At age 81, President Joe Biden finally threw in the towel. He will not be the Democratic party’s nominee. He was quick to tap his Vice President Kamala Harris to head the ticket, and if the Democrats rally around her, as Biden urged, she will be a formidable candidate.
Biden was too old to run for another four-year term, and I believe Donald Trump, in addition to his other disqualifications, is too old, too.
I am 84, three years older than Biden and five years older than Trump. I am a retired trial lawyer. I was a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York at the beginning of my career. I used to try high-stakes cases and prosecute dangerous criminals, something no one would ask me to do anymore, even if I wanted to. I am blessed to remain fit and active. My knee bothers me sometimes, but I work out twice a week, and during the summer, I swim in the pool. I enjoy a good game of golf.
I have good cognitive and executive function, my wife assures me. I don’t lie to people. And I am neither an election denier nor a Holocaust denier.
I have written three books and scores of op-eds, and I still host a talk show on public television, which is up for an Emmy. I haven’t spaced out on camera. I think I am not too old to do most things. I don’t think of calling it a day, but I know the time will come. I recognize that people age in different ways.
I believe that even a fit octogenarian should not be President. These troubled times call for flexibility and innovation, not rigidity of thought. Today’s problems are more difficult than the challenges Germany’s post-war Chancellor Der Alte Konrad Adenauer, faced. Even for the intellectually deft, there is today too much to learn, too much to absorb, too much to decide. The field of play should now be left to the younger. Biden will stay on for another six months, and with a good team around him, he should be fine. Another term? Not a chance!
The Good Book tells us, “There is a time for everything.” There is no right time to retire but a wrong time to stay on. Justice Louis Brandeis was 82 when he retired from the Supreme Court. He died two years later. Brandeis was noted for his dissenting opinions, joined in by his colleague Oliver Wendell Holmes, who retired from the Court at 90. Many of their dissenting opinions later became the law. Holmes also died some two years after his retirement, just short of his 94th birthday. Despite his advanced age, Holmes, who fought in the Civil War, maintained his cognitive function, describing “a little canter at the end.”
It is said that Holmes and Brandeis liked to walk together in the park at midday. Holmes’s wife had predeceased him. Once, when they encountered an attractive woman, Holmes quipped: “Ah, Louis, if I were only eighty.”
Undoubtedly, most people, in the eighth or ninth decade of their lives, lose function in varying degrees from individual to individual. Biden aged in unfortunate ways. His time to hang up his cleats had come. Trump’s weird harangues, strange rhetoric, nonsensical ramblings, and erratic personality don’t exactly inspire confidence that he doesn’t have dementia. The buck truly stops with the president. The demands of the office famously make it the hardest job in the world, not just because of the grim specter of nuclear war but because only the hardest decisions make it to the president’s desk. Easier ones get decided further down the food chain. Octogenarians may be deft at many things, but I wonder whether rapid-fire decision-making is one of them.
Now that he is out of the race, Biden’s last debate with Trump will soon be forgotten. But, for a student of human behavior, there’s no erasing the immutable evidence of his decline: the vacuous gaze, the weak voice, the sentences that went nowhere, the drifting incoherence.
Sometimes, even for an alert octogenarian, it is appropriate to pass the torch for the sake of others he values. The transition is often difficult. No one relishes relinquishing power. As Henry Kissinger observed: “power is the great aphrodisiac.” A senior partner in a law firm must step aside for the younger lawyer he trained and groomed for leadership. The family patriarch reaches a point where he must relinquish the car keys.
The feminist Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, terminally ill, said she wanted to stay on as long as Brandeis did. She overruled herself and died in office at age 87, lasting in service five more years than he did. Believing that “age could not wither her,” she tarnished her legacy by holding on. The criticism has persisted after her death. Her obdurate insistence on remaining gave us Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the handmaiden of the reactionary supermajority that rules the Court.
Joe Biden sought another four years as President. With his record of accomplishment and the advantage of incumbency, he should have been returned to office in a heartbeat.
