Ranting On...Thad Cochran & Congressional Age Limits

Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS)

I have long been someone that does not espouse term limits, because I occasionally have a Libertarian streak that runs through me, and quite frankly I've never seen the point of limiting personal freedom when there are measures in place to ensure that a person can easily be removed from office if the people want them to be gone.  While I strongly feel that there should be campaign finance reform and at this point election campaign reform at the end of the day in the United States we get the right to vote in a primary and to vote in a general election.  If enough of your fellow citizens want to remove someone from office and replace them with someone else, they have the means to do so.  In recent months, though I've wondered if there needs to be some sort of measure to ensure that aging politicians, while not limited from running for public office, are held to some sort of accountability to their fitness to hold public office.  This culminated this last week with reports of Sen. Thad Cochran's declining health (it appears he is now back in Washington, but reports were much more dire prior to yesterday evening), and made me think about the concept of term limits and age limits in general.

People who talk about term limits treat it as the band-aid to all of the gridlock that Washington has experienced.  They speak about career politicians like they're a disease, and that if we simply "threw all of the bums out" we'd end up with a much better form of government.  In my opinion, this has always reeked of lazy thinking and perhaps even ignorance of how politics works.

For starters, let's stop the assumption that experience doesn't matter when it comes to high office, because it does.  I've written about this before, but being a senator, governor, congressman, or president is a big job.  Technically, anyone who is 35, naturally-born, and otherwise eligible can be the president, but that doesn't mean that they should, or that they can actually do the job, in the same way not everyone should just start practicing law or medicine tomorrow without some sort of guidance prior.  Donald Trump, the least experienced person in the history of the country to ever take the job, exhibits daily the need for background knowledge on how to run the country.  Yesterday he made a war widow cry through his callousness, and that is just one in a long, long, long line of public embarrassments that he has inflicted that an experienced person wouldn't do. Yes, the presidencies of men like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama certainly had their fair share of flubs, screw-ups, and occasionally massive public pitfalls, but it was never approaching what Trump has done in what is still less than a year-old presidency.  Term limits, it should always be noted, caused this-it's quite probable that President Obama would have run for a third term and been successful against Trump (remember how popular Obama became when Trump kept sinking lower?-that effect would have been diminished if he was a candidate, but not by enough to make him lose).

Secondly, "throw the bums" out is an easy toss-away solution that doesn't actually work, and we actually have evidence of it through the Tea Party movement.  The Republican Party regularly primaried proven leaders and threw out longtime Blue Dog Democrats, and as a result created a greatly dysfunctional caucus that has caused untold damage to people's faith in the government and to our international reputation.  (What amounts to) Ransom payments made to raise the debt ceiling have downgraded our credit rating and led to at least one government shutdown, and will probably result in another before Trump's first term is up.  The Republicans have spent seven years campaigning on overturning the Affordable Care Act, but when they actually hold all branches of government, they can't do it in part because it's such heinous, terrible policy that will harm too many people, and there are enough grown-ups in the building to stop it from happening.  For years, the position as adult in the room was held by President Obama, whom the Republicans "who came to throw the bums out" could blame all of their problems on, but now it falls to the likes of Sens. Murkowski/Collins/McCain to be the adults (and then get regularly berated by the party fringes).  Democrats are not immune here-Bernie Sanders oftentimes pitched ideas that were not actually feasible, resulting in untold national debt, but people believed it because he wanted to "throw the bums out," damn the consequences.  This isn't a responsible way to govern, and it does come back to bite you.  You can max out your credit cards and skip paying rent for only so long before responsibility comes back to bite you in the ass, and discarding people simply because they've been in power is regrettable when you realize no one knows how to balance the checkbook anymore.

But Cochran's situation does make me wonder if we need to stop making discussions about a politician's mental or physical ability to govern off-limits.  Cochran has come back to DC, but missed multiple votes, and it was a legitimate concern by Republicans that they wouldn't be able to pass a budget without him-the entire government shouldn't function on one specific senator not being there, but in a very combustible Washington, that's the case.  Sen. John McCain, before he was diagnosed with brain cancer, was seen rambling during a Senate hearing that made people question his mental capacity for the job, and Sen. Orrin Hatch recently was caught during a different hearing not understanding a very direct line of questioning.  The same could be said about the late careers of senators like Strom Thurmond, Fritz Hollings, and Robert Byrd, and of course it's worth mentioning the long medical leaves of people like Sens. Tim Johnson, Mark Kirk, and Ted Kennedy in recent years, where they missed dozens (if not hundreds if you count committee motions) of votes.

This isn't a small thing.  Thad Cochran doesn't just represent himself in the Senate, but nearly 3 million Mississippians who have entrusted him to do his duty and vote on their behalf, and represent their interests.  The enormity & grandeur of what members of Congress do frequently gets lost amidst the partisan bickering of day-to-day politics, but they are serving a vital role, one that was intended for them to best represent the interests of their part of the country.  If Cochran misses votes, or if John McCain or Ted Kennedy or Tim Johnson does, they are essentially erasing the voices of those people on Capitol Hill.  That's no small matter when so many things that Congress deals with (like the economy, healthcare, social security, and national security) affect people's lives in significant ways.

This isn't me posing a solution.  As I stated above, term limits might limit this issue, but we sacrifice stability for new voices, and limit people's freedom in the process (and it doesn't help find a solution for someone like Mark Kirk, who was incapacitated for a large portion of his first term in office).  Age limits could be the answer, but that also hits a snag.  Dianne Feinstein, for example, is the oldest member of the Senate and still as sharp as ever during committee hearings or floor speeches, and Rep. Maxine Waters is nearly eighty but has oddly never been so relevant in her political career.  It feels discriminatory to go after Kirk or Johnson by saying that they should have resigned, but, well, they probably should have in hindsight.  Part of why they didn't was that their governors were of the opposite party at the time of their stroke, an issue where there is an actual solution I feel confident backing.  I have long supported modeling all Senate (or House vacancies, for that matter) after the Wyoming method where the seat doesn't switch parties, but instead the state party picks three candidates for the governor then to select.  It ensures there are no shenanigans (no one quickly switches parties and then switches back again), that the seat stays in the same hands of the current senator, and that an elected official (in this case, the governor), rather than an undemocratic committee, makes the ultimate choice for who is to sit in the seat.

But the larger issue of age & health inhibiting public officials is a problem that should be discussed.  Politicians are not doing their job when they leave office, and a senator is not the same as a typical position where the incumbent can just delegate until they get better.  It feels very tacky and unfortunate to discuss this, because we are in fact attacking someone for something outside of their control, but there is a reality here that has to be faced.  This is a problem, but one with no solution I've heard that I'm comfortable backing.  I'm curious in the comments if you have solutions, because I can't come up with ones that make me feel on firm ground.  Share below!