Nikki Haley’s Call for Mental-Competency Tests Is a Stunt

I like Nikki Haley. I don’t give her presidential bid much of a chance, but I think she’d be a fine president — far better than the one we have now and better than most we’ve had for the last three decades. She’s got a better shot at the bottom than the top of the ticket, and even if she falls short of the vice-presidential nomination, she should be well-positioned to be a significant player in the next Republican administration, ideally starting in January 2025.

Unless she goes clown-show, that is, in which case she’ll make herself irrelevant in a hurry.

So I’m sorry to see Haley start out with a clown-show proposal, one that undercuts what should be the strength of her brand: that she’s a serious person, optimistic about the nation’s prospects while well well-informed and realistic about its challenges. If that’s where you’re coming from, you don’t want to start out by proposing something that would be patently in violation of the Constitution you want people to believe you will preserve, protect, and defend.

As John McCormack notes, Haley has proposed a mental-competency test for politicians over the age of 75 who want to serve in high office. It’s try-too-hard politics for someone whose very age (51) and appearance testify loudly to her advantages over some of her main competition, including the incumbent president (80 and feeble) and the former president (76 and becoming a crazy-uncle caricature). Haley doesn’t need a law to contrast herself with these older rivals. And she should want to prove herself by beating them fair and square, rather than rigging the game to disqualify them.

The mental-competency proposal also highlights Haley’s weaknesses, in particular, the perception that she is an opportunist who contorts herself as necessary to take the next step — e.g., Trump is the worst, and I’m going to work for him, and I won’t run against him, and I’m running against him. After serving in Trump’s administration, Haley supported his 2020 reelection campaign, which would have zoomed him past her newly proposed 75-year-old threshold if he’d won. When she initially vowed not to oppose him if he ran in 2024, it was with the knowledge that he’d be 78 if elected. Clearly, an age-based mental-competency test can’t be something she’s very serious about.

More to the point, the proposal is unconstitutional.

The qualifications for the presidency are fixed by Article II, and they are few: A candidate must be 35 or older and a natural-born U.S. citizen, and must have been a resident of the U.S. for the preceding 14 years. Haley is not a lawyer, but we’re not talking about abstruse legal principles here. Having served in important government positions, she presumably knows that the Constitution cannot be altered by a statute — and if she doesn’t, she’s got no business running for president. We’ve already had our fill of presidents who don’t regard the Constitution as binding. Haley’s mental-competency test would have to be adopted by a constitutional amendment, and there is no chance that will happen any time soon — certainly not in the next two years.

Which means that this is a stunt — and a poorly conceived one to boot.

Haley’s announcement of her candidacy was well-orchestrated, but the public case for her is not obvious. She was gifted with Don Lemon’s idiocy and the fact that the Bolshevik Left couldn’t help itself but pile on with equally idiotic snark about the happenstance that she goes by her middle name rather than her given first name, Nimrata. This generated unexpected, sympathetic attention from normal people — i.e., the voters she needs to win.

Too bad she’s wasting that opportunity on a stunt.

Like most of us, I’d prefer we didn’t elect to the world’s toughest job people who may not be physically and mentally up to it. When you’re entering your mid sixties, as I am, it’s easier to appreciate the advantages of youth. I’m predisposed against electing people who are approaching or beyond 70 — not dead set against it, but very much predisposed. Life expectancy for men in the U.S. is a shade over 76. Even if we accept that people in good health can live well for a decade or more beyond that, it doesn’t mean they are apt to remain in prime shape, much less that they will remain up to the unparalleled stresses of a job that has visibly aged much younger men.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean there should be a legally mandated maximum age. Yes, we have a minimum age, but I wouldn’t read too much into that. The age of 35 seems very young now, but in 1787, it was just about the average life expectancy for men. The Framers who settled on that limit ranged in age from 26 (Jonathan Dayton) to 81 (Benjamin Franklin), which itself attests to the fact that aging affects different people in different ways, such that limits can be arbitrary.

The Framers decided that the democratic process, rather than a maximum age, was the best way to assess advanced age as a presidential liability. Compared to then-contemporary life expectancy, our first three presidents, George Washington (57), John Adams (62), and Thomas Jefferson (58), were old, but no one would suggest they were bordering on non compos mentis. Now we’re talking about the prospect of electing octogenarians when octogenarians are a lot more common than they used to be — and often quite vital.

Still, as a rule, electing octogenarians (or those soon-to-be) is imprudent. The presidency is very different now than it once was: The federal government is enormous, the world is smaller, it can be destroyed by weaponry at the disposal of evil, unstable actors, and the information-age allows for no real respites. Such relentless burdens inevitably strain human physical capacity and mental acuity, which haven’t advanced proportionately with life-expectancy and probably never will. Today, we routinely press against the finiteness of this mortal coil in a way that was unusual in the 18th century, when people tended to die at young ages of diseases and conditions we have since eradicated or can now cure, or at least treat.

So, yes, I’d be open to a constitutional amendment that sets a maximum age on the presidency. But it would have to be a serious proposal, not a political stunt.