Why We Need a Too-Old-To-Serve Constitutional Amendment for Presidents

Original Sin, the new book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, documents that President Joe Biden was in a mental decline for years. The palace guard in the White House hid Biden’s real condition, and the news media — most of them — allowed themselves to be used.

Original Sin tells story after story of dignitaries and Democrats shocked at the president’s mental fumbling, and how they all prudently kept their mouths shut. It was not their job to holler that the emperor had no clothes. And sure, some of them — Tapper’s employer, CNN, for one — were politically in the Democrats’ pocket all along, but not all of them were. And with the exception of the Wall Street Journal, they let the most important story in Washington pass by. (Where were you, Fox News?)

This could happen again. Maybe my fellow journalists will do a better job next time, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Maybe the American people should be considering a constitutional amendment. In more than 200 years, the Constitution has set no maximum age for the presidency. We have inaugurated presidents as young as 42, for Theodore Roosevelt, and as old as 69 for Ronald Reagan in his first term. It was not until Reagan’s second term that we inaugurated a chief executive older than 70 — and, in hindsight, that was not such a good idea.

I asked ChatGPT to write me a constitutional amendment. Here it is:

Section 1. No person shall be eligible to hold the Office of President of the United States if that person shall have attained the age of seventy years on or before the date of their inauguration.

Section 2. No person shall be eligible to hold the Office of Vice President of the United States if that person shall have attained the age of sixty-five years on or before the date of their inauguration.

 Section 3. This amendment shall not apply to any person serving as President or Vice President at the time of its ratification.

Section 4. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

A no-more-than-70 rule would have prevented Biden from running in 2020 and Trump from running in 2016 and 2024. Is that discrimination on the basis of age? You bet! Might it deny the office in the future to a politician who cognitively was still spry? Sure. And so what? We’re talking about the most powerful job in the United States. It’s a job that requires a functioning brain, available 24/7, for four years. An upper-age limit would be no guarantee of mental horsepower, but it would limit the risk.

We arrive at rules like this after experience shows we need them. For more than 200 years, the Constitution had no rule limiting the president to two terms. George Washington had set a tradition, but it was never a rule. Then Franklin Roosevelt was elected four times. After he died, Congress decided he had accumulated too much power for one man — for example, to stack the Supreme Court by appointing eight of the nine justices during 12 years in office. In 1951, the states ratified the 22^nd Amendment, which limits the president to two terms. Donald Trump doesn’t like that rule, but there it is.

Admittedly, the not-after-70 rule would not have prevented two of the most infamous cases of presidential decline. One was Franklin Roosevelt, who was a dying man in 1944 when he ran for a fourth term. He had been diagnosed with congestive heart failure. In March 1944, his blood pressure was measured at 186/108, and there were no drugs to bring it down.

FDR began needing more and more rest, and his aides covered for him in the same way Biden’s would, 80 years later. World War II was on, and Roosevelt was the commander-in-chief, but he was less and less effective. In February 1945, he let Stalin walk all over him at Yalta. He died two months later at age 63, leaving the presidency to Harry Truman, who had never been told about the atomic bomb.

A generation earlier came a more sudden case. On October 2, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson, also 63, suffered a massive stroke. Wilson been on a national speaking tour to promote the League of Nations — including a stop in Seattle a few weeks before. His doctors told the press only that he was exhausted and needed bed rest. They said nothing about a stroke, or that that he was suffering partial paralysis and was unable to speak. When Sen. George H. Moses of New Hampshire said Wilson had suffered some kind of “cerebral lesion,” the president’s defenders suggested that Moses, a Republican, was spreading fake news.

This is not a Democrat-and-Republican issue. It’s about power. The inner circle around the president — the group that in the Biden White House was dubbed “the Politburo” — do not serve the public. They serve him. They protect power. That’s their job.

For situations like Woodrow Wilson’s stoke, we now have the 25^th Amendment. Ratified in 1967, it has never been used, and probably never will be. Under the 25^thAmendment, to put the vice president in (temporary) power against the president’s will requires an agreement of a majority of the cabinet, who have been appointed by the same ruler they are asked to dethrone. Probably the 25^th Amendment should be replaced by something simpler — but that vexed question is a subject for another time.

Right now, while Biden’s decline is on the public mind, is the time to insert an upper age limit into the Constitution, where it should have been all along.