Even more troubling about than the classification double-standard

Team Biden's line is that the president's legal team has fully cooperated with law enforcement and the National Archives, whereas Donald Trump obstinately refused to return the classified documents he had taken, even after being subpoenaed. The former president's loyalists, on the other hand, point out that the White House discovered on Nov. 2 that Biden had improperly taken classified documents when his term as vice president ended but suppressed the information for 68 days. Trump, to his discredit, stashed thousands of documents in the storage room at Mar-a-Lago and it took an FBI raid to recover them. Biden, to his discredit, insists he has "no regrets" about leaving classified material in multiple locations, including the garage of his Delaware home.

When he was asked on "60 Minutes" last September to comment on Trump's hoarding of top-secret documents, the president professed to be aghast that "anyone could be that irresponsible." Now others are saying much the same about Biden.

On Tuesday, meanwhile, former vice president Mike Pence notified Congress that "a small number" of documents bearing classified markings were found in his Indiana home.

Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed special counsels to investigate the Trump and Biden cases. But it's not too early to draw some obvious conclusions.

To begin with, it seems evident that both men broke the law. Under Section 1924 of Title 18 of the US Code, it is a crime for any federal officer or employee to "knowingly remove" documents containing "classified information of the United States" and to "retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location." There are differences between the two cases, but the language of the statute is clear. Trump and Biden plainly did what it forbids.

Second, neither the president nor the former president has to worry about facing a serious criminal penalty. Big shots in these cases never do.

"Carelessness with government secrets has become endemic in official Washington," observed The Washington Post this week. In recent years, highly classified government material has been mishandled by numerous senior officials, including former attorney general Alberto Gonzales, former CIA directors John Deutch and David Petraeus, former national security adviser Sandy Berger, and at least two former secretaries of state, Colin Powell and Hillary Clinton. None of them was punished with anything more severe than a temporary loss of security clearance or a fine. Petraeus, who supplied classified material to a former mistress who was writing his biography, paid the heaviest price: He resigned from the CIA and was charged a $100,000 penalty.

Getting caught with classified government documents earns prison time only when the offender is a low-level federal employee or contractor. Just ask Asia Lavarello, Ahmedelhadi Serageldin, Harold Martin III, Reynaldo Regis, Benjamin Bishop, or Reality Winner. Their names are little known. But all of them ended up behind bars for doing what numerous high officials have gotten away with.

Perhaps the most important point is this: Even without any wrongful intent, it is inevitable that government documents classified as secret will be mishandled or misappropriated for the simple reason that there are way too many of them.

The amount of federal paperwork classified as confidential each year is staggering. At a congressional hearing in 2004, then-Representative Chris Shays noted that in the previous year, at least 14 million documents had been placed off-limits by the nearly 4,000 government officials authorized to do so.

"No one can say with any degree of certainty how much is classified, how much needs to be declassified, or whether the nation's real secrets can be adequately protected in a system so bloated," Shays said. "This much we know: There are too many secrets."

With the coming of the digital era, the already vast sea of classified documents swelled into what the director of the Information Security Oversight Office, a division of the National Archives, calls a "tsunami." The 14 million documents a year being designated as secret in 2004 has metastasized into more than 50 million a year today, according to Oona Hathaway, a Yale Law School professor and former special counsel to the Pentagon. A maxim attributed to Frederick the Great holds that "he who protects everything, protects nothing." The Prussian king was referring to battlefield strategy, but the principle applies equally to government paperwork. The annual classification of tens of millions of documents, most of which do not deal with ultrasensitive national security secrets, serves mostly to shelter the political class from scrutiny and to keep from the public information it has a right to see.

So far there's no indication that any actual harm was caused by the cavalier manner in which Trump and Biden made off with classified material. Politics aside, it may all amount to a big nothing. The same can't be said of Washington's bloated classification process. The breathless obsession with who mishandled classified government documents — and how, where, and when — makes headlines. What really deserves attention is why the documents were classified in the first place.

