1870

I imagine the military likes 20 year olds (and younger) because they are easier to mold.

1871

A 20 year old brain looks much, much better than a 70 year old brain. The vast majority of 70 year olds have some degree of brain damage.

1872

The craziness of the 70+ you’d hope will be self-evident… they have history, lots of it to look at. It turns out, starting in 2016, some voters just don’t care. If the problem occurs while in office, we have a system in place for that, and we have had presidents with past difficulties before anyway.

1873

OK, but you could replace 70+ with 20 and it would be equally true.

1874

Not really. We lack the history part. If we’re not supposed to judge people by what they did during their teen years, at least not fully, we can’t even judge them on what happened essentially yesterday. The history part is key here. There are years to draw from, professional, communal, whatever the heck they’ve been doing as an adult.

1875

Really? The point and supporting argument of the entire article is… Two sentences? Your post stating this is longer the supposed argument itself.

Come on. There is no argument being presented. It’s a bad article. Its point is that the Constitution should be changed so that Cortez can run for president. That’s the vast majority of the article.

The only reason people are ignoring that blatantly obvious fact is that it’s dumb. Folks are tying themselves in knots to try and defend a dumb article.

But that’s what it is. It’s dumb.

1876

We had a 24 year old Prime Minister, back when we were a superpower, and he coped with the demands of the office ok.

1877

Brains don’t really finish baking until 25/26. And I agree with Nesrie, you need to be older so people can look into your history. At 20 you literally have no history. Everything is “teenage bullshit”. 35 is fine as an arbitrary number that recognizes your brain is done developing and gives you a decade of time to show said development and where you stand, how you think, etc.

1878

We don’t need any 30yo former Presidents around, soaking up lifetime Secret Service protection. Clearly the age should be increased to keep future costs down.

1879

History isn’t everything. For one thing, people change. We allow ex-felons to run for president, after all. Why is someone with a criminal history preferable to someone with no history?

Furthermore, some people judge others not based on their history, but on how the act right now. If you don’t fall into that group, you don’t have to vote for a 20 year old. But you shouldn’t force everyone else to use your criteria.

Like I said, the argument is poorly made. But it’s still there.

1880

It’s a good thing I didn’t say “history is everything”. It will certainly provide information. I am fine with our laws as they are. If you’re not fine with it, go gather all the 20 year olds, get them to replace most of Congress, probably a President and a fair amount of lobbyist and by the time they’re 35, maybe they’ll get close to changing it.

1881

1882

Are you worried the great candidates under 35 are going to spoil before they’re eligible? Again, the nice thing about the age requirement is it’s just saying “not yet”. If they’re such good candidates, they’ll still be good candidates in a few years.

1883

Well, it’s about you saying it was dumb, and everyone else kinda disagreeing.

1884

I’ve yet to see a particularly coherent argument for why 35 should be the age, other than that’s the way we’ve always done it and arguments for changing the age are “dumb”…no argument apparently necessary, just “it’s dumb”.

I hate to play this card, but if you’re old enough to bleed out in the desert based on bullshit War on Terror rhetoric from the President, then you’re old enough to run for the job.

1885

Indeed. Also, you ought to be able to buy a martini without going to jail for it.

1886

No, everyone isn’t really disagreeing.

Some are saying that the idea you need to be 35 is dumb… But that’s not the same as saying his terrible article is good.

Some of you guys think it is, but can’t really explain why.

Because it’s clearly not.

1887

I don’t like your explanation != you can’t explain why.

1888

I was listening to pod save America, and they made a point about how sometimes you have a moment and if you don’t take it, it won’t come around again.

What if your moment of appeal is when you are 32 years old? You are shit out of luck. And yes it is sometimes that fleeting. Obama was shiny and new in 2008, but I doubt he would have been in the moment if he decide to run in 2012 or 2016.

Beto is big right now but I doubt anyone care about him in 2024 if he doesn’t run in 2020.

Anyway, younger people have more energy, more elastic brains (over 25 shall we say) and less likely to predisposed to past I’ll informed prejudice.

Also, younger people are more likely to be inpact by their choices. And 30 year old will care more about the environment in the next 50 years than some random 70 year.

Also, old people are evil. That’s a fact.

1889

Respectfully, I disagree with that card. Military service and being the President of the United States are not the same thing and it doesn’t make sense that their qualifications should necessarily be the same just because they’re important roles or because one can affect the other.

There’s no single age when a person goes from being unqualified for all regulated privileges and responsibilities to qualified. We let kids work at 15 before they can vote on labor laws and practices that may affect them, and (varying by state) they can drive before they can vote on traffic laws or serve as the highway patrolman enforcing them.

So even at an individual level, if we threw out the differences in maturity between this 18 year old and that one, I think it would be foolish to say 18 (or 16, or 21, or 35) is the age when someone goes from being incapable of any of these responsibilities to equipped for all of them.

I’m not here to tell you any of the above examples are inarguably the correct ages. I could probably be persuaded that 30 is old enough or President. I could probably be persuaded that there should be a maximum age limit too.

I like that 35 broadly means someone will reach a level of physical and mental maturity, and to the extent an age limit can affect this, probably have some meaningful measure of life experience outside of their education. I don’t think that means 35 is the indisputably correct age for the job, but you’d need me to convince your alternative still does a reasonably good job of limiting the pool of candidates to that group (so like I said, I could probably be convinced 30 is fine, 18 would be a very hard sell).

I don’t think something is right just because it’s the way things have been done, but I also don’t think we should move the age capriciously. We should look at the restriction and be sure it’s not unjust (and I don’t think a higher age for the President than for military service is unjust, as an example), and we should look to health and science evidence for how we mature biologically and mentally, and make an informed decision if either shows 35 might be too old (or too young!).

Okay, but, so what? Point to any age where you won’t be able to find examples of talented individuals who just missed the cut-off. This line of thinking can only be a rationale for removing the age restriction entirely, which I’m flatly against. You can’t use this as an appeal that the age should be Y instead of X. If we had some sci-fi/magic machine we could plug someone into that provided an objective and incontrovertible “maturity measure”, that’d be great and Beto could’ve run at 27 and Trump would’ve been ineligible at any age. But instead we have age, so we try to pick a safe compromise and we live with the fact that all age limits will be somewhat arbitrary.

These are the best arguments I’ve seen for lowering the age.