Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Maybe It’s Time to Pass the Baton

I think we need to have a conversation about age limits in government.

Not Republican age limits. Not Democratic age limits. Not “your guy is older than my guy” age limits.

Just… age limits.

Because apparently we have decided that the only minimum age requirement for holding federal office is that you have accumulated enough birthdays to remember when television came in three channels and the remote control was your kid.

The Constitution actually has minimum ages. You have to be 25 to serve in the House, 30 to serve in the Senate, and 35 to be president. (Congress.gov⁠)

But there is no upper limit.

Apparently the Founding Fathers were perfectly comfortable with the idea that someone could be old enough to remember the Revolutionary War and still show up for work on Monday.

And here we are.

Chuck Grassley just turned 93. He has been in Congress since 1975 and has been a U.S. senator since 1981. He is currently the longest-serving senator in American history by years of service among living senators. (U.S. Senate⁠)

And we’re talking about the possibility that he could run for another Senate term in 2028, when he’d be 95, potentially serving into his 101st year. He hasn’t definitively announced whether he’ll seek another term. (Internationly⁠)

Now, before somebody starts screaming, “Ageist!”

I understand the argument.

There are 80-year-olds who are sharper than some 40-year-olds. There are 90-year-olds who are healthier than some 60-year-olds. Chuck Grassley is apparently still walking two miles every morning and doing the job. (Currently⁠)

Good for him.

Seriously.

But this isn’t about whether one particular 93-year-old can still do his job.

It’s about whether our system should be designed around the assumption that every elected official will remain equally capable of doing an increasingly complicated job indefinitely.

And that’s a different question.

Because government isn’t supposed to be a retirement home with better stationery.

At some point, we have to ask whether experience has become institutional stagnation.

There is a difference between wisdom and simply having been around a long time.

And I say that as a member of the generation that is rapidly approaching the age where we’re going to become the people I’m complaining about.

That’s the funny part.

Right now I’m saying, “If you voted for Eisenhower, maybe it’s time to consider retirement.”

Eventually somebody is going to look at me and say:

“Dude, your first car had a carburetor.”

And I’m going to respond:

“Okay, that’s just rude.”

Then they’ll remind me that I grew up with cassette players, rotary phones, VHS tapes and television antennas.

At which point I will have to admit they have a point.

That’s the thing about generational turnover.

Eventually every generation becomes the old people.

And maybe that’s exactly why we need rules rather than relying on politicians to voluntarily give up power.

Because power has never been particularly good at convincing people it’s time to leave.

There is also a rather obvious hypocrisy here.

We tell working Americans that they need to work longer.

Retirement ages creep upward. Social Security debates revolve around people working longer. We tell people who spent their lives doing physically demanding jobs that they should somehow keep going because Americans are living longer.

Meanwhile, someone whose job consists largely of sitting in a climate-controlled building, attending meetings, voting, talking to reporters and occasionally walking across the Capitol can potentially remain in office into their tenth decade.

Maybe that’s the message we’re supposed to take from this:

“If Senator Grandma can do it, you can pour concrete at 82.”

I’m not buying it.

A 70-year-old construction worker and a 70-year-old senator don’t have remotely the same physical demands placed on them.

Neither do they have the same consequences when their bodies begin telling them, “Hey, maybe we’re done with this.”

And here’s where I think the conversation gets interesting.

I wouldn’t necessarily argue for some ridiculous “you turn 65 and you’re escorted from the Capitol by security” rule.

Maybe 70 is the cutoff for the House.

Maybe 75 for the Senate and presidency.

Maybe 80 for federal judges.

The exact numbers are something people can debate.

But some number would at least force us to acknowledge that government should have generational turnover just like everything else.

And yes, I would include the Supreme Court.

We call Supreme Court appointments “lifetime appointments,” but perhaps we shouldn’t interpret “lifetime” as “until your body is eventually discovered behind the bench.”

Maybe at 80, you retire.

You’ve served your country. You’ve contributed your wisdom. You’ve had your turn.

Pass the baton.

That doesn’t mean your knowledge disappears.

You don’t suddenly become stupid because you turn 80.

