Bernie Sanders Tags Competency Test For Older Politicians As ‘Ageist’
New Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s suggestion of mandatory competency tests for U.S. elected officials over 75 has been deemed ageist. On CBS’ Face the Nation, Sen. Bernard Sanders (D-VT) slammed the idea, saying it is inappropriate to subject politicians older than 75 to mental competency tests.
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According to Sanders, the idea is not only absurd but discriminatory to older Americans. Likening ageism to social and political issues like racism and sexism, Sanders called for the fight against ageism.
“We are fighting racism, we’re fighting sexism, we’re fighting homophobia,” he said. “I think we should also be fighting ageism. Trust people, look at people and say, ‘You know, this person is competent, this person is not competent.’”
“There are a lot of 40 year olds out there who ain’t particularly competent,” he added.
Sanders believes that candidates for political positions should be judged by their individual competency, not collectively by their age.
Come 2024, Sanders, who is 81, will be due for re-election in Vermont. He settled for a senatorial seat after he unsuccessfully ran for president in the 2016 and 2020 primaries.
His election would have put him ahead of President Joe Biden as the oldest president the U.S. has ever elected into power. But Sanders did not take into account the current president’s frequent errors in speeches and memory issues. Instead, he advised that people ignore the issue of mental competency evaluation and focus on what a candidate stands for.
In a 2024 campaign kickoff speech on Wednesday, Haley proposed that presidential candidates older than 75 get mental competency tests, claiming that they are past their prime. This appears to be a dig at not only Democratic President Joe Biden but also Republican former President Donald Trump, who is 76 and has since declared he would be running in the 2024 presidential race.
Haley, however, admitted that Trump could do well with the evaluation as he did well the last time he did it. In 2020, the former president revealed that he took a cognitive test, shutting the mouths of those doubting his mental fitness to hold office. Giving details of how the evaluation was conducted, Trump proudly stated that he was “cognitively there.”
The same cannot be said for Biden, who just had his annual physicals released. The results made no mention of any kind of cognitive exam, despite incessant calls for the president to get one done.