Jeffrey Blehar of National Review Online asks politicians in Washington, D.C., to consider ending their careers while they’re still coherent.
Retiring Republican congresswoman Kay Granger, 81, of Texas’s 12th district (the Fort Worth area) apparently retired in spirit long ago: Unseen in public for nearly half a year (and missing multiple votes during that span) she was located yesterday in an assisted living facility for patients with dementia and “memory care” issues. It is a terribly sad situation.
The problem, of course, is that Representative Granger is no ordinary citizen, nor even an ordinary House backbencher: She was, until this April of this year, the chairwoman of the all-powerful House Appropriations Committee. (The position is now held by Tom Cole; her safely Republican seat was claimed by newcomer Craig Goldman last November.) It’s not quite as important as being, say, president of the United States – any journalist who shakes their head about this after four years of cowed or collaborationist silence about Joe Biden should keep sticking with nonverbal expression, because I don’t want to hear it from them. But given that we can safely assume that Granger’s memory problems did not begin in 2024, it makes one long yet again for a class of politicians who are capable of hanging up their spurs without letting their geriatric mental collapse while in office show.
I tire of our Washington gerontocracy. And yet I then turn to look at the “kids,” the new political generation like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Matt Gaetz, and Marjorie Taylor-Greene, and for a brief moment I can almost sympathize with our aged nomenklatura being reluctant to make way quite so soon. But nobody needs to see David Scott in a wheelchair shrieking at people for taking his photograph, or hear stories about Kay Granger asking people in her apartment if they can tell her where she lives. Mitch McConnell, bless his turtleshelled heart, knew when it was time to hang up his leadership spurs. Others would do well to follow his example.
