Democrats need to start taking the age issue seriously

This is an adapted excerpt from the Dec. 17 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”

Democrats have now settled on their committee leadership picks for the 119th Congress. Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia was elected by his caucus to be the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee. Connolly, who is 74 and was just diagnosed with esophageal cancer, beat back a challenge from 35-year-old progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Connolly’s win comes amid calls for a new generation of leadership in the Democratic Party. But as Democratic Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia, a Connolly ally, put it, “Gerry’s a young 74, cancer notwithstanding.”

Now, to be clear, I am sure Connolly will do a fine job as the ranking Democrat on Oversight. I understand the way seniority works in Congress, and often there’s a reason for it. But, in light of everything that has happened over the past decade, it feels like Democrats still have not learned a very important lesson.

Back in 2013, when some liberals called for the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then-President Barack Obama invited the justice, who at the time was an 80-year-old cancer survivor, to a now-infamous lunch meeting, according to The New York Times.

Obama gently implied that it was time for her to pass the torch before the 2014 midterms. Democrats were expected to lose the Senate in that election, meaning replacing Ginsburg with another ideological liberal would likely be impossible.

But Ginsburg refused to step aside. During an interview with the BBC in 2017, Ginsburg was asked how long she thought she could carry out her job as a Supreme Court justice. “At my age, you have to take it year by year,” Ginsburg said.

“I know I’m OK. What will be next year? I’m hopeful however because my most senior colleague — the one who most recently retired, Justice John Paul Stevens — stepped down at age 90. So I have a way to go.”

As expected, Republicans retook the Senate in 2014 and they held on to it until 2021. Ginsburg died in September 2020 at the age of 87, three years after that interview and seven years after her meeting with Obama. Trump and the Republican Senate replaced her with Amy Coney Barrett, further cementing conservative control of the court for generations to come and facilitating the end of Roe v Wade.

You would think that would have been enough for Democrats to start taking the age issue seriously. But it was not.

In April of last year, President Joe Biden announced he was running for re-election, even though he is the oldest man to ever serve as commander in chief. It wasn’t until over a year later, when Biden gave a cataclysmic performance in his first debate with Trump, that the Democrats changed course. After a wrenching, excruciating process, just months out from the election, Biden — to his credit — finally stepped aside under enormous pressure. But he clearly didn’t do so under the conditions that would have been best for the Democrats to run a winning campaign.

So you would think that would have been enough for Democrats to start taking the age issue seriously. But, again, it was not.

When Connolly won that vote, he did so thanks in part to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi whipping votes for him. To her enormous credit, Pelosi did choose to step aside and relinquish her job as House minority leader to a new generation of leadership. She also played an enormous role in the successful effort to push Biden to step aside this summer, which was the right thing to do.

But now, just months later, Pelosi whipped votes to make sure that Connolly got the Oversight job, over the young star in the party — even as the 84-year-old Pelosi is recovering from hip surgery after suffering a fall. It just feels like a moment of genuine madness.

Look, I know no one wants to think about their own mortality. There are lots of people who live very long, active lives well into their 80s, 90s even. But as a general matter, this is a very risky undertaking for everyone. Democrats are not taking this issue seriously, and they need to.

Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire has said she’s undecided if she will run for another six-year term in 2026, when she will be 79 years old. And again, this is nothing against Shaheen personally. But according to Pew Research Center polling from just last year, 79% of Americans support age limits for politicians in Washington.

That is an overwhelming majority in our polarized environment. Seventy-nine percent of Americans don’t typically agree on anything these days, but they agree on this. Democrats should listen.

Allison Detzel contributed.