James Clyburn

Asked by Vox’s Astead Herndon whether he had ever used artificial intelligence, South Carolina’s Rep. James Clyburn answered plainly: “Believe it or not, I didn’t know what that was until about a week ago. ChatGPT, or whatever it is.” Then, with the self-awareness of a man who has survived 17 elections: “That may sound strange to you.”

It does, and not for the reason the internet reached for within an hour of the clip’s posting.

Clyburn is 86 and seeking an 18th term. The reaction folded instantly into the argument now consuming both parties: that Congress has become a gerontocracy, that the typical House member is nearing 60 and the typical senator 65, that more than a hundred members are over 70, and that a generation of Americans has been told to wait its turn indefinitely. The hospitalizations and deaths of the past month have given the argument new urgency and new energy behind age caps, term limits and primary challenges.

I understand the impulse. I think it is the wrong lesson, and a costly one.

Start with the law, since that is where these conversations usually end. The Constitution sets three qualifications for the House: age, citizenship and residency. In Powell v. McCormack, the Supreme Court held that Congress cannot add to that list, and in U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton, it held that states cannot either. An age ceiling is not a reform proposal; it is a constitutional amendment. Everything short of that is a campaign slogan.

Now take the evidence. Technological illiteracy in Congress has never tracked chronology. Former Sen. Ted Stevens was 82 when he described the internet as “a series of tubes,” but the hearings that produced Washington’s most embarrassing questions about social media were populated by members of every age, and the youngest cohorts elected in the past two cycles have not distinguished themselves as a technologically fluent bloc. Age is a proxy, and a bad one. Curiosity is the actual variable, and curiosity is not distributed by birth year.

Which brings us to what Clyburn’s answer really exposed. He was not asked whether he could code. He was asked whether he had opened a product used by hundreds of millions of people, one that his own institution is deciding how to govern.

The House has before it a 269-page bipartisan discussion draft that would impose audit and incident-reporting duties on frontier developers while freezing, for three years, every state’s authority to legislate on how those systems are built. States have enacted more than 100 AI laws this year.

Members are being asked to suspend 50 legislatures’ police powers over a technology a meaningful number of them have never once used. That is not a generational failing. It is an epistemic one, and bipartisan.

So, the reform worth arguing about is not an age limit. It is a competence norm. Not a litmus test, a purity test administered by gatekeepers. More like a disclosure expectation, enforced the way we enforce tax-return releases and medical disclosures: not by statute but by reporters who ask and voters who notice.

Four questions, asked of everyone seeking federal office, in public, on the record. Have you personally used these systems, and what did you learn? Who advises you on technology, and are they paid by anyone with business before your committees? Do you support federal preemption of state AI law, and can you name what it would displace? What is one thing about this technology you have changed your mind about?

Nobody fails such a test for answering “no.” Clyburn’s “no” was not disqualifying. What followed it was. “Or whatever it is” is the shrug of an institution that has decided fluency in the subjects it regulates is optional, a posture available to a 40-year-old as readily as to an 86-year-old, and one that voters can see clearly if anyone bothers to ask.

There is a reason the age argument has spread so quickly: It is easy, visible, and it excuses everyone under 70. However, retiring the oldest members of Congress would not have produced a single better question at the last AI hearing. Demanding that candidates demonstrate they have engaged with what they propose to govern might.