Summary
Rep. Annie Kuster, a 68-year-old Democrat from New Hampshire, retiring after 12 years in Congress, cites a desire to “set a better example” and create space for younger leaders.
Her decision comes amid growing public concern about aging politicians, with about a quarter of lawmakers over 70. Kuster’s successor will be Maggie Goodlander, 38.
Democrats are increasingly elevating younger leaders following setbacks in 2024, which some attribute to the perception of aging leadership, including President Biden’s controversial reelection bid.
Calls for age limits remain popular but face significant legislative hurdles.
The problem is that committee assignments are based on seniority, so if only one party has its long-serving Congresspeople step down, it cedes power to the other.
In other words, similar to how first-past-the-post elections lead to the two-party system, seniority rules leading to gerontocracy is a structural issue, not merely bad/incorrect/self-serving behavior on the part of individual politicians.
Edit: I’m not wrong, at least not completely. My argument just applies to the Senate, rather than all of Congress.
Did you not hear about AOC losing the vote to head the oversight committee?
And that’s not getting into when seniority is important, it’s within the same party…
Quick edit:
Weird I just noticed both comments were yours.
You can only reply to me once and just wait a couple minutes for a reply, there’s no need to start the same conversation multiple times. It’s rather annoying to most people in fact
Replies aren’t only for your benefit; other people read them too. I wrote the second reply because it was in a different branch of the thread and it’s possible people reading that branch wouldn’t see the first one.
If you thought you were helping, you could have googled it first instead of guessing, but feel free to reply as often as you want.
Fine, I googled it: seniority determining committee leadership is a Senate thing, but not a House thing.
It also might be that people in other professions would work longer if the structural issue of ageism was not so predominant there…about the only profession in the private sector where I see people doing it long past the average is doctors, but maybe that’s because they still have some labor protections as a profession, I don’t know…
The words smartest living physicist is like 94…
But he’s been “retired” for 30 years and his post work hobby has been figuring out what consciousness is.
Still insanely active and sharp as a tack. But it says a lot that he decided to retire from academia as soon as he was able.
From what I remember is their pay was largely predicted on experience. With a “more is always better” approach because until recently living past 70 was a big exception. Thy also have the bonus of usually having very good healthcare, and knowing when to get checked out.
So there were multiple reasons doctors were one of the first professions people stuck in for a very long time. Another example would be lawyers, but for different reasons
My hope is that people that want to do what they find meaningful work are able to do it longer, if they so wish. Rather than working to lower all boats, such as those in public service, who currently work longer. I submit it’s because they actually can.
I probably sound like a broken record here, but if people try to set some kind of rule or norm on when people “should” exit the workplace, and along comes tech to slow down aging or even reverse it we are going to have to very quickly adapt to that.
I get that people get exasperated with people like Pelosi holding back all kinds of progress, while making all kinds of money by insider trading. However, I’m not sure it’s just an age thing - that seems like red herring. It should be about competency and removing corruption, but people talk about “term limits” and “gerontocracy” instead. If Bernie were all of a sudden able to live to 150 - I wouldn’t want some stupid notion of a “norm” or, worse, some backward age-related rule to keep him from continuing to do the job if he so wished.
In the short term, if people want to start applying some kind of independently-verified cognitive test and candidates for office start taking it, I’d be all for that.
[1] Not that I think anything like that will happen that quickly, but talking about AI was mostly a “fringe” discussion mostly, too. Until it wasn’t. And most of the population, given the reaction to things like GPTLLMs are not AGI, and maybe never will be. But they are and will be incredibly disruptive. I think any breakthroughs related to age might be similar - it’s considered very “fringe”, until it’s not.