You can still write books. Teach. Advise. Serve on commissions. Mentor younger people. Sit on boards. Give speeches. Become the annoying old guy at the coffee shop who tells everyone how things used to work.

Trust me.

There are plenty of options.

But perhaps the people making decisions about the next 50 years of the country should have some meaningful connection to the people who will actually live through those 50 years.

Because here’s another uncomfortable truth:

The future belongs to people who aren’t currently running the government.

A 25-year-old member of Congress may not have decades of experience.

A 35-year-old president may not have lived through every historical crisis.

A 50-year-old senator may not remember the Cold War firsthand.

That’s okay.

That’s how succession works.

Every generation inherits the country and then screws it up in its own unique way.

That’s America.

But eventually you have to let the next generation take the wheel.

And maybe that’s the real issue here.

This isn’t about Republicans or Democrats.

It’s about whether we believe government should continuously recycle the same people who have been running it for decades, or whether we believe democracy should include generational succession.

If your first presidential election was Eisenhower, that’s an impressive résumé.

If you remember Kennedy being elected, that’s a hell of a historical perspective.

If you have a draft card from Vietnam, you’ve lived through an extraordinary amount of American history.

But maybe—and this is said with affection—it’s also possible you’ve earned the right to sit back and watch somebody else screw it up for a while.

Because eventually every generation has to learn the same lesson:

You don’t pass the baton because you’re incapable of running anymore.

You pass it because somebody else needs a chance to run.

And if we’re going to tell everybody else in America that nobody gets to work forever, maybe we should apply that rule to the people who make the rules.

Besides, if we wait much longer, we’re going to have a Congress where someone proposes an amendment and the debate begins with:

“Back when Eisenhower was president…”

At that point, Gen X might finally have to admit:

Okay. It’s probably time for a younger crowd.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

There is something almost uniquely American about being angry about a problem that doesn’t actually exist, voting to fix it, and then being disappointed when the problem remains exactly where it was.

I had one of those conversations today.

Someone told me they aren’t happy with Donald Trump. Fair enough. Apparently, however, they voted for him because they were fed up with DEI, transgender kids getting surgery at school, transgender athletes taking over school sports, and whatever other horrors had apparently been hiding behind the gymnasium doors waiting to destroy Western civilization.

And I had to ask the obvious question:

Which of those things actually happened to you?

Because this is where political reality gets really strange.

Let’s start with the surgical horror story.

No, children aren’t wandering into their elementary school nurse’s office at lunchtime and coming out with a new set of plumbing. That’s not how gender-affirming surgery works. A 2024 national study found that gender-affirming surgeries among minors were extremely rare. Among insured minors in 2019, the study found no such procedures among children 12 and under, and only 85 procedures among minors aged 13–17 in the dataset; most were chest-related procedures. 

Another national study found that surgery among people ages 12–18 was uncommon compared with adults, and that genital procedures were particularly uncommon among adolescents. 

So when somebody tells me they voted for Trump because they were tired of transgender children getting “surgery in schools,” I’m sorry, but that’s not a policy problem.

That’s a story.

And there’s an important distinction between saying that gender-affirming care exists and saying that the internet’s most outrageous version of it is happening everywhere.

Those aren’t the same thing.

There have been transgender adolescents who received gender-affirming medical care. There have also been some adolescents who received chest surgery. That’s documented. 

But the idea that schools are performing gender-reassignment surgery on children is a completely different claim.

It would be like being furious that your local elementary school has a nuclear submarine parked behind the cafeteria because someone on television showed you a picture of one.

Then there’s transgender athletes.

Again, let’s separate the existence of an issue from the political megaphone surrounding it.

There are transgender students. There are transgender athletes. There are disputes over eligibility rules. Those are real.

But somehow a tiny number of people participating in school athletics became one of the defining political emergencies of our time.

Think about that for a minute.

We have somehow managed to take an extraordinarily small population of students and turn them into a national political obsession.

And here’s the part that really gets me:

If the thing you’re angry about was already incredibly rare before Trump, and remains incredibly rare afterward, what exactly did your vote accomplish?

This is where the political marketing genius comes in.

Take something most people will never personally encounter.

