Maureen Callahan: Dianne Feinstein, Joe Biden Show Why We Need Age Limits for Politicians

Does it shock anyone, really, to learn that 88-year-old veteran US Sen. Dianne Feinstein is exhibiting signs of dementia?

I’ll brace for angry emails from readers who still have landlines, dial-up modems and AOL addresses in making this argument: We’re long overdue for age limits on our legislators.

Commercial airline pilots are forced to retire at age 65. Air traffic controllers must retire at age 56.

Yet we have a 79-year-old in the White House who, on any given day, thinks that his VP is his wife, or that his wife is his sister and his sister is the first lady, or that Michelle Obama is the vice president or that Barack Obama is Donald Trump and vice versa.

So easy to get the latter two confused, isn’t it?

When asked how he’d handle a dispute with his actual vice president, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden told CNN, “I will develop some disease and say I have to resign.”

Wonder where he got that idea?

A recent Politico/Morning Consult poll found that 48% of Americans are concerned about Biden’s mental fitness.

So are some of his own staffers, who, according to a September 2021 Politico report, either mute or turn off his live press conferences — so alarmed are they by the inevitable next malapropism or false claim or thought to nowhere or near-catastrophic foreign policy bungle.

This is not a new problem. Strom Thurmond retired at 100 years of age, his complete out-to-lunch-ness an open secret on Capitol Hill. By the end of his second term, Ronald Reagan was falling asleep in cabinet meetings and so inattentive that his aides broached invoking the 25th Amendment with Reagan’s chief of staff.

Four years before a stroke forced him to resign in 1975, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas contemplated retirement because, as he wrote to a friend, “My ideas are way out of line with current trends.”

Imagine that. The self-awareness to know one is aging out — negated by the craven desire for power.

“The judiciary,” wrote Judge Richard A. Posner, “is the nation’s premier geriatric occupation.”

Congress is right there with them. Among our biggest public health crises today is Big Tech, which is deliberately corroding and addicting our youngest and most vulnerable — not to mention propping up dictators, disseminating all kinds of misinformation, interfering in wars and elections and colonizing space.

Who really thinks that a cohort of 70- and 80-somethings — led by Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Grassley, Mitch McConnell, Pat Leahy, Jim Inhofe and Richard Shelby — are best equipped to deal with this?

Pelosi, Grassley and Shelby are fast approaching age 90. It’s enough already. It’s not healthy — or fair to the generations behind them — for the nation to remain in these arthritic clutches.

“I see in the U.S. Congress people who’ve been there 20, 30, 40 years,” Barack Obama said in 2017. “And because they’re still there, they’re blocking the 25- or 30- or 35-year-old who is more of their time and could be more innovative and creative [in] solving the problems we face today, rather than the problems we faced 35 years ago.”

As far back as 2020, The New Yorker reported that Dianne Feinstein had been “seriously struggling” with her memory — for years.

That piece led with Feinstein asking Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey, at a Senate Judiciary Hearing, a lengthy, detailed question in which she quoted from one of President Trump’s tweets. Dorsey responded — and Feinstein followed up by asking him the exact same question again, verbatim, as though it were the first time.

Today’s piece in the San Francisco Chronicle is only more alarming in that multiple people — fellow Democratic colleagues and Feinstein’s own staffers — are now going public. And they’re dispensing with customary double-speak and politesse. “It’s bad,” one Democratic senator said of Feinstein’s forgetfulness, “and it’s getting worse.”

A YouGov poll from January shows that 58% of Americans want an age limit for elected officials — forcible retirement at age 70. If something like that passed now, 71% of US senators would be out of a job.

At least they’d have their dignity. Then again, in our national politics, that’s never counted for much.