Congressman Peter Welch, age 74, the Democratic at-large representative for Vermont in the US House, has indicated he’ll run to replace the 81-year-old retiring Senator Patrick Leahy in 2022, Axios reported Monday. While we often suck at simple arithmetic, if Welch is 74 in November of 2021 he will be 75 in November of 2022, and thus 81 by the time he would run for a second six-year term in the Senate in 2028, should he win the election in 2022, the same age Patrick Leahy is now.

The word “gerontocracy” gets tossed around an awful lot these days but it’s probably better to look at it in sheer numbers: The average age of the US Senate is 64.3 years, just shy of the retirement age for most professions – and that’s probably weighted down by at least 3 or 4 years owing to the fact that the youngest US Senator, Jon Ossoff, who at 34 is 7 years younger than the second-youngest US Senator, Josh Hawley, age 41. The House is a bit younger, but not much, at 58.7 years. The two oldest US Presidents at the time of their inauguration were the last two presidents, Joe Biden at 78 in January 2021 and Donald Trump at 70 in January 2017 (Number 3 is Reagan. Number 4 is William Henry Harrison, who got sick at his inauguration and died a month later in 1841).

We could use some younger leadership. We could also use more Senators who had cameos in Batman movies, because we’ll be at zero once Patrick Leahy rides off into the sunset. Leahy appeared in Batman Forever in 1995, Batman & Robin in 1998, The Dark Knight in 2008, The Dark Knight Rises in 2012, and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in 2016, the last of which as a Senator who was blown up in a terrorist attack on the Capitol by Lex Luthor. If we spoiled that for you don’t worry, you probably weren’t going to see that one anyway. Wasn’t that good.