Note: Ages and details below current as of July 2026 unless noted.
The news that Lindsey Graham has died at 71 is going to generate a lot of tributes this week, and it should — the man spent decades in public life. But if I’m honest, my first reaction wasn’t grief. It was a gut-punch reminder of something I’ve been thinking about since my own days working around the Senate: we have built a system that keeps people in power long after anyone would hire them for almost any other job on earth, and we call it “experience” instead of what it often is.
I tell this story in a book I’m about to publish, but it bears repeating here. Decades ago, I saw video from the Senate floor of Strom Thurmond, sound asleep in his chair, while a staffer stood next to him indicating his vote by raising or lowering his hand. That wasn’t a rumor. That wasn’t a political attack ad. That was footage of a sitting United States Senator being voted by proxy through his own body, like a marionette with a pulse. I remember thinking at the time: this is either the saddest thing I’ve ever seen, or the most honest thing I’ve ever seen about how this institution actually runs.
Turns out it was both, and it’s still happening — just with better PR management.
The MIA List Keeps Growing
Look at Mitch McConnell right now. As of this writing, he has been essentially missing from public view for weeks, with no real information released about his condition. In the past he publicly froze so often he earned the nickname “Glitch” Mc Connell. Try to imagine that happening in almost any other profession. Your surgeon’s office says he’s “unavailable” for a month and won’t say why. Your airline pilot doesn’t show up and the airline just… doesn’t comment. Your kid’s teacher vanishes and the school shrugs. In what other job does an employer go silent for a month about whether a person can still do the work, and nobody with actual authority forces the issue?
McConnell isn’t the outlier — he’s the pattern:
- President Biden, despite growing evidence he was too old to continue the job, refused to drop his candidacy until it was too late for the Democratic Party to recover.
- I met Dianne Feinstein when I was working in the Senate, and she was obviously sharp and intelligent. But that was 20 years ago. I was a lot sharper then too. She ended up hanging on well past the point where it was obvious, to anyone paying attention, that she was struggling. Staff ran interference. Colleagues looked away. She died in office rather than retire with dignity on her own timeline.
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg was 87 years old when she died after several hospital stays over the last few months. If she had retired at 80 when President Obama was in office, we would have a different Supreme Court.
- We just watched a sitting House member go missing from public duties for three months with barely a ripple of institutional concern.
- And Chuck Grassley — 92 years old — is reportedly leaving the door open to running again. Not finishing his current term. Running again in 2028, when he will be 95.
Meanwhile, the man at the top of the org chart is 80 years old, has been photographed nodding off in meetings, and recently told the country that drug prices were down “400%, 500%, even 1500%” and referred to “the Islamic Republic of Japan” — and then turned around and treated passing a cognition test like a campaign talking point, as if “I am not currently the most impaired person in this building” is the bar we should be celebrating.
That’s not a gaffe. That’s a warning light on the dashboard, and we’ve collectively decided the warning light is just part of the car now.
The Math Is Not Subtle
The average age in the U.S. Senate right now is around 64-65 — well above the median age of the country it’s supposed to represent. And the five oldest members of that chamber are all in their 80s and 90s, led by Grassley at 92, with Bernie Sanders, Mitch McConnell, and Jim Risch not far behind him. This isn’t a chamber with a few outliers. It’s a chamber where being an octogenarian is close to a job requirement.
I don’t say any of this to be cruel about age itself. Age isn’t the villain here — unaccountable age is. Nobody is firing these people. Nobody is even allowed to ask the question out loud without being accused of ageism. Voters get to make a choice once every six years about someone whose condition can change dramatically in year two. Staff, party leadership, and donors have every incentive to prop someone up rather than let the public see the truth. Strom Thurmond’s raised-hand vote wasn’t a scandal that ended a career. It was a Tuesday.
What I’d Actually Do About It
Here’s where I land, and I’ll lay it out plainly:
- Term limits, real ones. Three terms in the House, two in the Senate, twelve years for federal judges. Long enough to build competence, not long enough to build a monarchy.
- Mandatory retirement at 70 for public office, full stop — the same basic logic that applies to airline pilots and plenty of federal judges’ own clerks, applied to the people actually making the decisions.
- A basic competency bar to even get on the ballot. A 9th-grade-level civics test. Real knowledge of the Constitution and American history. And if the office requires it — foreign relations, defense, that sort of thing — a demonstrated grasp of current world events. Not a bar exam. Just proof you know what job you’re applying for.
- No more salary-for-life. A modest pension, and you keep your health coverage — deducted from that pension, like the rest of us pay for ours. No golden parachute just for showing up.
None of this is radical. It’s closer to the standard we already apply to airline pilots, surgeons, and commercial truck drivers — professions where “we just let him keep going out of respect for his tenure” would rightly get someone killed and get the company sued into oblivion.
A Modest Proposal
Here’s my tongue-in-cheek fallback, for the days when I’m feeling less optimistic about reform actually happening: skip elections for a cycle and pick Senators by lottery. Pull Social Security numbers for every citizen between 30 and 50. “Congratulations — you’ve been selected to be a Senator from your state for the next six years.”
I say this half-joking, but only half. What’s genuinely the worst-case outcome? We end up with a convicted felon in office? At this point that’s not a hypothetical risk of the lottery system — it’s a proven feature of the one we already have. At least the lottery guarantees someone who can stay awake through a floor vote without a staffer moving their arm for them.
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