Should there be an upper legal age limit for becoming POTUS?

The purpose of this post is to allow for a discussion of this topic.

A few preliminary thoughts:

(1) A key threshold issue is whether it makes sense to turn a pragmatic prudential case by case judgment (is Candidate X too old?) into a categorical legal rule. Note that we do this in terms of a lower age bound: the fact that certain people under the age of 35 might be good presidents hasn’t been considered a good enough reason not to remove the categorical rule in regard to young people as a group.

(2) How should such a rule be structured? Some possibilities:

*A rule that no one over the age of X is eligible to be elected president.

*A rule that no one over the age of X is eligible to be re-elected president.

*A rule that specifies different ages for eligibility to be elected in the first instance, and re-elected.

There’s an argument for having no upper age limit on initial election, but an age limit on re-election. This would retain maximum flexibility in regard to the class of older people who could serve as president, but would ameliorate certain problems that come with electing an old person in the first place.

For example, I’m not aware of any coherent response to the following concern: Suppose Joe Sanders is elected president in his late 70s. Then suppose he wants to be re-elected, even though there are some good reasons for not doing so, such as signs of cognitive slippage, other forms of declining health, or simply an electorate that at the electoral margin is OK with an 80-year-old president but not OK with an 85-year-old. This puts the president’s party in a bad bind. It’s extremely difficult to stop a sitting president from getting re-nominated, even if re-nomination is a bad idea.

Maximum age for re-election gets rid of this conundrum. (It also serves as disincentive to elect people who are less than four years younger than the maximum age for re-election eligibility, which itself could work as a kind of “soft” limit on maximum age for initial election).

Or you could have a regime that features different maximum ages for election and re-election, with the former being slightly lower or even somewhat higher than the latter.

(3) What should these various possible maximum ages be? In my view, age begins to become a significant concern for a candidate around the late 60s. I would categorically refuse to consider a candidate whose first term began after age 75. So I would set the age limit for initial election at 75, if we were to go that route. I would argue that an age limit for re-election of 75, with no limit on the age for initial election, would be far preferable to our present system.

But enough of my yakking. What do you all think?