Give it a scary name.

Put it on television every night.

Have politicians repeat it until it becomes familiar.

Tell people their children are under attack.

Then offer yourself as the guy who will ride into Washington and stop it.

Congratulations.

You’ve just manufactured an emergency.

And I’m not saying people aren’t allowed to care about these issues. Of course they are. People can have legitimate disagreements about transgender participation in sports, medical treatment for adolescents, DEI programs, school policies, and the appropriate role of government.

Those are legitimate subjects for debate.

But debating an actual policy is different from voting based on an imaginary version of the policy.

That’s the part I wish we could talk about more.

Because the person I spoke with today isn’t stupid.

They weren’t trying to be malicious.

They were telling me what they had heard, what they believed, and why it mattered to them.

And that’s exactly why this bothers me.

Because somewhere along the way, political advertising stopped being about persuading people about what government should actually do and became increasingly effective at convincing people that government is doing things it isn’t doing.

The result is bizarre.

A person can be unhappy with the president they voted for while still believing the reasons they voted for him were valid.

But if the original premise was based on something that was exaggerated, distorted, or simply untrue, then maybe the uncomfortable question isn’t “Why hasn’t Trump fixed it?”

Maybe it’s:

“Who convinced me it was happening in the first place?”

That’s a much harder question.

Because once you discover that the monster under the bed isn’t actually there, you have to decide what to do with all the energy you spent being afraid of it.

And that’s the real problem with outrage politics.

It doesn’t require the problem to be solved.

It actually requires the problem to stay scary.

Because if tomorrow everybody suddenly agreed that transgender kids aren’t getting surgery in the school bathroom, that DEI isn’t secretly replacing every qualified white person with somebody’s diversity hire, and that the transgender student-athlete apocalypse hasn’t arrived, what happens to the outrage?

It disappears.

And apparently we can’t have that.

So we keep yelling.

We keep pointing.

We keep finding another terrifying thing hiding behind the next cultural corner.

And meanwhile, the boring stuff that actually affects people’s lives keeps sitting there waiting for somebody to pay attention.

Housing.

Health care.

Infrastructure.

Wages.

Education.

The deficit.

Climate.

The cost of groceries.

And about a thousand other things that don’t make quite as exciting a television segment as “THEY’RE COMING FOR YOUR CHILDREN.”

Maybe the most Gen X thing I can say is this:

Before you get pissed off about something, maybe check whether it actually exists.

Because we’ve spent an astonishing amount of political energy fighting imaginary fires while the real house is still standing there with the smoke alarm screaming.

And if somebody convinced you to vote for the firefighter because he promised to save you from a fire that wasn’t burning in the first place, you probably have every right to ask why you’re still smelling smoke.

But perhaps the first question should be:

Who lit the incense?

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Welcome to the National Security Excuse

There is a certain point at which the phrase “national security” stops sounding like a legitimate governmental concern and starts sounding like the administrative equivalent of a universal coupon code.

Apparently, just type NATIONAL SECURITY into the justification box and congratulations—you can build, demolish, restrict, rename, reshape, or apparently militarize whatever the hell you want.

Welcome to the Trump administration’s newest episode of Everything Is National Security.

First, we had to tear down the White House East Wing because, naturally, we desperately needed a ballroom. Not because Donald Trump wants a giant ballroom. No, no. That would be vanity, and we can’t possibly admit to that.

It is national security.

Then there is the 250-foot triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery.

Originally, it was supposed to be a monument celebrating America’s 250th anniversary. Now we’re being told it will also function as a military complex, potentially equipped with drones, snipers and ammunition.

Because apparently America’s national security apparatus was sitting around thinking, You know what we’re missing? A really big sniper tower next to Arlington Cemetery.

And then there is the press.

Apparently, journalists who aren’t sufficiently flattering to the president can become a national security threat too. Reuters recently reported that Trump has increasingly invoked national security to justify everything from the ballroom and proposed arch to restrictions involving the press. Legal experts interviewed by Reuters warned that stretching the national-security rationale across unrelated disputes could undermine the credibility normally given to legitimate national-security claims.

But wait.

We’re not done.

