37-year-old Elise Stefanik faces GOP challenger seeking mandatory retirement age for politicians: report

The rightward lurch of the Republican Party is on full display in one upstate New York congressional district.

Rep. Elise Stefanik won New York's 21st congressional district in the 2014 midterms, which had been held by retiring Democrat Bill Owens. At the time, the moderate was the youngest woman ever elected to the House of Representatives.

Now in her fourth term, Stefanik was rewarded with a leadership position in the Republican caucus after her race to the far-right during the Trump era.

Yet she's still being primaried in the 2022 midterms.

"Lonny Koons, a Carthage resident, Army veteran and current truck driver for R.B. Humphreys in Rome, said he wants to represent normal, average Americans in Congress," NNY360 reported Friday. "Mr. Koons said he's running for Congress because he believes career politicians have lost touch with the people they're meant to represent, and he said there's a simple solution to that problem."

Stefanik, turned 37 on Friday.

"We need term limits," he said. "Maybe we need to look at something similar to a retirement age, but there just needs to be a cut off for politicians."

While Stefanik has introduced a bill called the "Second Amendment Guarantee Act," Koons may be even further to the right of her on gun control.

"In all technicality, if you wanted to own a nuke, you should be able to own a nuke," he said. "That's obviously extreme craziness, but at the same time, if the whole point of the Second Amendment is to stand up to the government, if the government has nukes how can you stand up to that with a musket?"

Read the full report.