The median American is 39.4 years old. The median member of Congress is 60. That’s not a generation gap, that’s two entirely different relationships with the internet, the job market, and whether you know what TikTok is being used for beyond dance trends. The average Senator is 65.3. A quarter of Congress, 134 people, are 70 or older. Twenty-seven are 80 or older. Somewhere in that building, someone old enough to remember rotary phones is voting on regulations for an app they’ve never opened.
And it’s not just Congress. People bring up the Supreme Court in the same breath, and they’re right to. Nine people get appointed for life, no election, no renewal, no built-in expiration date, deciding constitutional questions that will outlive the technology that existed when they were confirmed. Thirty years ago, in 1996, most American households didn’t have a mobile phone at all, let alone one that fit in a pocket. No smartphones. No social media. No GPS. People still rented movies from an actual store. That’s not ancient history, that’s one generation back, and it’s roughly the gap between a 39-year-old’s daily operating logic and the logic of Congress’s median member. A 39-year-old built an entire adult identity around information moving instantly. Somebody twice that age built theirs in a world where information moved at the speed of the evening news and the phone was bolted to a wall. Both are valid ways to have lived a life. Neither one should be the only lens deciding policy for the other. There’s real wisdom in that age gap, plenty of it, lessons about patience and permanence a scrolling generation could use more of. But wisdom and authority aren’t the same thing, and there’s a fair question in asking whether somebody whose adult life predates the internet should be the deciding vote on how the internet gets regulated for the people actually living inside it now.
Here’s where it gets genuinely funny instead of just mildly concerning. You’d think term limits would be a simple fix, cap it at a set number of years, same as the presidency, and let new people rotate through. States tried exactly that in the 1990s. Then in 1995, the Supreme Court decided in U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton that no state gets to impose term limits on its own federal representatives. Only a constitutional amendment can do it. Which means the actual legal path to term limits requires two-thirds of Congress to vote yes on their own eventual unemployment, then three-quarters of the states to agree, all so the people currently holding the job can be talked into giving it up voluntarily. Nobody has ever willingly organized their own layoff with this much required paperwork.
So, the fix for a Congress too old and too entrenched to turn over requires the exact people benefiting from staying in power to be the ones who approve ending it. That’s not a policy gap. That’s a logic problem. Turkeys are historically bad at voting for Thanksgiving, and we built the only legal path to term limits through a room full of jive turkeys.
To be fair, seniority isn’t automatically a bad thing. Somebody who’s been doing a job for twenty years usually knows where the bodies are buried, literally and legislatively, and that institutional memory has real value. Nobody’s asking Congress to be run entirely by twenty-five-year-olds with a group chat and good intentions. But there’s a real difference between valuing experience and having a governing body where a quarter of the room is old enough to be the median American’s grandparent, deciding policy on the internet, healthcare, and retirement for a population whose actual median age hasn’t cracked forty. That’s not wisdom showing up in the room. That’s one very specific generation showing up and just never leaving.
Every few years somebody floats a term limits bill, it gets a press conference, a few cosponsors, and a quiet death in committee, because why would the people who’d lose the most from it be the ones to push it through. The definition of insanity might be doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, but this isn’t insanity. This is just a very comfortable arrangement for the people who get to keep their seats.
Would you actually support a real congressional age cap or term limit, even knowing it might remove someone you currently like? Tell me in the comments.