Because apparently elections are national security too.

Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that large numbers of noncitizens are registered to vote and that election systems are dangerously vulnerable. In July, he cited a DHS figure of approximately 278,000 noncitizens supposedly registered to vote. Fact-checkers and election experts, however, found serious problems with the methodology behind that number, and there has been little evidence of widespread noncitizen voting.

And now the federal government is aggressively reviewing state voter rolls. Reuters reported today that the White House is pushing federal agencies to accelerate reviews of at least 47 state voter rolls in an unprecedented effort to identify noncitizens among registered voters as the midterms approach.

And here’s where the logic gets really interesting.

If the president declares that noncitizen voting is a national-security threat, then apparently the next logical step is:

Well, obviously the president needs more control over the elections.

Because that’s how this works, right?

Ballrooms are national security.

Arches are national security.

Press access is national security.

Noncitizen voting is national security.

Therefore, logically, federal control over elections must also be national security.

What could possibly go wrong?

Except there’s a tiny constitutional problem hiding underneath all that national-security wallpaper.

Elections aren’t supposed to belong to the president.

States have traditionally administered elections, subject to federal constitutional and statutory requirements. The administration’s attempts to exert greater federal control over election administration have already generated legal challenges.

And that’s where this stops being merely another episode of Donald Builds Something Weird in Washington.

Because when the person who controls the executive branch starts saying that the elections themselves are a national-security problem, and then uses that claim to justify increasing federal involvement in how elections are administered, we should probably pay attention.

Not because every claim about election security is automatically illegitimate.

Election security is absolutely important.

Preventing fraud is important.

Protecting voter information is important.

Making sure eligible citizens can vote and that votes are counted accurately is important.

But there is a difference between protecting elections and using the protection of elections as a justification for expanding presidential control over elections.

That distinction matters.

Because if the president gets to define the threat, define the emergency, define the national-security implications and then decide that those circumstances require more presidential control, we’ve created a rather convenient little circle:

I say there’s a threat.
Therefore, I need more power.
The fact that I have more power proves the threat required it.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

And suddenly we’re no longer talking about national security.

We’re talking about presidential authority.

That’s the trick hidden inside the phrase.

“National security” carries enormous emotional and legal weight because everybody understands that protecting the country sometimes requires extraordinary measures.

Nobody wants to be the person who says, Well, maybe we shouldn’t protect America from terrorists.

But that’s not the question.

The question is whether everything the president wants to do can simply be placed under the national-security umbrella.

Because if everything is national security, then nothing is beyond presidential reach.

Want a ballroom?

National security.

Want a giant arch?

National security.

Don’t like the reporters?

National security.

Don’t trust the election system?

National security.

Want the federal government more deeply involved in state election administration?

Well…

You guessed it.

National security.

At this rate, I’m expecting the next executive order to announce that replacing the White House curtains requires a national-security review because an enemy intelligence service might determine Donald Trump’s preferred shade of beige.

And here’s the part that really should bother everybody, regardless of political party:

National security is supposed to protect the government established by the Constitution. It isn’t supposed to become the excuse for concentrating power in one person.

The president is supposed to be part of the government.

Not synonymous with the government.

The country is supposed to survive the president.

The Constitution is supposed to outlast the president.

Elections are supposed to determine who gets temporary custody of the machinery of government—not give the person who currently has custody the authority to rewrite the rules governing who gets custody next.

So yes, let’s secure the elections.

Let’s investigate actual fraud.

Let’s prosecute actual crimes.

Let’s protect voter databases.

Let’s make voting systems secure.

Let’s do all of that.

But let’s also secure something else:

the principle that the person being elected does not get to become the person who controls the election merely by declaring the election a national-security matter.

Because eventually, somebody has to ask the obvious question:

If everything Donald Trump touches requires national-security justification, perhaps the real national-security question isn’t whether Donald Trump has enough power.

Maybe it’s whether any president should ever have that much power in the first place.

And if we ever reach the point where protecting America means protecting the constitutional system from the person occupying the Oval Office, then perhaps we’ve finally found the one national-security threat that actually matters.

Not the ballroom.

Not the arch.

