Spate of Congress Deaths Raises Age Question

While the number of members of U.S. Congress who have died since 2020 has already nearly equaled the number from the entire previous decade, experts tell Newsweek that federal term limits would likely have little impact if ever enacted.
New Jersey Representative Bill Pascrell, 87, a Democrat, died August 21. He was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1996, the first of a string of 14 consecutive congressional election victories. At the time of his death, he was running for reelection this November.
Pascrell became the 11th congressional member, House and Senate, to die while in office since 2020. Other politicians who have died in the past four years and change include Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, 90, who represented California for more than 30 years and died in 2023; Alaska Representative Don Young, a Republican who served in the House from 1973 until his death in 2022; and Georgia Representative John Lewis, a Democrat who died in 2020 at age 80.
Between 2010 and 2020, a total of 12 sitting congressional members died.
Currently, the oldest House members are Representative Grace Napolitano (87, California Democrat); Hal Rogers (86, Kentucky Republican); Maxine Waters (86, California Democrat); and Steny Hoyer (85, Maryland Democrat).
Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican, is currently the oldest senator and oldest member of Congress. Feinstein was previously the oldest senator before her September 2023 passing.
In recent years, notable high-profile politicians including President Joe Biden (81), former President Donald Trump (78) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (82) have drawn criticism based on their ages and multiple public medical episodes. Prior to Biden’s dropping out of the 2024 race, most Americans expressed disillusionment towards the older ages of both him and Trump.
The average age of House members in the previous 117th Congress was 58.4 years, and 64.3 years for senators. The average age of House and Senate members in the current 118th Congress as of February 2023 was 58 years, lower than previous years but still higher than the median U.S. age of 38.8 years, based on 2021 U.S. Census Bureau data.
“Some of the main arguments for term limits is that people get Potomac fever,” Todd Belt, professor and political management program director at George Washington University, told Newsweek. “They go to Washington, D.C., and they forget about the constituents that they support.”
The reelection rate for House members in recent years is about 95 percent, Belt said, and between 85-90 percent in the Senate. It has led to very public concerns about politicians who serve at the highest levels of government and viewed by some as forgetting their constituents back home.
A public consultation survey of 2,700 registered voters conducted last year by the Program for Public Consultation (PPC) at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy found overwhelming support for term limits, favored by 83 percent of registered voters nationally across all party lines.
“There’s the age issue,” Belt said. “It becomes difficult to unseat someone who has been there a while because of all the advantages of incumbency.”
On the opposite side, states that utilize term limits result in unfamiliar faces.
“That’s been problematic because you have a lot of new people coming in and going out and they just don’t know the ins and outs of legislation and they end up relying more on lobbyists to help them out, to do their job, and because of that you get an increased influence of outside sources,” Belt added.
Jacob Neiheisel, an associate political science professor at the University of Buffalo, told Newsweek that the age issue in Congress depends on perspective—and that’s subjective and not uniform across the political spectrum.
Politicians who have spent decades in Congress could argue that their presence in their specific chambers speaks to experience and knowledge of how these institutions function, he added, invoking how Alexander Hamilton, in The Federalist Papers, was among the first Americans to oppose term limits due to depriving the public of an effective legislator.
“It’s absolutely true [that] we can find an existence proof that there are politicians who are there for themselves and that they’re not really helping the constituents,” Neiheisel said. “Their longevity in office is more associated with their own desires.
“That being said, that doesn’t seem to be the case on average. In fact, we see legislators with more experience and more time [are] more effective policymakers. They know the institution better than the levers within that institution that can be pulled to get things done.”
Douglas Cantor, author of the book Term Limits and the Modern Era of Municipal Reform, told Newsweek that term limits have been popular dating back to the 1800s because institutional reform has been traditionally popular in the U.S. The New Deal spurred another groundswell.
“It gets at the heart of this distrust of government that Americans on average tend to have, regardless of party affiliation and age and ethnicity, etc.,” Cantor said. “It’s a distrust that Americans tend to have more than other countries.”
The actual prospect of term limits ever being enacted is near impossible in this polarized political climate, he added. It would require a constitutional amendment and support from both chambers, effectively harming sitting politicians’ own political futures.
Also, those who tend to support them are often at the political will of others. For example, Contor said that a Democrat living in a Republican-heavy district for decades is more prone to embrace the idea than the candidates or party continually succeeding in certain districts.
“[Some people think if] you get new people in Congress all of a sudden things will start working better,” he said. “The evidence [at local and state levels] doesn’t show that. The evidence shows that term limits will actually have a marginal effect on most stuff.
“What it will have the biggest effect on is the obvious one, which is you’ll have new people.”
James Jones, director of the Sheila Y. Oliver Center for Politics and Race in America at Rutgers University-Newark, said term limits are viewed as a “magic bullet” when issues like campaign finance reform and lobbyists’ input are just as vital to address.
There’s also a comfort level with candidates like Pascrell, who served in Jones’ home state and received over 70 percent of his party’s primary vote earlier this year. Challengers often view facing such incumbents as a major uphill battle due to lack of name recognition and general party structures in place—along with dark money and bloated Super PACs.
“This problem of octogenarians and septuagenarians is important, but I think the bigger issue is about money and politics and how do we challenge that,” Jones told Newsweek. “I think Nancy Pelosi stays in power and has a lot of influence in part because she’s an incredible fundraiser.”
Denny Salas, a political strategist and senior vice president at New York-based Gotham Government Relations, said the loss of congressional members leads to a loss of institutional knowledge and expertise necessary to craft effective legislation and laws.
“That is hard to replace,” Salas said. “Instead, party leaders should encourage new and qualified leaders that reflect the current societal zeitgeist for their states and districts. That way, we can eliminate instances where an elected official dies in office and citizens lose effective representation.”
T.J. McCormack, a Republican communications specialist, disagrees and believes term limits could be a worthwhile method to curb a prevalence of career politicians who “are always a risk to become complacent empty suits at best and corrupt criminals at worst.”
“Between the recent rash of deaths and cognitive declines of elected officials while in office to the slew of convictions—most notably [Democratic] Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey— clearly, it is in the best interest of taxpayers to show politicians the exit ramp,” he told Newsweek.
“Before she passed, Feinstein was voting ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ on crucial bills while clearly not knowing where she was, let alone what she was voting on. When the United States finally embraces term limits, we will have taken a step towards a better government for the people.”