As you might guess when reading my short bio below, I’m a bit of a newspaper junkie. In my traveling days, I collected newspapers of all kinds. Not only did they give me the flavor of the community, news from other places, and ideas for my paper, but the headlines also gave me smiles and guffaws. You know the type– “Something Went Wrong in Jet Plane Crash, Expert Says,” or “Typhoon Rips Through Cemetery; Hundreds Dead.”
Jay Leno made reading these a regular feature of the Tonight Show when he hosted.
Writing headlines is a brutal assignment, often tedious, often rushed, and silly things get into print. My favorite of all time is a headline over a short story on the breakdown of an earthen berm that protects the Netherlands from encroaching seawater. Although the AP wrote it, it’s wrong for me to repeat it here. I’m culturally sensitive. Someday over a beer, maybe.
I don’t see many newspapers these days. By that, I mean the ones printed on flimsy, rough paper where your fingers get stained by the ink as you handle it. Do it constantly, and you become an ink-stained wretch like me.
Thanks to technology, I use what’s called a news feed by the kids. I get articles from various community weeklies, domestic and international dailies, and some of the blogs I like to follow. I log into that feed several times a day and find a couple hundred articles. I don’t care about most of them, so I scan headlines to win-now out the pieces I want to read. Sometimes, the headlines are funny, and some catch my eye just because they’re written well.
A couple weeks ago, this headline on Alter-net, an online news aggregator, made me want to read the article. “‘Kick the Bucket at any Moment’: GOPer Worried About Trump Entrusting Agenda to 91-year-old.” Both funny and well-written.
The article was about Senator Chuck Grassley’s role in shepherding the Trump agenda through the US Senate. Grassley is the President pro tempore of the Senate and chairs the Judiciary Committee. He’s the oldest member of the Senate and the longest-serving Republican in that august body.
An unnamed Republican who has worked with the Judiciary Committee is quoted (a pet peeve of mine, don’t quote someone anonymously unless a life is at stake) expressing concern that Grassley may not live through Trump’s second term. ‘Statistically speaking, he could kick the bucket at any moment — like, what happens then?’ the Republican told Politico. ‘And will there be disruption to the Trump agenda? … That takes stamina that you could say a 91-year-old doesn’t have.’ This quote highlights the potential risks of having older elected officials in key positions.
Grassley entered the Senate in 1981, the same year I figured out how the Bohunk was getting pregnant so often. He doesn’t hold the record for the longest-serving Senator by a safe margin. Senator Dianne Feinstein from California served three decades in the Senate, only leaving by with the grim reaper at 90, a couple years ago. Senator Strom Thurmond, South Carolina, began his service in 1954 only to leave the Senate in 2003. After almost 50 years as a Senator, his career ended when, at 101, he died.
We all could kick the bucket at any moment, and statistics verify that the likelihood of any particular person coming to the end of the road increases as age increases.
Articles like this about Grassley affirm that more than term limits (I’m ambivalent about those), we need age limits for elected officials, from county board members to members of Congress. Even the lords of the court system. Last fall, we found that Texas Congresswoman Kay Granger, 82, was AWOL for the last several months of the last term in her 30-year career. She’d been in her district all that time, living at a facility for dementia patients.
The average age of US Senators is north of 65. Some of the younger ones are barely over 40, which means a fair number of Senators are past 70.
As someone living in his 71st year, I am qualified to make this statement. Every member of Congress, the judiciary, and even the White House should be mandated to retire at 70 years old. The wisdom of the elders can still be preserved and utilized, but for really important jobs–70 should be an end. Let Grassley and his peers serve the country in other ways. ASAP.
