Age Rules

I chose this title for its delicious ambiguity. Put an exclamation point on it, and “Age Rules!” becomes the rallying cry of our Baby Boomers’ gerontocracy.

Trump is 80 years old today. Joe Biden acknowledged the inevitable ravages of age and stopped running for a second term at the age of 81. Nancy Pelosi was 82 when she wisely stepped down from the Speaker’s job and opened it to younger pols, soon to be Hakeem Jeffries (already 56 today).

The late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in office at the age of 87. Her refusal to let go paved the way for disaster. Mitch McConnell’s evil machinations and so-called “conservative” overreach turned our Supreme Court into an instrument of lawless revanchism.

Which of our Founders, do you imagine, would have been eager to equate corporate and individual wealth with “speech” for purposes of human electoral rights? Which would have lauded giving our president the criminal immunities of a king? Didn’t our Founders fight our Revolutionary War precisely to prevent that?

The current Court’s rallying cry of “original intent” is absurd. It would be hilarious had it not forged our nation’s recent disastrous retrogression. The very notion of “original intent” fundamentally contradicts the values of continuous progress and improvement in the human condition that were core to the Enlightenment and to our Founding.

Remember those words in the Preamble to our Constitution, “to form a more perfect Union”? Our Founders recognized, as does every sane religion, that the pursuit of perfection is a vital job that never ends.

One of the wisest American judges who never made the Supreme Court was a man named Learned Hand. He once wrote that “[o]ur Constitution is not a straitjacket, but a charter for a living people.” In contrast, our modern so-called “conservatives,” with their absurd obeisance to “original intent,” have condemned us to live in the late eighteenth century insofar as our fundamental norms are concerned. Should we really treat our Constitution like ancient and inviolable Scripture, as if we were all fundamentalist Christians, Jews, or Muslims?

With the exclamation point, my title is a parody. It ridicules the self-evident senility of many of our current leaders and the preposterous notion that the norms of 1791 (when our Constitution was ratified) should govern a free, modern people in the twenty-first century. How’s that for outlawing progress?

(Where our Constitution is clear, directive and explicit, we have no choice but to obey its commands, or for aggrieved states to secede. So long as all our states stay together, each of Wyoming’s individual citizens will have more than fifty-times the voting power in our Senate as California’s. That’s an indirect consequence of our Founders’ agreement to preserve slavery.

What I’ve been discussing here is the “conservative” justices’ penchant for importing late-eighteenth-century norms not remotely mentioned in the Constitution’s language into our law. So far they have done so in fields as diverse as carrying modern firearms and performing abortions. Now they are contemplating doing so with regard to medical transgender transitions, which were neither performed nor remotely contemplated in 1791.)

Without the exclamation point, “age rules” becomes a prescription for a long overdue cure. We desperately need clear and unbreakable rules requiring leaders in all three branches to step down, or not to serve or run, after they reach a certain age.

Why didn’t our Founders impose such rules? They wrote minimum ages right into our Constitution: 25 years for House members, 30 for Senators, and 35 for the President. But they never considered mandatory retirement.

From the perspective of our own century, the reason is obvious. Current estimates of longevity at the end of the eighteenth century, for both genders combined, are 30 to 40 years worldwide. According to Google AI, at that time “no region in the world had an average life expectancy exceeding 40 years.”

On analysis, that horribly low number derived from the high risk (then) of death in childhood. Once a person survived childhood and reached the age of fifty or so, he or she could live to 71 or more. Our Founders John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, for example, were respectively 90 and 83 when they both passed famously on the same day, the fiftieth anniversary of our Founding, July 4, 1826.

But Adams and Jefferson were the Colonial equivalents of Elon Musk and Warren Buffett today. They were wealthy men with access to the best doctors and the latest medical knowledge from around the world. They had the best food and drink then available, and neither had to suffer our modern epidemic of highly-processed, for-profit food. Jefferson was also one of our only two Founders who could reasonably be called a “scientist,” the other being Ben Franklin. In their longevity, these men were outliers for their time.

The point here is simple but profound.

In the late eighteenth century, people’s bodies gave out long before their brains did. Today, the reverse is true. At the advanced longevity that modern medical science, hygiene and diet make possible, the statistics are truly alarming. Among adults 65 and older, the incidence of Alzheimer’s is 11 percent; among those 85 and older, it’s 33%, or one in three.

So should we leave the risk of senility in our leaders to the vagaries of chance? Or should we do precisely what our Founders would have done if they had had our current knowledge of senility and its rapidly increasing incidence with age?

For me, as an ex-scientist, the answer is obvious. Our Congress should enact mandatory retirement ages for all of our leaders, in Congress, the Supreme Court and the Executive. It should do so over the President’s veto if necessary, and it should dare the Supreme Court to overrule them.

This issue has nothing to do with party or ideology. It has everything to do with assuring our nation’s and our species’ survival in our age of nukes and AI-enhanced propaganda and bio-weapons, not to mention runaway planetary heating.

NOTE TO READERS: The sources for the age-related facts in this post are all contained in this Google AI thread: https://share.google/aimode/axLuwmMrTjZe5bpTw". (You may have to copy the URL into your browser’s input field to connect.)