Before you fire off the hate mail, keep in mind that I am certainly not attacking everyone of a certain age. Many older Americans are absolutely lovely people (and these days I’m not all that far from being one myself). I’m also not some self-serving whiny Millennial on a screed for free stuff that will benefit me personally. I’ve never owed a penny in student loan debt thanks to several merit-based academic scholarships, and I’ve thankfully never had to deal with a situation in which the currently standing American right to reproductive freedom was seriously at issue in my private life.
What I am concerned with though is that people in high places who will never again deal with these things themselves keep making decisions that the rest of us have to live with for years. It doesn’t help that these decisions, and most of these people, are not supported by the majority of Americans.
The big example that has sucked all the oxygen out of the room lately is the leaked draft Supreme Court opinion that makes it appear as though the justices are about to overturn Roe v. Wade (which, if you aren’t up on your major legal precedent, established abortion rights nationwide). The youngest justice on the Supreme Court is Amy Coney Barrett, who was born on January 28, 1972 — just in time for the Roe v. Wade opinion to come out less than a year later on January 22, 1973. I think it’s fair to assume that at age 50 and with seven(!) children that she already got to choose to have (or not have), Barrett is probably done having kids.
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Yet, after a lifetime of possessing reproductive rights herself, Barrett is reportedly one of the justices in the majority who is voting to overturn Roe v. Wade. She is joined by several of her male colleagues who are also unlikely to be involved in deciding whether an abortion is needed within their own families in the future. I suppose it doesn’t matter to them that 54% of Americans think Roe v. Wade should be upheld compared to only 28% who believe it should be overturned.
Still, you can’t ultimately be upset at a generation of jurists nominated with the explicit understanding that they’d overturn Roe if given half a chance. For that, you really have to look to octogenarian Mitch McConnell, approval rating 34%, who stole two Supreme Court seats, first by holding open the seat now occupied by Neil Gorsuch for almost a year during the Obama presidency so that Donald Trump could fill it and then by reneging on his supposed principle that a Supreme Court nominee shouldn’t be considered during an election year when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died days before the 2020 election.
McConnell has obviously aged out of having to worry about whether his partner might need an abortion (do yourself a favor and don’t think about how that has not always been the case for McConnell). Although I do find it difficult to imagine that Trump, the actual nominator of three of the justices who are reportedly set to overturn Roe v. Wade, has never personally paid for an abortion or asked a woman to abort an embryo that he was worried he might have fathered.
It’s not just the Republicans who seem attracted to making decisions that won’t actually affect them anymore. In an attempt to make this a bipartisan critique, consider the Joe Biden (age 79) stance on student loan debt forgiveness. Uncle Joe has a long record of criticizing people who can’t pay off their student loan debts, including by complaining that he took out loans to attend law school. Now there is a lot of fairly popular talk about the White House possibly forgiving some student loan debt for some people — though probably not more than $10,000 per borrower.
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But Biden graduated from law school in 1968. Back then, you could practically pay for your law school tuition with a bale of calico and a handful of copper wire (I can’t find reliable averages going that far back, but even in the mid-1980s, law school tuition was only about $2,000 a semester, compared to more like $25,000 per semester today). Crushing student loan debt is not something that Biden is likely to encounter again. He didn’t really even have to deal with it the first time around.
Wisdom comes from experience. But not automatically. When there is a large amount of distance between your own life and a particular type of problem — when it won’t affect you — it’s easier to shrug off. Maybe more people who will actually have to live with the results of these decisions should have a seat at the table in making them.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].