The press office of Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa recently posted a message on X announcing that the senator had completed his forty-sixth consecutive year of face-to-face meetings with Iowans in all ninety-nine counties. The post was written as a celebration, and in one narrow sense it is one, because very few politicians keep a promise for four and a half decades. What that number actually measures, though, is not diligence. It measures how long one man has held one seat.
Iowans have every reason to appreciate a senator who shows up in every county, year after year, including the small ones that most officeholders drive past. The question the X post raises, and does not answer, is whether any single person should hold the same office for that long.
Senator Grassley has served in the Senate since January 1981 and has held a seat in Congress since 1975, and he has given no sign of stopping. In mid-August 2026 he filed an early statement of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission, which is the routine paperwork that allows a politician to keep raising money for a future race. He turns 93 this month. If he seeks and wins a ninth term in 2028, he would be 95 on Election Day and 102 at the end of that term.
The argument of this opinion piece is simple, and it is not about one man’s health or one state’s choice. Forty-six years in a single seat is not an achievement, it is entrenchment, and it is the predictable outcome of a system that places no limit on how long a person may hold power. The Centercratic Party believes the answer is a firm cap of eighteen years of service in either chamber of Congress and a retirement age of eighty, and this fall, while one seat in Iowa is being decided by one family’s timetable, is exactly the moment to say so.
Consider what the senator himself has said about his plans. Asked directly on August 28 whether he intends to run again, Senator Grassley said he is focused on the coming midterm elections and told the interviewer to ask him next year. He has indicated he will announce by this fall whether he will seek a ninth term, and he has said he hopes voters will not judge him by his age. In the meantime, he is running the Senate Judiciary Committee as its chairman, and he has invited former special counsel Jack Smith to testify before that committee on September 22.
None of this is the conduct of a man preparing to hand anything over. What makes the situation more striking is the name most often mentioned as his eventual successor. Pat Grassley, the senator’s grandson, is 43 years old, serves as Speaker of the Iowa House, and was born two years after his grandfather entered the Senate. A seat held by one family since 1981 may simply pass to another member of that family, and in the language of American politics that is described as passing the torch. It is not. Passing the torch means letting go of it in time for someone else to be chosen on their own merits.
It would be unfair to treat Iowa as an outlier, because it is not. Newsweek published an analysis of legislator birth records on July 13, 2026, prompted by the death of Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina at 71, and it found that the average sitting senator is 65.1 years old and the median is 66. That analysis counted 36 senators aged 70 or older, eight aged 80 or older, and one in his nineties, who is Senator Grassley. The eight who have passed 80 are Senator Grassley of Iowa at 92, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont at 84, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky at 84, Senator James Risch of Idaho at 83, Senator Angus King of Maine at 82, Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois at 81, Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut at 80, and Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts at 80.
Newsweek also reported that 131 members of the House and Senate together are 70 or older, which is nearly one quarter of Congress. NBC News reported that Senator Risch will be 83 on Election Day this year and would be 89 at the end of a new six-year term, that Senator King would turn 86 during his next race in 2030, and that Senator Sanders would turn 89 in that same year. Length of service tells the same story from a different angle.
The SenatorDB seniority ranking for the 119th Congress lists Senator Grassley in the Senate since January 3, 1981, Senator McConnell since 1985, Senator Patty Murray of Washington since 1993, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon since 1996, and Senator Susan Collins of Maine, Senator Durbin, and Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island since 1997. This is not a Republican problem or a Democratic problem. It is a shared arrangement that both parties have found comfortable.
The usual reply is that voters already hold the remedy in their hands, and that anyone who has served too long can be sent home in November. That reply describes a country the United States no longer is. When the Cook Political Report first published its Partisan Voting Index in 1996, a measure of how competitive each congressional district is, it counted 164 House districts where either party had a genuine chance to win. By 2024 that count had fallen to 42 seats out of 435, a decline of 74 percent in less than thirty years. In that same year, House incumbents were reelected at a rate of roughly 97 percent.
When a district is drawn so that only one party can win it, the general election no longer decides anything, and the only contest that can remove a member is that party’s own primary, which is the internal election in which registered members of a party choose their nominee. Roughly 10 percent of eligible Americans vote in primaries, and those voters are the most committed and most ideological slice of the electorate. Under those conditions, telling voters that they can simply retire a forty-six-year incumbent whenever they choose is not a description of how the system works. It is a description of how it once worked.
Americans have already reached their own verdict on this. A CNN poll released on July 29, 2026 found that 58 percent of Americans consider the current share of elderly lawmakers in Congress a major problem, a figure that rises to 68 percent among Americans under 35, and that 70 percent of people aligned with either major party would be uneasy or upset if their own party nominated someone over the age of 70. A Fox News poll conducted in July found that 85 percent of registered voters believe there should be a mandatory retirement age for lawmakers, and about half of that group would set it below 70.
A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found support for an age limit for federal elected officials among 82 percent of Republicans and 76 percent of Democrats. Nor would such a rule be a novelty in American government. Newsweek reported that 37 states already impose term limits on their governors and 16 impose them on their state legislators. The states figured this out. Congress, which would have to impose the limit on itself, has not.
This is the gap the Centercratic Party was built to fill. The party is founded on nine principles that hold regardless of who is winning, and the second speaks directly to this moment: limit terms for accountability, impose term limits on public office to prevent entrenchment, and keep representatives answerable to the voters rather than to their own careers. In practice that means eighteen years in the House, eighteen years in the Senate, and a hard stop at the age of eighty.
Eighteen years is three full Senate terms and nine House terms, which is more than enough time for any capable person to learn the institution, chair a committee, and leave a record behind. It also means that a seat becomes an open contest on a known schedule rather than whenever an incumbent decides he is finished, and that a state’s next senator is chosen by its voters instead of inherited. The full set of principles is posted at Centercratic.party.
It is important to call out that experience in government is invaluable, because writing law, running a committee, and negotiating across party lines are difficult skills that take years to build. States that adopted strict legislative term limits have found that power shifts toward unelected staff members and toward lobbyists, who stay after the elected members leave and who know the rules better than the newcomers do. A House member restricted to just a few years in office may never accumulate enough standing to accomplish anything, and voters who want to keep a good representative are entitled to ask why a rule should override their judgment.
Those concerns are the reason the Centercratic Party limit is set at eighteen years rather than six or twelve. That length preserves genuine expertise while ending careers that outlast the problems they were elected to solve. The objection loses its force entirely at the far end of the curve, because whatever institutional knowledge is gained between year eighteen and year forty-six is purchased at the cost of a seat that an entire generation of Iowans has never once had the chance to compete for.
Senator Grassley has visited all ninety-nine counties in Iowa every year for forty-six years. In all that time, he has never once found in any of them a single Iowan he judged ready to take his place.