On the menu today: Our geriatric governing class strikes again, and the marriage of one of Vogue magazine’s favorite celebrity couples is on the rocks. This is the last Morning Jolt until December 26. Have yourself a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and anything else you celebrate.
What Happened to Kay Granger?
The marginally good news is that 81-year-old Texas GOP representative Kay Granger announced back in November 2023 that she would not run for reelection. The benefits of incumbency are powerful but not quite so powerful that a representative could effectively disappear from public life in late July and still win reelection in an R+12 district. But the last time Granger voted in the U.S. House of Representatives was July 24.
On Friday, the Dallas Express — allegedly a site for “conservative propaganda,” but this seems like a heck of a scoop that makes a GOP lawmaker look bad — noticed Granger’s absence from Congress and that no one was answering phones in her district or Washington offices.
Carlos Turcios of the Dallas Express reported:
When we asked employees at the WestBend building where Ms. Granger’s district office is located what happened to Ms. Granger’s office we were told that her team had packed up and closed the office before Thanksgiving. Her office appears to be closed for good (she is retiring at the end of the session) with phone calls going unanswered and voice mails not returned. . . .
Taylor Manziel who is the assistant executive director for the senior living facility acknowledged to The Dallas Express that “This is her home.”
Around 1 p.m. on Sunday, a statement attributed to Granger was released by her office:
As many of my family, friends, and colleagues have known, I have been navigating some unforeseen health challenges over the past year. However, since early September, my health challenges have progressed making frequent travel to Washington both difficult and unpredictable. During this time, my incredible staff has remained steadfast, continuing to deliver exceptional constituent services, as they have for the past 27 years. In November, I was able to return to DC to hold meetings on behalf of my constituents, express my gratitude to my staff, and oversee the closure of my Washington office. It has been the honor of a lifetime to serve the city of Fort Worth — as a city council member, as mayor, and as a member of Congress. Thank you for your continued prayers and support that you have extended to me.”
On Sunday, the Dallas Morning News reached the representative’s son, Brandon Granger, who said she was “having some dementia issues late in the year”:
Brandon said his mother is living at Tradition Senior Living in Fort Worth, but she is not in a memory care facility, as some media reports have stated. He said that while the facility has a memory care community on the same property, Rep. Granger resides in the independent living facility.
“There’s nothing wrong with someone wanting to live in a community with other folks their age,” he said. “She’s in a building with a lot of other folks her age that are super active that she really loves. She has exercise classes, she gets to be around people all the time, it’s wonderful for her for this point in life.”
We’re all deeply sympathetic to someone who develops “unforeseen health challenges.” We’re all human, and sooner or later in life, our bodies and minds let us down.
But voting is part of the job. From April to June of this year, Granger missed 46.3 percent of the floor votes in the House. From July to September, she missed 76.7 percent of the votes, and, as noted above, she has missed every vote since September. The “votes and legislation” page on her congressional website is “undergoing routine maintenance.” (I’ll bet.)
If you are in a condition where you need to reside in an assisted-living facility, you should not be representing your constituents in Congress. This is not holding anyone to an impossibly high standard.
Our elected officials like to call themselves “public servants.” If you want that title, you must serve the public, and that includes putting the public’s interest before your own. I am sure it is difficult to resign from Congress and metaphorically ride off into the sunset. But the people of Texas’s twelfth congressional district, encompassing the western half of Tarrant County and most of Parker County, west of Fort Worth, deserved a representative who could perform all the duties.
Had Granger resigned anytime between July and October, Texas could have held a special election for the remainder of her term, concurrently with the election for the new congressional term that starts in January. This is what happened when Representative Sheila Jackson Lee passed away on July 19; the voters of Texas’s 18th congressional district selected Erica Lee Carter, Sheila Jackson Lee’s daughter, to fill in the remainder of her term while Sylvester Turner, the mayor of Houston, won the election for the next Congress. Carter was sworn into office on November 12, and her term will end on January 3.
Chad Pergram of Fox News reported that he was told that “there’s a reason Granger did not step down earlier: ‘Frankly, we needed the numbers,’ said one senior Republican source, referring to the paper-thin GOP House majority.”
Elderly members of Congress are nothing new; former South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond served until he was 100, and exalted cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan and West Virginia senator Robert Byrd served until he was 92.
Iowa senator Chuck Grassley is 91, but you probably don’t want to challenge him to a push-up contest.
I wonder if we’re seeing something of a “preference cascade” — each elderly lawmaker who resists an obvious need for retirement makes it easier for the next elderly lawmaker to stay in place.
Back on August 4, 2023, I argued that California senator Dianne Feinstein’s having the power of a senator but not her own power of attorney demonstrated that we live in a clown world. (Feinstein had given power of attorney to her daughter, who was herself old enough to collect Social Security.) A lot of people argued that I was making a mountain out of a molehill, and that transferring power of attorney simply made it possible for her daughter to act on her behalf if she, herself, is not able to take needed action. By September 23, the argument was moot because Feinstein died.
This newsletter has observed that President Joe Biden is somewhat old every now and then.
Our Jeff Blehar argues:
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 turtle-shelled heart, knew when it was time to hang up his leadership spurs. Others would do well to follow his example.
Although our John Fund suggests that not everyone thinks McConnell timed his retirement right:
Mitch McConnell finally stepped down from Senate leadership this month, at age 81, after he had frozen in multiple public appearances that prompted concerns of cognitive decline. “We haven’t really had a GOP leader for the last year,” a top Senate Republican told me this month.
ADDENDUM: The weekend brought some sad news out of Russia. Vogue magazine’s infamous “Rose in the Desert,” Asma al-Assad, reportedly wants to divorce her husband, currently unemployed former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
Nothing like a Moscow winter to bring out a woman’s cold shoulder. It’s a familiar story: A guy loses his job, and his wife just doesn’t see the same chemical-weapons-using brute she married. Maybe she thinks he has just lost that killer instinct.
This morning, however, the Kremlin says reports of an impending divorce aren’t true. I guess if you’re exiled to Moscow and Vladimir Putin says you’re going to stay married, you’re going to stay married.