Not the reporters.

Not the voters.

The idea that the president gets to decide that all of them are.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

The Lightning You Can See but Not Hear

As children, we learn the equation pretty quickly: lightning equals thunder. One flashes; the other goes BOOM. But every once in a while, you’ll look up and see lightning dancing across the clouds—or even striking the ground—and hear absolutely nothing.

So where did the thunder go?

It didn’t disappear. Sound just has a much shorter range than light.

When lightning happens, the electrical discharge heats the surrounding air almost instantaneously to temperatures of roughly 30,000 kelvin. That sudden heating makes the air expand explosively, creating a pressure wave. We call that pressure wave thunder.

The important part is that the lightning and thunder travel very differently. Light reaches us essentially instantaneously, while sound moves through air at only about 1,125 feet per second. As a result, you can see a lightning flash from a storm that is much farther away than you can hear its thunder.

And sometimes the atmosphere helps hide the sound. Temperature layers, wind, terrain, buildings, and even the structure of the storm can bend or scatter sound waves. A distant lightning strike may produce thunder, but by the time those sound waves reach you, they’ve become too weak to hear.

There’s even a name for the phenomenon: heat lightning.

And here’s the slightly misleading part: heat lightning isn’t actually a special kind of lightning caused by heat. It’s ordinary lightning from a distant thunderstorm. The storm is simply far enough away that you can see the flashes while the thunder either hasn’t reached you or has become too faint to hear.

So the next time you see lightning without thunder, the storm isn’t being strangely quiet.

You’re just watching something happening much farther away than your ears can hear.

Turns out, even lightning has a social-distancing limit.
:::

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

The GOP’s New Campaign Strategy: Please, Please Don’t Vote for Us

With the 2026 midterms now roughly six weeks away, I have a question that keeps rattling around in my increasingly cynical Gen X brain:

Are Republicans actually trying to win this election?

Because from where I’m sitting, it sometimes looks less like a political campaign and more like a group project where everyone on one side has decided the best way to guarantee failure is to keep doing exactly the things their opponents would have done if they were trying to sabotage them.

Maybe there’s a plan here.

Maybe the plan is so sophisticated that my primitive Gen X brain simply can’t comprehend it.

Or—and hear me out—the strategy is:

Lose now. Blame the Democrats later.

Because apparently we’re doing the latest installment of How to Make Americans Hate Something They Already Need.

Enter JD Vance and Mehmet Oz, who announced that the Trump administration plans to remove approximately 760,000 people from Affordable Care Act exchange coverage, claiming those enrollments are fraudulent, unauthorized, ineligible or otherwise “phantom.” Another roughly 419,000 enrollments are reportedly being subjected to additional verification. The administration says the cancellations will save about $2.2 billion.

And yes, there is legitimate evidence of fraud and unauthorized enrollment in the ACA marketplace.

That’s important.

Because I’m not arguing that nobody ever commits fraud. Of course they do. People commit fraud against Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, insurance companies, banks, credit-card companies, grocery stores, and probably the self-checkout machine at Walmart.

But then we arrive at one of the arguments being used to identify suspicious ACA enrollments:

They haven’t filed any claims.

Excuse me?

Have we forgotten how insurance works?

Insurance is the thing you pay for hoping you don’t need it.

That’s kind of the entire point.

I have car insurance precisely because I hope I don’t get into a wreck.

I have homeowners insurance precisely because I hope my house doesn’t spontaneously decide to become a campfire.

And health insurance?

Well, I’d prefer not to need it because the alternative usually involves a doctor, a hospital, a diagnosis, a procedure, or a bill that makes you briefly consider becoming Amish.

Not filing a claim isn’t evidence that insurance isn’t working.

It’s evidence that you haven’t needed to use it.

And here’s the really important distinction: the administration isn’t simply saying, “You didn’t use your insurance, therefore you’re fraudulent.” Its HHS analysis says the unusually high concentration of zero-claim enrollment—particularly among people with $0 premiums—can be an indicator of people being enrolled without their knowledge or of other improper enrollment practices.

That’s a reasonable thing to investigate.

But investigating suspicious enrollment and treating lack of medical claims as inherently suspicious are two very different things.

