This shouldn’t be controversial, but it seems as though it is. If you’re of an age where people have cause to worry you might have senile dementia, or that you might get it during your term, you shouldn’t be allowed to run for President.
I have to retire at 65 because society has determined that’s when my usefulness as an employee starts to sharply drop off. I, like most people, am very OK with that because I’ve zero desire to work into my 70s anyway. But if I did, I’d probably be politely ushered out anyway, and for good reason. And my job is about a billion times less difficult and stressful than the Presidency.
I get that the Founding Fathers said any natural born citizen over 35 could run for President. But you know what the average life expectancy was back then? I looked it up: 35 if you were an average Joe and 64 if you were an aristocrat. These criteria, like many things the Founders decreed, are out of date and need to be changed.
We’ve got a 73 year old President and a 78 year old presumptive front runner. Both might very well be suffering from dementia. One can’t talk about a single topic for more than 30 seconds without wandering off into the weeds, and the other seems to think websites and phone numbers are the same thing. This is simply deranged.
I get that there are plenty of 80 year olds who are sharp as a tack (Bernie Sanders, for instance, doesn’t look like he’s slowing down…yet) but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re at an increased risk of dementia and that risk grows bigger every day. The Presidency is simply too important to be given to people who might be on the verge of losing their marbles.
Proposition: If you’re older than 65, you can’t run for President. If you’re 65 and make it through your first term OK then you can have a crack at a second term, but no first termers over 65.
Pretty sure you’re looking at the wrong statistic here. That one likely incorporates childhood deaths. While lives have extended in the modern era, the average life expectancy of an adult hasn’t changed that dramatically.
Anyway, that’s relatively minor.
I disagree with your idea. In fact, I think we should remove the existing age and natural-born requirements from the presidency. America should not have second-class citizens, be they young, old, or foreign-born. Everyone should be able to run for the office of the President.
I think your arguments are a great reason not to vote for old people though.
I’m also older than 65 and I think it would be a huge mistake to vote for anyone over that age for President. The historical record backs that up.
But I’d be reluctant to put that in the Constitution. People do live longer and healthier with all their faculties today. Huge amounts of research into Alzheimer’s is being done and several promising approaches will probably come onto the market over the next ten years. We don’t have any idea where medicine can take us. Now is a particularly bad time to mess around with stuff we don’t know the consequences of.
Here in america we don’t really get a choice. If your party decides to run a 90-year old, then you vote for the 90 year old or you don’t vote for anyone, at least as far as the presidency is concerned.
The party doesn’t decide to run a 90-year-old without your input, though. If you don’t want a nonagenarian in the general election, then vote against him in the primaries.
The problem with setting some arbitrary age limit is basically the same as setting any arbitrary limit on who can be president (or USSC or Congress-critter or whatever)…that it’s going to be arbitrary. In addition, any age limit you set today is almost certainly going to be out of date, so to speak, in the future…just like if you set one in the past it wouldn’t be applicable today. As medical technology progresses, someone who is in their 80’s or even 90’s CAN still be fully functional…until they can’t. And when they aren’t is going to depend on the individual, not some broad category grouping or actuary table. Certainly folks in their 70’s today are much more functional, as a group, than a similarly aged group of folks in the 50’s, and my WAG is this is going to continue to change as the population ages and companies focus on that market (not just in the US…many other countries have worst aging issues than we do). There will be a HUGE (hands) market for this stuff in the next 30 years, assuming the world doesn’t go completely tits up and we go back to the joys of hunting and gathering (well, the few survivors anyway).
Myself, I think it’s like any other decision that voters need to take responsibility for when they choose a candidate. We shouldn’t ‘fix’ this issue and take those choices out, especially when we actually do have a succession system in place to deal with it if it becomes a real issue. I think we don’t need an age limit on the presidency or on Congress or even on the USSC. I think there are a lot of bigger issues in our political system currently than this one. YMMV of course.
You can vote for one of the other candidates. Doesn’t mean that candidate will win. Clearly, if you think that being 90 is such a huge impediment, you should just vote for a third party, or even for the other major party candidate.
If you’re not willing to do that, I’m not sure why we should enshrine it in the Constitution. You’ve already proven that the 90-year-old you’re willing to vote for is a better candidate than the other one. “We should amend the constitution because a majority of voters want to vote for someone I think shouldn’t be president” isn’t a very compelling argument.
“My preferred candidate can’t get enough votes to win” is very much not the same as “I don’t get a choice for whom to vote.”
Wow, this doesn’t align with my experience at all. Telling an american to vote third party is never good advice, for a starter, and lunging from that to “the guy voting against everything you value is a better candidate due to youth” is dubious at best.
Chronos has the right of it, to whatever degree the common man’s vote has weight in the primaries. By the time it gets to the final voting booth, your choices are like it, go home, or make a third-party vote that is exactly equivalent to going home.
That should be: if the President’s actions/behavior give serious cause to believe he/she is suffering mental impairment. Setting an arbitrary age for disqualification for office ignores the reality that many people function very well into “old age”, while some who are much younger are deteriorating or never had really good cognitive function to begin with.
There could at some point be a crisis where the President or other high elected official is displaying prominent signs of impairment, and it might become necessary to demand formal cognitive testing or proceed with impeachment. During his second term in 1919, Woodrow Wilson suffered a severe stroke (when he was 63 years old) and his mental faculties were apparently severely impaired, a condition lasting until he left office in March 1921, requiring his wife and senior aide(s) to help make executive decisions.
What should not be acceptable is ageist discrimination or labeling someone demented because they support policies you detest or in general behave like a jerk.
Yeah, while I definitely consider that “too old for the Presidency” is a real thing (and that certain current and former candidates for or holders of the office have met that criterion), I’d be against imposing a formal age limit on the office.
Even less so in the case of SC Justices, who don’t have to trundle all over the world and make important decisions quickly the way Presidents do.
IF there is one, it should be in the early/mid 70s at the start of your first term as the cutoff. By that age you should still be competent to handle the job and if you are a developed human being, you’ve got 20 years of life experience above and beyond a person who is in their 50s.
Yes, it’s arbitrary. But I expect we’re going to hear a massive amount of talk about this issue in the next fourteen months. And it will all be saying that the acceptable age for somebody to get elected President is older than seventy-four and younger than seventy-seven.
Thus bringing us just a bit closer to the world as portrayed in Demolition Man.
I was actually excited by Schwarzenegger’s Governorship, even though I wasn’t a huge fan of his policies, because I thought he was potentially going to be popular enough to push for that change.
If we agree that there are lots more important qualities in a candidate than their age, why should we disqualify candidates based on age?
Your scenario is essentially that a (potential) majority of voters want to vote for the 90-year-old they agree with over the younger candidate they disagree with, but we should somehow prevent that 90-year-old, who has popular support of voters, from running?
I don’t care about their age. I care that they know what the fuck they’re doing, or at the very least have a rudimentary knowledge of how the federal government works.
Thus, I would like a standard high school civics test to be administered to each candidate that they must take in full public view, given at a random time without warning.