Why Age Limits Work Where Term Limits Don't

Cold open

Every few election cycles, we all collectively rediscover the same thing: Congress is old.

Not "distinguished elder statesman" old. Not "aged like fine wine" old. More like "I genuinely cannot tell if this person is awake or just really good at sitting upright" old.

And the frustration is legitimate. Right now, in 2026, the average senator is 64 years old. The average House member is 58. The 119th Congress — the one sitting right now, making decisions that affect your life — is the third-oldest legislative body in American history. Meanwhile, the median age of an actual American is 39.1 years old, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That means your legislative branch is running roughly 25 years older than the country it represents. At least 20 members of Congress are currently in their 80s — and more than half of them have already signaled they're running again in November. The third-oldest Congress in history, actively trying to become the second.

And the political leadership situation is even wilder when you zoom in. Chuck Grassley of Iowa — who chairs the Judiciary Committee and is third in line to the presidency as President Pro Tempore of the Senate — is 91 years old. He's been a senator since 1981. Ronald Reagan was in the White House when Grassley started his Senate career. There are currently 20 members of Congress who are 80 or older. Twenty. And more than half of them have indicated they plan to run again in 2026.

So when voters look at this and say "something needs to change," they're not being paranoid. They're doing math.

The Thornton problem

And the answer that always bubbles up is term limits. It's clean. It sounds democratic. It trends on Twitter every four years like clockwork. There's just one enormous problem — and it's not a small technicality you can wave away. It's the Supreme Court.

In 1995, the Supreme Court decided U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, 514 U.S. 779. The case came out of Arkansas, where voters had passed a constitutional amendment in 1992 limiting how many terms their congressional delegation could serve. Seemed reasonable. Voters voted for it. Off it went to the courts.

The Supreme Court said no. Five to four.

Writing for the majority, Justice John Paul Stevens concluded that the Constitution's Qualifications Clauses — which spell out the age, citizenship, and residency requirements for members of Congress — are exhaustive. States cannot add to them. Congress can't add to them either. And if you want to change those qualifications, you need a constitutional amendment under Article V — the full, grueling, two-thirds-of-Congress-plus-three-fourths-of-states process.

The Court specifically said that allowing individual states to craft their own additional qualifications would "erode the structure envisioned by the framers" and create an inconsistent, patchwork system for a national legislature that's supposed to represent all Americans uniformly.

Now, you can agree or disagree with that ruling. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a lengthy dissent. The debate among constitutional scholars continues. But for practical purposes, the door is largely closed. Twenty-three states had term limit provisions invalidated in one shot.

And here's the thing: it matters that the door is closed, not just whether it should be. Reforms that get struck down don't restore public trust — they actively damage it, because now you've promised people change and delivered a courtroom loss instead.

Age limits ≠ term limits

So if term limits are constitutionally compromised, the real question becomes: what reform fits within the existing constitutional tradition rather than fighting it?

The answer — which is almost always skipped over because it's less emotionally satisfying — is age limits.

People assume age limits would be just as unconstitutional as term limits. This is wrong, and it's an important distinction that deserves more than a hand wave.

Here's the key: age requirements already exist in the Constitution. You must be at least 25 to serve in the House. At least 30 for the Senate. At least 35 to be President. The framers didn't just say "anyone a state sends us, we'll take." They built in floor-level age thresholds from the beginning, because they believed cognitive readiness and life experience were legitimate constitutional interests.

If minimum ages are already constitutional — and they obviously are — then maximum ages aren't some radical departure. They're the other end of the same principle: age as a structural criterion for office.

The reason term limits fail constitutionally is that they're a performance judgment in disguise. They say, "you've served too long, regardless of how good you are." Courts read that as an additional qualification that alters who can appear on the ballot.

Age limits don't do that. Age limits don't care whether you've been in office for two terms or twenty. They set an objective ceiling — the same way a floor exists — and they apply universally. They don't assess your effectiveness. They don't penalize your record. They just say: at this point in human biology, the institutional risk calculus changes.

That's a very different constitutional posture. And it's one that already has deep, bipartisan precedent across American law.

A century of precedent

Thirty-two states plus the District of Columbia impose mandatory retirement ages on at least some of their judges — usually somewhere between 70 and 75. This isn't new. It isn't fringe. Mandatory judicial retirement ages have existed in American states since before the Constitution was ratified. Alexander Hamilton argued against New York's mandatory judicial retirement age of 60 in Federalist No. 79 — which means the practice is older than the federal government itself.

The Supreme Court has also explicitly upheld the constitutionality of mandatory retirement ages. In Gregory v. Ashcroft (1991), the Court ruled that Missouri's mandatory retirement age of 70 for state judges was constitutional. The Court noted — and I'm paraphrasing here because I respect copyright — that states have a compelling interest in maintaining a judiciary capable of performing demanding tasks, and that physical and mental capacity can diminish with age. Generalizations, the Court said, are not necessarily constitutionally impermissible.

