U.S. leaders are older than ever. Could a WA lawmaker’s proposal restore trust in a Congress that rewards seniority?

WASHINGTON – Sen. Patty Murray waited three decades to become the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, one of the most sought-after roles in Congress and one that gives undeniable benefits to the Washington state voters who first sent her to D.C. in 1992.

In an interview with The Spokesman-Review, Murray said she intends to run for another six-year term in 2028, at the end of which the now-74-year-old lawmaker would be 84. Sen. Jim Risch, an 82-year-old Idaho Republican, has said he will run again in 2026, and 76-year old Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., confirmed in a brief interview that he plans to do the same in 2028. That’s hardly retirement age in Congress, where the 91-year-old Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the GOP chairman of the powerful Judiciary Committee, has already filed paperwork to run again in 2028 and potentially serve until a record age of 101.

“I have always felt, and still feel really strongly, that a Senate, a body of elected officials, should make up a broad array of a lot of different people who come here – working-class people, older people, younger people,” Murray said in her office at the Capitol.

“It isn’t so much age. It really is spirit and ability to fight for what you believe in and fight for your state. And different people age differently, so I don’t think it’s a number. I think it’s more somebody’s ability to get up every day and fight hard in these halls for your state, for what you believe in. And certainly, right now, I’m energized.”

Murray said she has seen some of her colleagues stay in the Senate past a point of cognitive decline “where clearly it was time to go,” mentioning the late Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California and Robert Byrd of West Virginia. Byrd refused to resign and died in office at age 92 in 2010, after more than half a century in the Senate, and Feinstein’s high-profile decline before her death in 2023 prompted uncomfortable conversations among Democrats just as the party was careening toward then-President Joe Biden’s ill-fated re-election bid.

When Congress convened in January, more members than ever before were aged 70 or older – a total of 119 of the combined 535 voting members of the House and Senate. The so-called “gerontocracy” that runs much of the U.S. government is more pronounced among party and committee leaders, who typically spend decades climbing the ranks.

Since the 2022 elections, eight members of Congress have died in office, all of them Democrats. Three House members have died in the current Congress, leaving a significant number of vacancies in a narrowly divided chamber where Republicans have passed controversial measures by as few as two votes.

At the start of this year, the median age of senators (64.7 years) and voting members of the House (57.5 years) actually declined slightly from the previous Congress, according to the Pew Research Center. But in a legislature that rewards seniority, the most prominent members often serve well beyond the age where most Americans retire.

The problem isn’t exclusive to Democrats.

Rep. Kay Granger of Texas, a Republican who chaired the House Appropriations Committee in 2023 and 2024, continued receiving her congressional paycheck for months after her family moved her into an assisted-living facility for what her son called “dementia issues.” Despite being Granger’s counterpart as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee at the time, Murray said she wasn’t aware of the Texas lawmaker’s condition and “that’s not highly unusual,” because “we work through our staff so much.”

The staffers who toil behind the scenes for committees and in members’ personal offices necessarily do most of the work that makes Congress run, but the youngest member of Washington’s congressional delegation worries that high-profile cases of aides shielding lawmakers like Feinstein and Granger from scrutiny are undermining Americans’ trust in Congress.

Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a 37-year-old Democrat who represents the southwestern corner of the state, now sits on the House Appropriations Committee that Granger led before stepping down last year. In June, the committee rejected an amendment Gluesenkamp Perez introduced that would have directed the Office of Congressional Conduct, the body’s in-house ethics watchdog, to develop a standard to treat “irreversible cognitive impairment” as an ethics violation.

“I’m not trying to test everybody – I’m not a big believer in standardized testing as it is,” Gluesenkamp Perez said in an interview in her D.C. office. “But I hear from constituents a lot that there’s this conviction that the elected members themselves are not running the show, that it’s the staff. And I think it’s strongly feeding into a lack of trust and confidence in Congress, and even maybe our electoral process.”

Her office shared the results of a survey sent to her constituents, in which nearly 92% of the roughly 8,000 respondents agreed that “there should be basic ethics standards to ensure members of Congress aren’t suffering from memory loss or cognitive impairment.”

The congresswoman emphasized that her proposal isn’t about “policing what a kooky idea is,” but rather establishing a process for treating cognitive decline like other “conduct that does not reflect creditably upon the House,” as her amendment describes it. She envisions the Ethics Committee – which, unlike other panels in Congress, always includes a 50-50 split between the two parties – insulating the process from partisan shenanigans.

That panel wouldn’t release the findings of any inquiry without bipartisan agreement, and her proposal wouldn’t change the fact that lawmakers can only be removed from the House by a two-thirds vote of their peers.

