Ella's Electoral Elucidations

In this reoccurring segment, Ella shares her thoughts on important political issues.

Ellaheh Gohari | Co-Editor-in-Chief pl236951@ahschool.com

Those of you who know me know I love learning about politics. Something about watching grown adults acting as petty and immature as two-year-olds amuses me.

In all seriousness, I like politics because I want to learn about what’s going on in the world. After all, if we don’t know how our world works, how can we change it? That’s why I decided to start this column, and I hope that even if you disagree with me, we can still respect each other’s viewpoints.

The U.S. government has a problem: its members are too old and have held onto their power for too long. At age 78, President Joe Biden is the oldest President in history; second-in-line Nancy Pelosi is 81 and third-in-line Patrick Leahy is also 81. These seniors have held office for longer than the youngest members of Congress have been alive, and their outdated, out-of-touch views have no place in today’s government.

The average age of members of the U.S. Senate is 64 years old, according to the Congressional Research Service, with eldest members Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Grassley both 88 years old. This makes today’s Senate the oldest in history. Many of these Senators have held onto power election after election—Grassley is on his 6th term with 40 years in office, while Feinstein served for 29—and their age shows.

During hearings for Facebook and Google, many Senators were baffled as to how their phones and the internet worked. “How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?” longest-serving Republican Senator Orrin Hatch asked (he has since retired), confused when the answer was a simple “[Facebook] runs ads.”

The 2018 Google hearing—clips can be found on YouTube—is filled with meme-able quotes from House representatives who cannot seem to grasp the concept of opt-in services and algorithms. People who do not understand modern-day technology should not be making decisions that could destroy them.

Also, Feinstein, Grassley and most of the Senatorial caucus grew up in a time where gas was 27 cents a gallon and the median home value was less than $10,000. Those numbers today sound unheard of, yet their refusal to get with the times is shown by their voting patterns.

When asked to explain why he didn’t support increasing the minimum wage to a livable $15 an hour, 60 year old Senator John Thune responded that he “started bussing tables at $1 an hour… [when he] finally made it to cook, which was big time, that was $6 an hour.” By not considering that times have changed and viewing his own childhood as the golden standard, Thune doomed millions of hard-working Americans to poverty.

Finally, politicians like Mitch McConnell, Grassley, Feinstein, Pelosi, Biden and so many others have held onto power for far too long, enriching themselves to the detriment of American society. In a caucus where a net worth of 3 million dollars is seen as “poor,” according to “The Gazette,” there is obviously a problem when it comes to transparency and accountability.

When people are in power for this long, there is bound to be some corruption as they can essentially bend the law to their own benefit. Insider trading, or selling/buying stocks based on prior knowledge unknown to the general public, is illegal in Congress, but that didn’t stop three senators from “coincidentally” trading their stocks after a confidential Senatorial hearing right before the coronavirus recession, as reported by Forbes. These senators managed to avoid insider trading charges, with two of the three still in office today.

It is obvious that term limits and age limits are necessary for the betterment of the country. We cannot progress as a nation without new, younger faces who have unique opinions and views. The Senate and House are supposed to represent all Americans, not the super rich senior citizens, and it’s time our government reflected that.

(Design/Shreya Shanmugam) Issue 2