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Sunday, July 21, 2024
Two Notes on Gerontocracy
First, I remain convinced that the most interesting and valuable piece of legal scholarship in American constitutional law I have read in the past year or two is Sam Moyn's piece on gerontocracy in Granta, "The Trouble With Old Men." This despite because of the fact that it a) mentions Hesiod, James Frazer, and the regrettable lack of mandatory retirement in American universities more frequently than it does the United States Constitution, which is mentioned exactly zero times, and b) is not published in a law review.
Second, and with essentially no hope at all, I would say that for anyone who is serious about Supreme Court term limits for other than uninteresting short-term reasons, this--the season of Biden, Ginsburg, Trump, and Feinstein (to mention only those whose age has been or come close to front and center)--is about as good a time as one is likely to get to make some progress, 22nd Amendment-style, on a bundled, prospectively oriented constitutional amendment that provides both reasonable term limits on the Court and reasonable age limits in the executive and legislative branches. Even if one doesn’t change the lower age limit, it seems to me that 30 years (if one sets the upper limit at 65) is a pretty substantial window of opportunity in which to seek and take one’s opportunity to run for the presidency. (For what it’s worth, I felt the same way in 2016 and 2020 and considered it somewhere between questionable and dishonorable for a number of candidates in both parties, including Trump, Clinton, and Biden, as well as Sanders and Warren, to seek the office. Offices are not entitlements, and the possibility that the vagaries of time and chance might cause a particular politician to miss his or her shot should bother no one except for the politician. Nor was there any adequate excuse, even during wartime, for Roosevelt to make virtually a deathbed run for a fourth term.)
Posted by Paul Horwitz on July 21, 2024 at 02:50 PM in Paul Horwitz | Permalink
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