The country will thank him for his prodigious achievements. They will not be interred with his bones. To cite some of the most salient features: More people are working than ever before, the infrastructure is being rebuilt, and the first meaningful weapon safety legislation in 30 years has been enacted. On his watch, we have recovered from the economic impact of the pandemic. We have curbed inflation. The stock market is at an all-time high, not in anticipation of a Trump victory as they would have you believe, but because of real economic growth, the promise of lower interest rates, and technological innovation.
Many urged Biden to step aside earlier. But, like Julius Caesar, he defied augury and went to the forum for an early debate, which was his undoing.
In foreign policy, Biden has stressed the importance of alliances. He has supported Israel and Ukraine, as well as Japan and Korea. He has won the respect of world leaders. Around the world, America is more robust and better positioned, and the arguments to the contrary are hyperbolic and pretextual.
It is striking to compare Biden’s bipartisan foreign policy, which is consistent with past GOP policy where, in the words of Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, “politics stops at the water’s edge,’ and the isolationism and transactionalism of Trump and the MAGAs.
J. D. Vance, Trump’s unpalatable vice presidential pick, is on the record saying he doesn’t really care what happens in Ukraine one way or the other. And, Trump, in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, accuses Taiwan of having taken 100 percent of America’s chip business, saying that it should pay the United States for its defense—before he all but dismisses the ability to defend Taiwan given its distance from the United States and its proximity to China. Trump’s foreign policy ignores the tangible benefits we enjoy due to our network of allies and partners and from a half-century of institutions and arrangements central to international order in the Asia-Pacific region.
The Constitution is difficult to amend. Any amendment would require the approval of two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the states, presenting an insuperable barrier in this political climate. It provides a four-year term for the president, who must be 35 years old to qualify, with no age limitation on his incumbency which is probably just as well. It also gives a lifetime appointment for federal judges. That may have worked in 1789 when the expected life for men was 50 to 60 if they survived infant mortality.
Term limits are particularly appropriate for Supreme Court justices even if we lose the once-in-a-generation Holmes or Brandeis in their “little canter at the end.” We have them for the president. Why not for the Court?
Of course, if we had term limits, we would not have kept Holmes and Brandeis long, but in those days, the Court followed the law and was not supremely partisan as it is now. Also, the Court was not as corrupt as it is now. Alas, the issue of longevity had not matured sufficiently in 1937 when FDR introduced his failed “court packing” bill, adding a new justice each time a justice reached age 70 and failed to retire.
Today, we have two justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, the oldest sitting justices, who are 73 and 75, respectively, and they are the most ethically challenged. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has introduced a bill of impeachment to oust the reactionary duo for their acceptance of unreported extravagant gifts from those having business before the Court. Still, the measure is unlikely to go anywhere.
After months of hesitation, Biden decided to back term limits for the justices and an enforceable ethics code. Lots of luck with this Congress, but come January 1, who knows? Term limits for judges are the order of the day in England and France, and both countries’ legal systems would appear to have made out pretty well.
Going back to the presidency, Peggy Noonan, the Reagan speechwriter and columnist, writing in The Wall Street Journal on July 11, argued that, with Biden’s exit, the Democrats should “embrace the chaos” and suggested a debate among leading Democratic contenders, including Vice President Kamala Harris leading to mini-primary to select a new top of the ticket. If the nod fell to Harris, said Noonan, after a short but spirited contest, she would have newfound stature, making it easier to distance herself from some of Biden’s more unpopular policies. It looks like this won’t happen as Democrats fall in line, but it wasn’t a bad instinct as even Harris intimated when she said she had to “earn” the nomination.
Biden’s brave and difficult decision bodes well for the country and our self-governing democracy. Autocrats come to power in an environment of economic dislocation and distress, as did Hitler in Germany in the 1930s. America does not need Donald Trump at this prosperous time or any other. Now, there is a clear path forward to defeat him.
