Oh well.
I suppose my praise of Michael Reagan’s recent piece about the Republican debate really was just a case of blind squirrels and acorns, because his next ones was downright insidious.
Pretending to be reasonable, the 78-year-old Reagan said if he was going to attack President Biden for what he says is cognitive decline, he has to call Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on it too. Clearly McConnell and Biden should step down.
And so should Dianne Feinstein and John Fetterman, two Democratic senators.
Well, Feinstein is 90 and in clear decline, but Fetterman was just elected to the Senate last year and is 54 years old. He has cognition problems, but he is in the process of recovering from a stroke.
A stroke Pennsylvania voters were fully awaew of when they elected him.
Last year.
Of course Reagan doesn’t mention Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, who will be 90 in two weeks. He was just re-elected to an eighth term last year and has already filed to run for re-election in 2028.
When he’s 96.
Reagan might have mentioned Strom Thurmond, who died in office at age age of 100.
Nope, both Grassley and Thurmond are/were Republicans. He’d rather attack a Democrat young enough to be his son who has a condition that is improving than Grassley, for whom eight terms in the Senate aren’t enough.
It’s actually kind of appalling that while we have all sorts of laws requiring that people reach a certain age before they can hold certain offices, we have none that mandate maximum ages. No one wants an 11-year-old president, although you could argue we had one with that level of maturity from 2017-2021.
It’s really somewhat obscene that while we have all sorts of jobs requiring retirement by age 65, we have some people among those running the country who have 65-year-old children. Sorry to keep picking on Chuck Grassley, but the 40-year-old speaker of the house in the Iowa state legislature is his grandson.
And of course Reagan doesn’t mention that the favorite to win the Republican nomination for president next year would be 78 years old on inauguration day in 2025.
And we haven’t even mentioned someone close to Michael Reagan’s heart. The 40th president was two weeks from his 70th birthday when he took office in 1981. He was nearly 78 when he left office and had been showing signs of cognitive decline for much of his second term.
You might remember him.
A guy named Ronald Reagan,
Yes, a maximum age for elected officials would cost us some good ones. Bernie Sanders will be 82 in September.. He’s one of only four senators who are 80 or above, and I have mentioned all four of them already. But there are 12 other senators 75 and older. But 12 House members are at least 80 and 26 others at least 75.
That’s too many.
There used to be something in this country known as elder statesmen (or -women). Those who want to could still serve a valuable advisory role.
There used to be something called growing old gracefully. Now we need a 20-minute recess because Senator Senile took a dump in his Depends.
It would be perfectly reasonable to say no one could be elected to federal office — president, vice president, senator, representative — after the age of 75 and no one could serve in those offices or the federal courts after the age of 80.
Otherwise we will someday see a “Wild in the Streets situation.
“I have nothing against our current President… that’s like running against my own grandfather. I mean, what do you ask a 60-year-old man?… You ask him if he wants his wheelchair FACING the Sun, or facing AWAY from the Sun. But running the country? FORGET IT, babies!”