Beyond judges: the Federal Aviation Administration mandates that commercial airline pilots retire at 65. Air traffic controllers — people who are also keeping you alive at 35,000 feet — must retire at 56. These aren't voluntary suggestions. They're federally enforced retirement ages for public-safety roles, upheld and maintained precisely because the stakes are too high to rely on individual case-by-case exceptions.

The federal government has even built the number 70 into Social Security in a meaningful way: delayed retirement credits — the bonus you earn for waiting to claim — stop accumulating at age 70. There's no additional financial incentive to wait past 70, because the program itself treats 70 as a natural end point.

So when someone says "age limits are unconstitutional and unprecedented," the accurate response is: they are neither.

Why 70

Let's talk about the number, because that's where people's feelings get involved.

Why 70?

First, it's where much of the existing legal and policy architecture already points. As I just mentioned — pilots at 65, air traffic controllers at 56, most state judges at 70 to 75.

Second, the science on cognitive aging, while complicated and individual, does support the idea that population-level risk increases statistically with age — even among highly capable people. The European Aviation Safety Agency commissioned a study in 2019 that found increased health risk and measurable cognitive decline with age in pilots. A 2020 FAA-cited study found that pilots 65 and older faced elevated risks of errors in complex, time-critical decision-making situations.

Now — and this is important — none of that means every 71-year-old is impaired. Many are sharper than people half their age. That's true. And it's also irrelevant to the policy question, because institutional rules don't run on exceptions. They run on averages and risk management at scale.

We don't let commercial pilots fly indefinitely because some 70-year-olds pass their medicals with flying colors. We set a line because the system needs rules it can administer consistently, fairly, and in advance — without getting into the politically radioactive business of evaluating individual legislators one by one.

A mandatory retirement age removes the cognitive assessment entirely. As one Harvard law professor quoted in a 2025 Gazette piece put it: "All you need is a birth certificate and a calculator."

And that's the beauty of it. No one gets singled out. No one gets accused. The rule applies equally to everyone who takes the job, regardless of party, regardless of ideology, regardless of whether they've been great or mediocre. You know the deal going in.

The hidden cost of term limits

Here's the cleanest case against term limits that nobody says out loud: they transfer power to unelected people.

When you force out an experienced legislator mid-career, the institutional knowledge doesn't disappear. It migrates — to lobbyists, to career staff, to executive branch agencies that have been around longer than the freshman class they're now dealing with. Term limits, paradoxically, reduce accountability. The people who know how the machine runs aren't on the ballot.

Age limits don't have this problem. They allow a full, long, productive career. A member of Congress elected at 35 could serve until 70 — thirty-five years in office, assuming voters keep them there. That's more than enough time to accumulate genuine expertise and seniority. The difference is that at the end of it, they have to go.

Term limits assume the problem is time served. Age limits recognize that the actual problem is indefinite accumulation of power combined with biological reality. That's a more honest diagnosis of what's actually broken.

The polling

And here's the polling, because the polling is kind of staggering: a 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that 82% of Republicans and 76% of Democrats support age limits for federal elected officials. That's not a partisan issue. That's a national consensus. You almost never get numbers like that on anything. Congress can't get 82% agreement on what day of the week it is.

The reason both parties are on board is that age limits don't target ideology. They don't target party. They target time. Every party eventually benefits from the seats that open up. Every party eventually has members who would be affected. It's actually one of the most structurally neutral reforms you could propose — which is probably why nobody in leadership is particularly excited about it.

Common objections

"But voters should decide who represents them."

They already do — within constitutional limits. Voters can't elect a 24-year-old to the House. They can't elect someone who doesn't meet citizenship requirements. They can't elect a non-resident. Constitutional guardrails don't eliminate democracy. They structure it. The age minimum for president didn't provoke a constitutional crisis. A maximum wouldn't either.

"But some 80-year-olds are sharper than 40-year-olds."

True. Also irrelevant, as I just covered. We don't build systemic policy around the exceptions. We build it around what's true on average, what creates manageable risk at the institutional level, and what can be administered fairly and without discrimination. Individual brilliance is wonderful. It is not a substitute for a rule.

"But isn't this age discrimination?"

It isn't, legally. Age discrimination law under the ADEA has always contained carve-outs where safety, public trust, or judgment are implicated. That's why the pilot retirement age is legal. That's why the air traffic controller retirement age is legal. That's why 32 states' mandatory judicial retirement ages are legal. Governance — especially executive and legislative power — clearly falls within the category of roles where these exceptions apply.

And frankly, the Supreme Court's own language in Gregory v. Ashcroft already blessed this kind of reasoning at the state level. The constitutional runway exists. It just hasn't been used federally.

Beyond Congress

If the concern is institutional legitimacy and functional government, why would we stop at Congress?

Federal judges with lifetime appointments were a sensible design when the average life expectancy was 40. In a world where a federal appellate judge appointed in their 40s can realistically serve 40 or 50 years — well past any presidential administration that appointed them — lifetime tenure starts to look less like independence and more like immovability.

