm in LA - should be a great time.  If you're in one of those places join us - these events have been amazing!