On Friday, Lindsey Graham stood beside the wreckage of Russian military vehicles in central Kyiv.

The South Carolina Republican had spent more than three decades in Congress and had turned 71 two days earlier. He was promoting a sanctions package negotiated with Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal and preparing to return to Washington to press congressional leaders for its passage. The following evening, he died after what medical examiners preliminarily identified as a tear in his aorta.

Graham had become one of Ukraine’s most useful intermediaries with President Donald Trump. One Ukrainian lawmaker called him “truly indispensable.” Trump’s own description was equally revealing: Graham was a “temperature gauge” of the Senate who “could go in and get something approved.”

Then, almost simultaneously, came a rather different appraisal of congressional old age. Mitch McConnell, 84, appeared in a photograph holding the day’s newspaper, the proof-of-life accessory of choice for politicians and hostages alike.

McConnell disclosed that a June 14 fall had briefly left him unconscious, that he had been treated for mild pneumonia and that he could not return to the Senate “quite yet.” He said tests had found no broken bones, concussion, heart attack, stroke, tumor or hemorrhage.

Graham’s last journey and McConnell’s long absence appear to tell the same story: Congress is too old. In fact, they tell almost opposite stories. An age limit is deceptively attractive partly because it avoids having to distinguish between the two.

Common Knowledge

When McConnell disappeared from public view for weeks, Democratic Senator Cory Booker complained that some people “don’t know when to gracefully step aside.”

Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, asked McConnell to update the public about his health in a “transparent manner.”

McConnell eventually acknowledged that “folks of my generation often hesitate to share the vulnerability that comes with growing older.” The admission arrived after weeks during which his office had released little information. Members of Congress are not generally required to publish their diagnoses.

Some Republicans agree with the broader diagnosis.

Pennsylvania Senator Dave McCormick, who says he will serve no more than two Senate terms, argues that “an older and more experienced Congress has not translated to a more productive Congress.”

He notes that the average senator is around 11 years older than in 1981 and that Congress enacts barely half as many laws each year as it did in the 1980s. McCormick has proposed limiting senators to two terms and representatives to six: 12 years in either chamber.

The public needs no convincing. In an April 2026 NPR/PBS News/Marist poll, 83 percent of Americans supported congressional term limits and 80 percent supported a maximum age for candidates seeking the House and Senate. It held true across the political spectrum. Rarely has Washington inspired such enthusiasm for showing Washington the door.

And Congress really has grown older. At the beginning of the 97th Congress in 1981, the mean representative was approximately 49 and the mean senator approximately 53. At the opening of the 119th Congress in 2025, the corresponding averages were around 58 and 64.

So the argument seems logical enough. Congress is old. Congress does less. Retire the gerontocracy and let government become younger, faster and better.

It is a clean argument, but wrong.

Uncommon Knowledge

Congress has grown older over several decades, but it is not aging in a straight line. At the opening of the 119th Congress, the House median age had actually fallen to 57.5, from 57.9 two years earlier and 58.9 four years earlier.

The Senate median slipped to 64.7 from 65.3, reversing three consecutive Congresses of increases. Of the 61 representatives newly elected in 2024, 48 were younger than the House median. The 11 new senators had a median age of 53.9, nearly 11 years below that of the chamber.

The generational handover is particularly visible in the House. Generation X became its largest cohort in 2025, with 180 members against 170 Boomers, while Millennials held another 66 seats. The Senate remained a different country: Boomers occupied 60 of the 99 seats filled on opening day.

More importantly, however, chronological age and congressional seniority have begun to come apart. Brookings’ opening-day count put the average House member’s service at 5.4 terms, or about 10.8 years, and the median at four terms. Those were not record highs: the mean had been 6.2 terms at the beginning of the 112th Congress in 2011. More than four in 10 members of the current House—43.2 percent—were in their first, second or third terms, while only 15.4 percent had served at least 10 terms.

The Senate presents the paradox even more clearly. Its members began the 119th Congress with an average of 11.1 years of service and a median of 10. Thirty-five senators had served six years or less; only 14 had served at least 19. In 2009, the average senator had spent 14 years in the chamber. Today’s Senate is much older by birthday than the Senate of the early 1980s, yet less experienced in office than the Senate of less than two decades ago.

The Senate, in other words, may have acquired the worst possible demographic combination: older politicians with fewer years of accumulated institutional experience. The gerontocracy critique treats age and tenure as though they were the same thing. Increasingly, they are not.

The strongest evidence does not show that birthdays improve government. It shows that experience, position and relationships often improve legislative effectiveness—all of which are difficult to acquire without remaining in office for some time.

The Center for Effective Lawmaking, a joint project of the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University, measures legislators through 15 indicators: how many bills they sponsor, how substantial those proposals are and how far they advance through committee, chamber passage and enactment. Scores are normalized so that the average member receives 1.0.