Cabinet secretaries. Agency heads. Independent regulatory bodies. These positions exercise enormous power over daily American life, and many of them face no mandatory rotation whatsoever. An age limit for federal appointees — say, 75 — would create predictable turnover without politicizing individual performance reviews. It preserves the independence of the tenure while preventing the kind of institutional calcification that makes government feel permanently frozen.

As of 2024, the average age of U.S. federal judges was 67.68 years, according to the Federal Judicial Center. On the Supreme Court, you currently have justices in their 70s with no end date in sight. That's not a criticism of any individual justice's competence. It's an observation that the system has no self-correcting mechanism. Age limits would provide one.

The close

One of the strangest features of modern American politics is the idea that stepping aside is failure. Retirement in any other profession is a milestone. In politics, it's treated like exile, or worse, like surrender to your enemies.

That's backward — and it's doing real damage to how institutions function and how the public perceives them.

A healthy system doesn't cling to its leaders forever. It thanks them, gives them a nice dinner, maybe names a building after them, and then makes room for whoever comes next. Age limits normalize that transition. They take it out of the realm of political warfare — where forcing someone out requires a primary challenge, a media campaign, and a near-death experience for your party's unity — and put it into the realm of rules everyone agreed to when they took the job.

Peaceful, predictable, rule-based rotation is the lifeblood of republics. The Framers understood that. Most functioning democracies around the world understand that — the majority of countries with high courts either impose a mandatory retirement age (usually between 60 and 75) or strict term limits on their justices.

Age limits don't weaken democracy. They normalize transition. They reduce the stranglehold of any one generation on national decision-making.

Not radical. Not partisan. Just the clock, doing what clocks do.

Citations

Case Law

• U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, 514 U.S. 779 (1995). 5-4 decision, Justice John Paul Stevens writing for the majority. Invalidated congressional term limit provisions in 23 states. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/514/779/
• Gregory v. Ashcroft, 501 U.S. 452 (1991). Upheld Missouri's mandatory judicial retirement age of 70 as constitutional.

Constitutional Provisions

• U.S. Const. Art. I, §2, cl. 2 (House minimum age: 25)
• U.S. Const. Art. I, §3, cl. 3 (Senate minimum age: 30)
• U.S. Const. Art. II, §1, cl. 5 (President minimum age: 35)

Congress Age Data

• Pew Research Center, "Age and Generation in the 119th Congress: Somewhat Younger, with Fewer Boomers and More Gen Xers" (January 16, 2025). Median House age: 57.5; median Senate age: 64.7. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/16/age-and-generation-in-the-119th-congress-somewhat-younger-with-fewer-boomers-and-more-gen-xers/
• NBC News, "The Incoming 2025 Congress Is the Third Oldest in U.S. History" (January 3, 2025). Average member age: 58.9. https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/congress-age-2025-third-oldest-us-history-rcna185742
• NBC News, "24 Members of Congress Are 80 or Older. More Than Half Are Running for Re-election." (January 15, 2026). https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/congress-oldest-members-run-reelection-80s-rcna249479
• Quorum, "Average Age of Congress" (2023/2025 update). Average Senate age in 119th Congress: 64; average House age: 57. https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/age-of-congress/

Public Opinion

• Pew Research Center (2023). 82% of Republicans and 76% of Democrats support age limits for federal elected officials. Cited in: Harvard Gazette, "Time for Mandatory Retirement Ages for Lawmakers, Judges, Presidents?" (October 2025). https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/10/time-for-mandatory-retirement-ages-for-lawmakers-judges-presidents/

Judicial Retirement Ages

• National Center for State Courts, "Mandatory Retirement" (FAQ, December 2023). 32 states plus D.C. impose mandatory retirement ages for appellate judges; most set at 70. https://ncsc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/api/collection/judicial/id/633/download
• IAALS (Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System), "Mandatory Retirement Ages for Judges: How Old Is Too Old to Judge?" https://iaals.du.edu/blog/mandatory-retirement-ages-judges-how-old-too-old-judge
• Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 79 (1788). Addressed mandatory judicial retirement, noting New York had a retirement age of 60 at the time.

Aviation Age Limits

• FAA / ICAO: Commercial airline pilots (Part 121) must retire at age 65. Air traffic controllers must retire at age 56. The pilot retirement age was raised from 60 to 65 in 2007 to align with ICAO standards.
• Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), "Why ALPA Opposes Extending US Pilot Retirement Age." Cites 2019 European Aviation Safety Agency study finding increased health risk and cognitive decline with age. https://www.alpa.org/news-and-events/air-line-pilot-magazine/why-alpa-opposes
• FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 upheld the mandatory retirement age of 65 for commercial pilots.

Federal Judiciary Age Data

• Federal Judicial Center (2024): Average age of U.S. federal judges: 67.68 years. Cited in Harvard Gazette (October 2025).

Social Security

• Social Security Administration: Social Security delayed retirement credits stop accumulating at age 70. There is no monetary incentive to delay past 70, and no requirement to claim at any specific age. Claiming can begin as early as 62. https://www.ssa.gov/benefits/retirement/planner/agereduction.html