The records Mikulski can and can't break in 2010

U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski will turn 72 years old on July 20. If -- more like when, as her aides will point out -- she seeks re-election in 2010, she will be 80 years old at the end of that term.

William Pinkney WhiteOf those Senators who left voluntarily over the last fifty years, the ages average at about 68. On the older side, Paul Sarbanes was nearly 74 when he retired in 2007. Charles Mathias was 64 and John Marshall Butler was 65.

The oldest sitting U.S. Senator from Maryland is William Pinkney Whyte, age 81 when he was appointed to the Senate to fill the vacant seat of Arthur Gorman, who died in office at the age of 67 in 1906.

Whyte had been out of the U.S. Senate for more than two and a half decades, having served as Mayor of Baltimore and Attorney General in the interlude. He was first sent to the Senate in 1868, left to serve a term as governor and then returned to the body in 1875.

He remained in the Senate until his death at about 83 and a half years old in 1908. Whyte had been born a mere month after Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died during the presidency of John Quincy Adams, and nearly lived to serve under President William Howard Taft.

John Walter SmithYet since Whyte's service occurred before the Seventeenth Amendment, he is not the oldest elected Senator in Maryland history. That title goes to his direct successor: John Walter Smith, serving until January of 1921, when he was almost 76.

Naturally, Smith also holds the title of oldest person from Maryland to be elected to the U.S. Senate. When the first cycle of direct elections to the Senate took place in 1914, Smith was nearly 70 years old -- 69 years and 9 months to be exact. When Mikulski was re-elected in 2004, she was 68 years and 3 months old.

She will break both of Smith's records if she is re-elected in 2010, but not Whyte's.

That's a job for 2016.