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Mitch McConnell is unfit to serve in the US Senate and should resign immediately — that is, presuming he’s lucid enough to wittingly make that decision.
For liberals and Democrats, the Kentucky senator’s career-long opposition to campaign spending limits, theft of two Supreme Court seats, and gutless refusal to convict Donald Trump after the January 6 attack on the Capitol already disqualified him on partisan and ideological grounds. But that’s a matter of policy and political dispute.
McConnell’s profound cognitive decline, however, is indisputable. His staffers and Senate majority leader John Thune’s office are violating the public’s trust by pretending McConnell can ably serve his constituents and the nation. (Consider Mitch’s barely conscious state in the below TMZ video shot just before his return to the Senate this week.)
That critique is nonpartisan: Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein was similarly incapacitated during the late stages of her too-long Senate career and should also have resigned.
McConnell would never be allowed to drive a car, babysit young children, or file his own taxes. Why, then, should a cognitively incapacitated 82-year-old retain one of the most important positions of power within the national government?
American gerontocracy
In the fall of 1988, during my senior year in college, I took a trip to Washington DC. While touring the Capitol, I needed a bathroom break and found myself standing at a urinal next to Strom Thurmond. I recognized South Carolina’s senior senator immediately: His ashen face and trembling voice were burnished into my brain the year before during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings on Judge Robert Bork’s appointment to the Supreme Court.
Thurmond was a Senate legend. An unapologetic racist and one of the only senators ever elected by write-in votes, Thurmond drafted and signed the disgraceful Southern Manifesto, filibustered the 1957 Civil Rights Act for more than 24 hours, and defended Jim Crow as the States’ Rights party’s 1948 presidential nominee — all while hiding the fact that in 1925 he fathered a mixed-race daughter with a black teenager who worked for the Thurmond family.
A youthful 86 at the time I encountered him in that Capitol men’s room, Thurmond eventually became the oldest senator ever to serve and remains the only member of Congress in either chamber to serve to the age of 100. When he retired, Thurmond set the standard, at 47 years, for the longest-serving senator in history. (Democrats Robert Byrd, Daniel Inouye, and Patrick Leahy later eclipsed him, as will Republican Chuck Grassley if he finishes his current term.)
I share my Thurmond encounter because a staffer had to guide the octogenarian senator back to the Capitol hallway. That’s right: At 86, Thurmond was already too senile to safely navigate his way out a public men’s room. His mental decline was also evident from the Bork hearings, during which Thurmond monotonically read questions from note cards, incapable of extemporaneous back-and-forth discourse with the nominee. Yet Thurmond was reelected twice more and served another 13-plus years after my chance encounter with him.
Presently, the median age of US senators is 64, two years beyond the early Social Security retirement age and seven years higher than the median age for House members. Because 64 is the median, half the senators are older than that. Two of McConnell’s Senate colleagues are older than he is: Bernie Sanders, who turned 85 last week, and Grassley, who turns 93 today.
Americans live much longer than they did a century ago. In 1900, Americans’ life expectancy at birth was 47 years. By 2013, it rose to 77 years, a remarkable, 30-year improvement largely attributable to public-private achievements in food safety, vaccination science, and related medical advances. It’s reasonable to expect today’s politicians to serve at later ages than politicians from earlier generations.
But the time has come for reforms to prevent rule by an increasingly enfeebled gerontocracy. Older Americans’ disproportionate power affects policy. It’s no coincidence that the trillions of dollars the US government spends on entitlements — all of Medicare, all but the disability portion of Social Security, the majority of Medicaid spending — skew heavily toward older Americans. Even if they’re spry and lucid, aging politicians represent the past more than the future.
While reporting a recent Public Notice piece about Susan Collins’s reelection bid, a Maine woman I interviewed caught me offguard when she called for age limits (not term limits) beyond which members of Congress can no longer be elected or re-elected. She believes Collins passed her political sell-by date after five terms in the Senate, not because 30 years of service are too many but because Collins will be 79 by the end of a sixth term if she’s reelected this November.
Because Article I stipulates age minimums for serving in Congress (25 for House, 30 for Senate) but sets no maximums, age restrictions would require amending the Constitution; federal judges would likely rule age limits unconstitutional. But the Feinstein and McConnell episodes suggest that a rule for Congress akin to the Twenty-Fifth Amendment’s presidential incapacitation standard merits consideration.
A no-show senator
What’s galling about McConnell’s case is that his family and staff kept shielded him from public view for three months.
A no-show employee who disappeared without taking official medical or disability leave would be sanctioned with loss of pay and potential termination. Members of Congress — public officials whose salaries, benefits, and office perks are paid with taxpayer dollars — should be held to the same, not lower, standard. In fact, experts on presidential impeachment argue that presidents could be impeached if they leave the country and neglect their duties, even though no-showing falls short of the Constitution’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” standard.
Obviously, there’s only one president at a time, whereas the Senate and House have 534 other members to conduct business if one or two members of Congress become temporarily indisposed. But there should be some means other than impeachment to remove members of Congress derelict for extended periods, whether by choice or incapacitation, who refuse to resign.
Consider the recent cases of Republican House members Kay Granger of Texas and Tom Kean of New Jersey. Granger, who in 2023 disappeared from public view and ceased to cast votes in Congress well into 2024, had been living in a memory care institution that specializes in dementia. More recently, Kean abandoned his duties for four months to battle depression.
These are not examples of members taking short leaves for an emergency surgery or a week-long mental health retreat, but extended absences. Granger then and McConnell now have almost zero chance of cognitive recovery. Citizens can express empathy for members of Congress battling cognitive decline yet also expect them to resign when a politician’s incapacitation causes an extended absence.
Like Granger and Feinstein, McConnell has reached that point. Recall that he twice froze like a zombie during a press availability. Unable to speak or react in any sentient way, nervous staffers had to whisk McConnell away from the cameras. Clearly, he was incapacitated before he was hospitalized three months ago.
Weekend at Mitch’s
To avoid surrendering McConnell’s seat, his staff and Thune’s Senate majority office are engaged in an ongoing, elaborate cover-up.
Among the more absurd efforts to conceal McConnell’s cognitive decline, fellow Sen. Tim Scott incredulously claimed he had a normal conversation with an engaged McConnell. Smarmy CNN analyst and former McConnell staffer Scott Jennings’s account of meeting with his supposedly lucid ex-boss is equally suspect. (As the social media generation likes to say, “video or it didn’t happen.”)
Mitch McConnell is obviously and irreversibly incapacitated. The politicians and staffers closest to him should have the decency to allow him to retire peacefully among family and friends.
Instead, they’re propping him up like the title character in “Weekend at Bernie’s,” a revolting disservice to the senator, his Kentucky constituents, Congress, and the American public.
That’s it for today
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I was genuinely surprised when they wheeled him back into the capitol. I thought for sure he was in a state of permanent rigor tortoise.
There's a video clip going around of McConnell starting to vote "nay" with the Democrats and his staff intervening to make sure he changed his vote to "aye" with the Republicans. This is not acceptable. If it was wrong for Dianne Feinstein to cling to her job so her staff would still have jobs and the division of power would remain unchanged, then it's wrong for Mitch McConnell.