“You can’t get two-thirds of the body to agree that the sky is blue,” she said, brushing off the idea that the process could be used to oust lawmakers for political purposes.

Gluesenkamp Perez’s fellow Washington Democrats share her desire to restore trust in elected officials, but some said they don’t support her proposal, which was shot down by a voice vote in the Appropriations Committee.

“It’ll never work,” said Rep. Adam Smith, D-Bellevue, adding that people are conflating age with competence. “The issue that is really driving people the most is: Do we have people in positions of authority who are no longer doing a good job? And that’s a full-on, legit issue. But it is also not necessarily related to how long the person has been in said job, or how old they are.”

Democrats’ fundamental problem, Smith said, is a culture that discourages making judgments about each other – especially about someone’s ability to do their job. The 60-year-old congressman was one of the first members of his party to break that taboo in 2024 and call for Biden to drop out of the presidential race.

“The single biggest problem here – and this is a bigger problem within the Democratic Party – is we are reluctant to make judgments about people’s ability because we’re very focused on equity,” he said. “We’ve developed a fairly radical viewpoint of equity that makes us worried about making those types of judgments, and I think that’s something we need to fix.”

Unlike Republicans, Democrats don’t impose term limits for committee leadership positions. Smith, who has served as the top-ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee since 2010, said the solution his party needs is more competition for leadership roles. He opposes term limits because they would do the opposite, he said, but he favors holding a secret-ballot election among party members on each committee on a regular basis. If a majority of them votes against retaining the chairperson, then the party would hold an open election for a new leader on the panel.

“I spend a hell of a lot of time, both as a congressman and as a ranking member, thinking, ‘How do I do a good job for the people who elected me?’ I’m not just saying, ‘I’ve been here a while. Vote for me,’” Smith said. “My feeling is, if I ever stop doing that, then somebody ought to run against me.”

Rep. Marilyn Strickland, a Democrat from Tacoma who represents Joint Base Lewis-McChord and also sits on the Armed Services Committee, said she’s grateful to have someone as experienced as Smith leading her party on the panel. But she said some lawmakers leave Congress because they don’t see a path to leadership.

“You have institutional knowledge and how the place works, so there are upsides, but it also has a chilling effect,” she said. “You don’t want to put anyone on defense, because a lot of people have waited a long time to get into leadership positions. At the same time, when you have a really talented bench, you don’t want to leave people languishing there.”

Former Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Spokane Republican, sent shock waves around the Capitol when she announced last year that she would retire from Congress at age 55, opting to leave her powerful role as chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee even before her party’s term limit rules required her to step down from that leadership role.

In an interview, McMorris Rodgers said Congress needs both “new blood” willing to shake things up and experienced members who spend years developing the relationships and knowledge required to enact policy change.

“There’s a wisdom that you gain after you’ve been there for a number of years,” she said. “I think it’s like any job. You know, when you first get a job, no matter how knowledgeable and passionate you may be, it still takes time to learn a new job, and the same thing applies in Congress.”

It can be hard for lawmakers to walk away from the unique benefits of the job, McMorris Rodgers said, including the ability to travel and meet “really fascinating and insightful people.” Most people go to Congress to make a difference and work for what they believe in, she added, and many are reluctant to give up that position of influence.

“You get into these positions where you are a power player, as such, on Capitol Hill,” she said. “You can get a distorted view of yourself in all of it, and it’s important to have people around you that are honest. Clearly there’s many others who are capable of serving, who want to serve, and I think it’s important not to lose sight of that. No one is irreplaceable.”

When it comes to lawmakers’ health and ability to do the jobs voters elected them for, McMorris Rodgers said there will always be debates within each party, but the decision should ultimately be up to their constituents.

“I guess I’ve been at peace with letting the voters ultimately make that decision,” she said. “Now, I do think that a representative or a senator has a responsibility to be transparent and to be honest about their health. And there’s an accountability that comes with reporters and media asking some of those questions, but I’m not ready to support an across-the-board age cap.”

Murray said there are countless things she has learned since coming to Congress at the start of 1993. During her first term in office, then-Sen. Strom Thurmond, a Republican who represented South Carolina until he died in office at age 100, reportedly mistook the freshman senator for a staffer and groped her in an elevator. Murray declined to address that incident, calling it “ancient history.”

Long-running challenges like the Hanford cleanup, she said, benefit from lawmakers who work on them for years and understand the complexity of each issue and the people involved. Now, as the top Democrat on the Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, she said, she can do more for her state than she could years earlier.

“That’s not something you’d probably get from anybody else back here,” Murray said. “So it’s experience, knowing the issues, knowing your state, knowing the people, knowing the history of it, so you know how to fight for it, but it’s also being in a position to fight for it, and I am in that position as the top-ranking Democrat on Appropriations.”