Barro encourages greater turnover in Congress and looks for a “politically salable option”:
Frank Lautenberg missed most Senate votes this year because of ill health. Still, when Newark’s mayor, Cory Booker, announced his plan to run for Senate whether Lautenberg retired or not, some Democrats were aghast. Lautenberg aides told reporters that Booker was being “disrespectful,” and Lautenberg himself mused about spanking Booker like a disobedient child.
This is nuts.
Senate seats aren’t property, and Lautenberg wasn’t entitled to cling to his job even as he became too old and infirm to carry it out. We should have an expectation about Congress, as we do with other high-powered and demanding jobs, that people will retire when they are no longer up to the demands. …
[T]he best option is to change our norms about incumbency. Booker had this one right: being a good team player shouldn’t always mean waiting around for your party’s incumbents to retire. More politicians should be willing to make primary challenges, and state political parties should be more tolerant of them. And voters should recognize that “senator” is a job that benefits from turnover.
Claire Potter adds:
[P]erhaps the real question is not how old the Senate is, but how young it is not. If 37 senators are older than 65, only 12 senators are younger than 50. Demographically, the middle-aged, old and elderly are governing a nation entirely unlike the one they were formed by and educated in. Our most urgent policy questions – education, health care, immigration, communications technology, climate change, social security, long-term care for disabled veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq – are about what country the young will inherit.
Isn’t this why we could use some retirements in the Senate?
Recent Dish on the political age gap in Britain here.