Because imagine applying this logic to literally anything else.

“Sir, according to our records, you haven’t used your fire extinguisher.”

“Yes. Because my house isn’t on fire.”

“Sounds suspicious.”

Or:

“Your car insurance shows no collision claims.”

“Correct.”

“Fraud detected.”

Or my favorite:

“You’ve been paying for this gym membership for three years and we don’t have any evidence you’ve actually used the treadmill.”

Okay, you’ve got me there. That’s probably fraud.

But health insurance is fundamentally a risk pool. Millions of people pay premiums so that the relatively smaller number of people who actually need expensive medical care can afford it.

The healthiest possible insurance customer is, in fact, someone who pays their premiums and never needs the damn thing.

That’s not a bug.

That’s the business model.

And there’s another little detail here that seems to get lost in the political theater.

The ACA isn’t exclusively populated by some imaginary group of Democrats wandering around wearing Obama T-shirts and carrying copies of The Federalist Papers upside down.

Millions of Americans use it.

The administration’s own figures put current ACA exchange enrollment at roughly 19.2 million people.

Republicans use the term “Obamacare” as though it’s an ideological purity test.

But insurance cards don’t ask how you voted.

Your deductible doesn’t care whether you voted Republican.

Your cancer diagnosis doesn’t check your voter registration.

And your emergency-room bill certainly isn’t going to say:

“Oh, you’re a Republican? Never mind. Your coverage is free.”

Health insurance is one of those areas where ideology eventually runs headfirst into arithmetic.

People need it.

People use it.

People pay for it.

And when they don’t need it, they generally prefer to keep it anyway because they have this annoying habit of wanting to remain alive.

So here we are, six weeks before the midterms, watching the government announce that hundreds of thousands of people are losing ACA coverage while premiums have already risen sharply after enhanced subsidies expired. KFF Health News reported that average ACA premiums rose substantially in 2026 and that enrollment fell by nearly three million.

Again, the administration has a legitimate policy argument about fraud.

The question isn’t whether fraud should be investigated.

Of course it should.

The question is whether the cure for fraudulent enrollment should be designed so that legitimate people suddenly discover that the health insurance they thought they had is now sitting in the government’s recycling bin.

And then there’s the timing.

Six weeks before an election.

Which brings me back to my original question:

What exactly is the Republican strategy here?

Because if the strategy is to demonstrate that government can identify fraud and protect taxpayer dollars, okay.

That’s an argument.

If the strategy is to reduce federal spending on ACA subsidies, that’s an argument too.

But if you’re simultaneously making health insurance more expensive, removing hundreds of thousands of people from coverage, attacking the ACA as a program, and then heading into a midterm election where health care is one of the things voters are going to think about…

Well…

I’m starting to wonder whether “self-sacrifice” has officially become the GOP’s 2026 campaign mantra.

Maybe there’s a secret whiteboard somewhere in Washington.

At the top it says:

HOW DO WE WIN THE MIDTERMS?

And underneath:

• Make health insurance more expensive.
• Remove people from health insurance.
• Pick fights over things voters don’t care about.
• Keep doing things that generate negative headlines.
• Then blame Democrats for the consequences.

And someone in the back raises his hand.

“Should we maybe stop doing the things that are unpopular?”

Silence.

Someone slowly turns off the lights.

And the meeting adjourns.

Look, I’m a Gen Xer.

I’ve survived cassette tapes, rotary phones, leaded gasoline, Reagan-era nuclear anxiety, Windows 95, dial-up internet and the inexplicable cultural phenomenon of parachute pants.

I’ve learned one fundamental rule:

If something doesn’t make sense, there’s probably a reason.

Sometimes the reason is incompetence.

Sometimes it’s ideology.

Sometimes it’s money.

Sometimes it’s politics.

And sometimes it’s a strategy so convoluted that you have to wonder whether the people executing it have accidentally wandered into the wrong election.

But I suppose we’ll find out in November.

Until then, I’m going to sit here with my health insurance card, hoping desperately that I never have to use it.

Because apparently in 2026, being healthy enough not to file a claim may now require a congressional investigation.