Yes, but when a 20 year old gets sick, the general expectation is that they will recover. When an 89 year old gets sick that outcome is much less likely.
She’s not currently doing the job. The odds aren’t great that she’ll get back in the saddle. And there have been indications for a while now that she’s not up to it mentally, even ignoring the current bout of shingles. Not every 89 year old is too old to be an effective senator, but Diane Feinstein is too old to be an effective senator.
I wonder if there is anyone in her life who counsels her to resign?
I would guess most of her staff and family would want her to continue. Not to make her constituents better or her state or the country better. Just pure self interest. They’ll ride that train as far as it will take them.
I’d think a rational husband (I think he is dead now) or child or staff would be telling her she needs to step down.
Chosen as successors to the seat or to the comittee?
If the former, then I reverse my position and think she should resign post-haste. If the latter, then I think that it’s better to hope she recovers than hoping Republicans respect precedent.
She was 85 and in pretty good health for an 85 year old when she was re-elected. I know there were concerns about her age, but none about her immediate health at the time. As someone not from California, I didn’t really follow it that much, as my opinion matters little.
That said, they are all too old. Not just from a health standpoint, they are not representative of the population, and they are not responsive to the needs of those who are making plans to keep living past the end of the next decade.
But, rather than age limits, I’d really rather see term limits. It’s too easy for an incumbent to just stay in office by inertia alone, as she has, until we start having to take their age into account.
The crux of it seems to be that Republicans are claiming that allowing a Senator to “temporarily” relinquish his/her seat on a committee is unprecedented. A Senator leaving office, and then having their seat filled by either their direct replacement or another Senator of their party is well precedented and contemplated in the resolution.
If that’s the case, she should go, but make sure we get the "i"s and "t"s crossed and dotted and make sure we don’t close the door on the committee seat.
Just saying, just because this is how it is supposed to work doesn’t mean it will.
Republicans had no reason to object to Kyl’s seating, and Democrats wouldn’t have thought of it. But if some objection is brought up, based on the ambiguity of the resolutions, and it needs to be settled by vote, then we get back to where we started.
The Senate is a body that runs almost entirely on precedents. The formal rules of the chamber are shockingly short. But it has an encyclopedic set of precedents that have enormous impact on how the Senate conducts its operations. Republicans could object to Feinstein’s replacement being appointed to the Judiciary Committee, but the President Pro Tem (with the support of the Parliamentarian) would rule that it’s in line with established precedents and the Republicans would need 51 votes to overturn that ruling.
I always thought the party leader in each house got to choose who was on what committee. I never thought it was some kind of permanent position that was undoable.
TIL
And the folks concerned about her age were right - it wasn’t the immediate health that’s the concern.
It’s true that most of them too old, and there should be an upper age limit. But most of the ones who are too old are showing up to work, so they’re not part of the immediate issue that needs to be discussed.
That doesn’t make any sense. Under an aggressive term limit (say 2 terms), someone could get elected at age 82 and still be facing the same issues at 89 as Feinstein is, while a spring chicken like Jon Ossoff might be termed out at a young age 53. If the problem you want to solve is that politicians grow too infirm and out-of-touch with age, term limits are the wrong solution. The best most direct, and most obvious way to solve problems of excessive age is to set an age limit.
We don’t have manage age issues indirectly, or be coy or sensitive about it, or trot out statistics and calipers to justify an arbitrary cutoff. If 30’s too young (which is the current lower limit for Senators), then 80 can be too old, just because we said so. The only reason this hasn’t happened is that people pushing 80 have a hell of a lot more political power than people under 30. Well, that, plus the baked-in bias that Senators ought to be old - after all the word “Senator” is taken from Senex, old man. It’s time to change that.
We can’t impose age or term limits without a constitutional amendment. But we can pressure one elderly infirm senator to resign.
Well yes, from previous comments made by both of us in the thread, we’re clearly talking about both ideal and immediate solutions as separate categories. Nobody’s suggesting passing an age or term limit to take care of the Feinstein issue right now. These are idealist solutions of how things could be, or ought to be.
Well, i just can’t see any way in which we could possibly pass a constitutional amendment to limit the age of elected representatives, nor their time in office. Maybe a state could for state offices. Federal offices… there’s just no chance.
Again, ideal is a different category from currently feasible (though as we all know, there’s rarely a perfect overlap between these). Different topics, different conversations, one need not derail the other.
Do other countries have the same aging-politician issue the US tends to have? If not, what do they do differently?
Until someone else starts slipping. Why not set up a process now before it becomes a bigger issue?
There’s a scattering of different upper-bound age limits that will turn up easily on a Google search. I’m not going to do the legwork because, (a) that’s your question, not mine, and (b) again, discussions of how things should be is necessarily different from conversations of how things currently are.
It seems at this point that we’re not going to reach a shared understanding of the meaning of ideals vs. reality, so I’m not going to try explaining it anymore.
Long term, ideally, I absolutely agree, and all options should be on the table. Elected officials should have maximum age limits.
But procedurally and politically, that’s too heavy a lift to serve as a short-term solution. In the short term, Feinstein should either recover immediately and return to work, or resign her position so someone else can do it.
A Senator cannot even resign from a committee without the consent of the Senate.
…regarding the age thing, as I pointed out in the pit thread:
The median age in the Senate is 65.3.
There have only ever been eleven Black senators. Only five American Indian senators.
Only 25 out of 100 serving senators are women.
This isn’t something that gets fixed by “limiting the age of elected representatives.” This is a party problem. It always has been. If the selection process continues to ensure that old white men get picked to run for senate, then thats what you are going to get.
Or, you could just not give them extremely important roles and influence that they “earned” by not dying yet. Tell the people of California (and every other state) that re-electing a half fossilized crypt keeper isn’t going to give your state extra influence because we simply are not going to give that person a key role by virtue of their long service.