In the 118th Congress (January 2023-January 2025), minority-party House members averaged an effectiveness score of 0.55, majority-party members 1.44 and committee chairs 2.47. In the Senate, the corresponding figures were 0.88, 1.11 and 1.51.

These numbers do not demonstrate a biological advantage to gray hair. They show that command of the machinery has an enormous effect on a legislator’s ability to move policy.

A broader academic study of the House reached a similar conclusion.

Examining roll-call and co-sponsorship patterns, political scientist Andrew Taylor found that long-serving members retained disproportionate legislative effectiveness even after the formal seniority system weakened and congressional power became more centralized.

The findings were consistent with an intuitive explanation: relationships cultivated over time help senior members attract support from other experienced lawmakers.

Consider Representative Sam Graves of Missouri, a Republican. During the 118th Congress, he was in his 12th term and chaired the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. His effectiveness score was nearly seven times the House average.

Graves sponsored 17 bills; eight passed the House, four became standalone laws, and substantial language from three more was incorporated into enacted legislation. The average representative sponsored nearly 23 bills but produced fewer than one standalone law for every two members. Graves introduced less and accomplished more.

The pattern is bipartisan. Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton had exceeded the center’s seniority-adjusted expectations for 17 consecutive Congresses. Republican Chris Smith, then in his 22nd Congress, had exceeded expectations for seven in succession, while the late Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee maintained a seven-Congress streak through her final term.

In the Senate, Republican John Cornyn scored 6.562 in his 11th Congress; Democrat Gary Peters scored 10.648 in his fifth, the highest Senate score recorded for the 118th. Peters sponsored 152 bills, saw 34 pass the Senate and had 15 become standalone laws.

Freshmen are not incapable. They are simply freshmen. The 28 senators still in their first six-year term during the 118th Congress averaged an effectiveness score of 0.71, nearly a third below the normalized Senate average.

Majority-party newcomers averaged 0.87 and minority-party newcomers 0.58. Only four of the 28 exceeded the performance expected from senators with comparable seniority, party and institutional positions.

The House supplies an important qualification. Twelve first-term representatives exceeded expectations during the same Congress, and every one had either sponsored a bill that became law or written substantial language incorporated into another enacted measure. Talent can appear immediately; experience is not a prerequisite for competence. But the Senate data suggest that most legislators require something resembling an apprenticeship before they become effective operators.

Younger members may also contribute something their elders lack. A Lugar Center-based analysis found that in 2019, 56 percent of House members younger than 45 scored above the recent historical average for bipartisan sponsorship and co-sponsorship, compared with 40 percent of older representatives. Although the under-45s held only 17 percent of House seats, they accounted for 29 percent of members with positive bipartisanship scores.

That does not contradict the effectiveness evidence. A functioning legislature needs both bipartisan impetus and the experience to make that impetus real.

The second inconvenient fact is that counting statutes has become a poor way to count legislation.

The 118th Congress’ 274 public laws occupied 4,350 pages, an average of 15.88 pages each. The 80th Congress enacted 906 laws occupying only 2,236 pages, or roughly 2.5 pages each. The modern Congress enacted less than one-third as many public laws, but its average law was more than six times longer.

This does not transform the 118th Congress into a dynamo. The Congress before it enacted 362 public laws filling 8,742 pages—more than twice the 118th’s output by page count.

The 118th really was unproductive by several measures. But the historical comparison shows why the number of individual statutes cannot carry the entire argument. Modern Congresses increasingly stuff many policies into a few exceptionally large vehicles.

This is the legislative equivalent of measuring a novelist’s productivity by counting book covers while ignoring the number of words between them. Congress does pass fewer separately numbered laws. But part of that decline reflects a change in packaging, not a disappearance of activity.

There is also evidence that forcing experience out of legislatures can produce the opposite of rejuvenation. A study of state legislative voting between 1993 and 2016 found that term limits increased polarization by widening the ideological distance between Democratic and Republican voting records.

A survey of lobbyists in five states with legislative term limits found a strong consensus that influence had shifted away from elected legislatures and toward governors, agencies and organized interest groups. Remove the experienced elected politicians and the lobbyists, staff members and executive officials do not disappear with them. They may simply become the only people in the room who remember what happened last time.

What the evidence does establish is that Congress’s age does not adequately explain its poor performance.

Which is why Graham and McConnell do not belong in the same argument.

Graham is the argument for accumulated experience: a committee chairman, appropriator, Judiciary veteran, bipartisan negotiator and presidential intermediary working abroad immediately before his death.

McConnell is the argument for health transparency: an elected senator absent for weeks while the public awaited voluntary disclosures about his condition and return.

Neither is an argument for a cutoff based on someone’s date of birth.

The gerontocracy attack line identifies a real danger, but only by accident. America does not have too many experienced legislators. It has no reliable way to separate accumulated wisdom from accumulated incapacity.