So it's safe to say that the latest proposal isn't going anywhere. Still, it's important to understand why further lowering the voting age is a bad idea.

Those who back voting rights for 16- and 17-year-olds argue that since kids that age can work, pay taxes, and get a driver's license, it isn't right to exclude them from the voting booth. Here's how Moulton put it in 2020:

"Americans put a lot of faith in 16-year-olds. We let them drive, hire them at our businesses, and make them pay taxes." Moreover, he wrote, "we know that voting at an early age helps encourage civic habits for life."

Pressley goes even further. In a 2021 statement, she contended that a 16- or 17-year-old was qualified to vote by virtue of the "wisdom and maturity" that comes from living in a time of unique "challenges," "hardships," and "threats." Young people, said Pressley, are entitled "to have a say in our federal elections and the policies that impact their lives today and will shape the nation in their lifetime."

Such flimsy contentions don't stand up to scrutiny.

Americans don't put a lot of faith in 16-year-olds. To be sure, some kids at that age have jobs — some even contribute to their family's expenses. But the great majority of teens don't work, and vanishingly few hold down full-time jobs. Rare is the 16- or 17-year-old who foots the bill for groceries, rent, or utilities.

Yes, kids that age can legally drive, and yes, teenagers pay some taxes. But no one younger than 18 (and in some cases, 21) may legally drink alcohol or buy tobacco or marijuana. They may not purchase firearms or ammunition. They may not get married or adopt a child. They may not enlist in the military, buy a lottery ticket, book a hotel room or an Airbnb stay, apply for a mortgage, rent an apartment, file a lawsuit, obtain a credit card, work in a bar, or make a will.

In almost every area of life, society has established 18 as the age of majority because, broadly speaking, that is the age of maturity. Or at least the age of the minimum level of maturity to be entrusted with important decisions. It is well established that adult and teen brains operate differently. The prefrontal cortex — the brain region that governs decision making, long-term thinking, and rational judgment — isn't fully developed until the mid-20s. Behavior and reactions in teens are instead controlled by the amygdala, the more emotion-driven, impulsive, primitive section of the brain.

If Moulton, Pressley, and their colleagues want to make a serious claim that 16-year-olds are mature enough to cast a ballot, they need to show why the scientific consensus on teen immaturity is wrong. And to be consistent, they should also be lobbying to lower the minimum legal age of every other activity to 16.

As for the idea that "voting at an early age helps encourage civic habits for life," that too is unsupported by evidence.

The same claim was made when the 26th Amendment was being adopted. Lowering the voting age to 18, Senator Ted Kennedy declared, will "bring American youth into the mainstream of our political process" and "we will gain a group of enthusiastic, sensitive, idealistic, and vigorous new voters."

That didn't happen. Newly enfranchised 18-to-20-year-olds promptly became the least engaged cohort of voters. In every election, the youngest voters invariably participate at a lower rate than any others. There was considerable hoopla about how "high" turnout was for younger voters in last November's midterm elections, but the data actually confirmed the longstanding pattern: Only 27 percent of voters younger than 30 bothered to cast a ballot.

(On the other hand, those were the voters most likely to vote for Democratic candidates. A cynic could be forgiven for wondering whether that's why Democrats like Pressley and her cosponsors are so eager to lower the voting age still more.)

Weak turnout rates among younger voters shouldn't be surprising. Interest in government and politics tends to rise as the concerns of adulthood rise. Americans who have full-time jobs, who have to pay a mortgage, who are raising a family, who file yearly tax returns, who wrestle with health care premiums are more likely to take an interest in how they are governed than those who don't. For perfectly understandable reasons, teens are apt to worry more about school, social media, and relationships with other teens than with candidates, legislation, and public policy.

If we don't trust 16-year-olds to serve on a jury or sign a contract, we certainly shouldn't expect them to cast thoughtful votes for presidents, governors, and members of Congress.

In the eyes of society, adulthood begins at 18. Voting should begin then too.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission."