The question of whether there should be an age limit for U.S. presidents was raised this week in a particularly high-profile public forum when Congresswoman Katie Porter said in a televised debate that such restrictions “are a conversation for all elected officials that we should be having”.
Porter's admission was made during a debate over candidates for the US Senate seat left vacant by the death of Dianne Feinstein in September and represents the latest example of a thorny issue that is increasingly becoming a topic of discussion in dominant political life, like the inevitable rematch between '81 and '81. Joe Biden, 77, and former President Donald Trump, 77, take shape.
If elected, Biden would become the oldest sitting president in US history, a position he first claimed when he took office in 2021, while Trump would tie Biden for the record if he took office on next January at the age of 78.
It's an unprecedented situation that has brought potentially uncomfortable issues of age to the forefront on cable and Internet news talk shows, academia and public opinion polls. Debates over cognitive decline in older people have proven particularly fraught, raising the specter of ageism and ableism and a delicate question: How old is too old to lead the richest and most powerful nation in the world?
“This year, there has been an exceptional focus on the age of the candidates, particularly the age of President Biden,” Steven Austad, a professor specializing in aging at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said Thursday while moderating a webinar on presidents. and age.
“It is an issue that is not only raised by his political opponents, but is also whispered among people in his own party.”
As Porter, a left-leaning Democrat who has aligned himself with Biden in the past, demonstrated Monday, those whispers can sometimes be deafening. As the election season approaches, lawmakers, particularly Democrats, have been forced to confront the age issue more directly, according to Nicholas Beauchamp, a professor at Northeastern University in Boston who studies political discourse.
“Whereas before they avoided it in various ways,” he said.
Beyond concerns that advanced age can undermine an official's ability to serve in demanding positions, critics have also called it a feature of party politics that favors loyal incumbents and seeks to exclude potentially disruptive upstarts who They are more representative of the country's youth.
Porter's comments “speak to the divide within the Democratic Party between younger members and older members,” according to Beauchamp, who noted that the 50-year-old congresswoman is running for the same demographic as progressive stalwart Barbara, of 77 years old. Lee in the race for the vacant California seat.
“So he's in a strategic position where he needs to emphasize his youth and empathize with younger Democrats, who may be more concerned about Biden's age,” he said.
Uncomfortable question
In recent times we have seen how public discourse on the subject has reached a fever pitch; Elected officials stay in office longer as life expectancy increases.
The ailments and ailments that have afflicted congressional leaders in recent years – including Feinstein, who died in office at the age of 90, Mitch McConnell, 81, and Chuck Grassley, 90 – have fueled every There are increasing calls to impose age or term limits on candidates. members of the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Supporters have argued that such limits would discourage parties from continuing to support older candidates who are seen as safe electoral bets.
But Porter's articulation of the need to at least explore age limits elevates the argument of those who say term limits are not enough. To be sure, Porter, who was responding to a question about presidential age limits during the debate, said he was not using age as a metric to measure Biden.
American presidents are already constitutionally limited to two four-year terms. There is a minimum age requirement of 35 years, but no maximum age limit. Adding one would require a constitutional amendment, which itself would require massive – and nearly impossible – bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress.
It would also require lawmakers to answer a question that many bioethicists and aging experts consider impossible: What would be the cutoff age?
Speaking at Thursday's webinar, geriatrician Dr. Bradley Willcox pointed out the difference between “chronological age” and “biological age.” Simply put, people age differently and maintain very different levels of functionality, despite some general trends.
He said it is not feasible to determine an age limit without making it arbitrary.
“It completely abrogates the relationship [between biological age and chronological age], because biologically you can be 20, 25 years younger,” he said. “So, are you going to set the limit to be a calendar age or your biological age?”
He also noted problem-solving abilities such as inductive reasoning (the ability to draw broader conclusions based on specific evidence) and crystallized intelligence (the ability to make decisions based on accumulated knowledge), which have been shown to increase with age. . Meanwhile, memory and the ability to learn new approaches to problem solving tend to decline.
Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois, Chicago, also described the folly of trying to use other physical and medical measures to determine a president's fitness to serve based on his age.
“I'm waiting for the cartoon to come out with two presidential candidates on treadmills, hooked up to every device imaginable,” he said. “This is what it will be like to run for president, a measure only of cognitive and physical functioning and no longer on all the issues that interest everyone.”
Still, the issue of presidential age – and age limits – is unlikely to leave political discourse anytime soon.
This is consistent with public opinion polls that have shown broad support for imposing age limits. In October of last year, 82 percent of Republicans and 76 percent of Democrats supported imposing an upper age limit on federal elected officials, according to a Pew Research Center survey. A CBS News/YouGov poll conducted a month earlier found that three-quarters of Americans support such a limit.
Last year, Republican Rep. John James introduced a constitutional amendment to bar anyone over 75 from becoming president, despite James' support of the 77-year-old Trump. The largely symbolic bill had no cosponsors.
In North Dakota, an initiative seeking to effectively set an 80-year-old age limit for congressional candidates appears to have gained enough signatures this month to be on the ballot during the state's primary election in June, according to The Associated Press.
The effort would likely be subject to a constitutional challenge.
'Indicator rather than cause'
Recent events continue to fuel the debate, which has pitted supporters who highlight the issue as a political cudgel against opponents who express “legitimate dissatisfaction” with aging politicians, Northeastern's Beauchamp explained.
Neither Biden nor Trump have been able to allay concerns about their advanced age. In particular, Biden and his surrogates have been forced to address a report by special counsel Robert Hur, which described the president's memory as “severely limited,” including his failure to remember the date of the death of his son. he. During an interview, Biden introduced himself as “a sympathetic, well-intentioned old man with a bad memory,” according to Hur.
In a fiery rebuke, Biden took to the presidential podium to condemn the insinuations: “How dare you?” he said, while defending his mental acumen. Still, a later error in the speech, in which he referred to Mexico instead of Egypt, may have weakened his rebuke of Hur.
Broadly, Biden and his allies have tried to frame his age as an asset and representative of his experience.
Similarly, Trump's main Republican challenger, Nikki Haley, has ridiculed the former president for several recent gaffes, including a speech in which he repeatedly confused former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with Haley.
Still, Beauchamp argued that the current political discourse is perhaps best seen as a symptom “of deeper issues” surrounding the American political system and norms that broadly favor those in power.
“In Congress, the answer to the question [of incumbency] … It’s money or manipulation or some combination of those two,” he said. “And that's relatively simple.”
“But for party leaders and the president… there is still a deeper question about entrenching power,” he said. “Why hasn't the leadership of the Democratic Party changed since the 1990s?”
“The age issue is just an indicator rather than the real cause.”
