The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com
Patricia Murphy is a columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
A shocking story about a Texas congresswoman came out last week. A local reporter got a tip that, after quietly missing months of votes on Capitol Hill, Republican U.S. Rep. Kay Granger had moved into Traditions Senior Living, an assisted-living facility in Dallas.
When the reporter went to the facility to ask how Granger planned to vote on the year-end spending bill in Congress, the receptionist there was clearly confused, responding, “You know you’re in an Alzheimer’s assisted-living facility, right?”
Granger’s son later confirmed to The Dallas Morning News that she had been struggling with “dementia issues.”
The congresswoman, 81, was planning to retire from Congress at the end of this year, but for all intents and purposes, she was already out of office. The problem is that nobody bothered to tell her constituents.
I said the story was shocking, but it’s not really surprising when you look at where she’s been working — on Capitol Hill, the only workplace in America where seniority is rewarded more than showing up and staff are in place to assist, shield and, occasionally, deny the obvious.
The same week Granger was found, Georgia U.S. Rep. David Scott, 79, had a run-in with a photographer from Politico who was snapping his photo in front of the Capitol as he was being helped from a car into a wheelchair to go inside.
“Who gave you the right to take my picture?” the Atlanta Democrat yelled at the photographer before adding an expletive, a Punchbowl News reporter posted on X.
As concerns about his health were already swirling, Scott missed two weeks of congressional votes just before that. His office made no mention of the missed votes until The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Tia Mitchell called and learned the congressman had been receiving treatment for an ailing back.
It’s important to say here that there’s nothing disqualifying about simply being old or infirm. With age comes tremendous knowledge and wisdom, two disappearing assets in Washington. And as for the wheelchair, I worked for five years for U.S. Sen. Max Cleland, a triple amputee who wheeled through the Capitol complex faster than most of his staff could walk to keep up with him.
Voters not only looked past Cleland’s disabilities, many even connected with them. The problem for elected officials comes with trying to hide those health struggles, especially when they’re affecting an official’s ability to do their job.
President Joe Biden’s fade from the national stage is only made worse by the overriding sense that, like Granger, he and his team never leveled with the American people about how quickly he declined after he was elected in 2020. Not until his debate against Donald Trump in Atlanta did it become clear that Biden was not all right — and that dozens, maybe hundreds, of family, staff and fellow Democrats must have known that all along.
I think a lot about how Biden could have possibly decided that yes, he would run again in 2024 and that his entire staff would have gone along with the choice. But then I remember that Biden and his closest advisers came out of a Senate where U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond, a Republican from South Carolina, retired at the age of 99, a full 20 years older than Biden when he was mulling his reelection bid.
Watching Thurmond be gingerly guided through the Senate corridors by his staff on the way to a vote was like watching a team of museum curators move a Faberge egg. One former Senate aide told The New Yorker that for the last 10 years of his life, “Strom Thurmond didn’t know if he was on foot or on horseback.”
As for how he would vote, Thurmond’s chief of staff at the time was so well liked and knowledgeable, there seemed to be a gentleman’s agreement among his colleagues, which would have included Biden, to leave the decisions to the chief and look away the rest of the time.
But in the age of social media and camera phones, the days of looking the other way are over. And there is a much better way to age or deal with illness and disability in office.
Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman had a serious stroke on his way to a campaign event before he was elected to the U.S. Senate. Fetterman was hospitalized at the time and again after he was elected, the second time for depression that often follows a stroke. The difference between Fetterman and Biden or Granger is that we know all about it. Still struggling with cognitive processing issues, the senator tells reporters ahead of interviews that he’ll be using an iPad’s voice-to-text function so that he can fully understand their questions.
That’s the kind of transparency voters expect now related to a leader’s health and abilities. And no matter what kind of social-media environment we’re in, it’s the kind of transparency voters deserve.
Time will tell if President-elect Trump is able to keep the pace that he did on the campaign trail. At 78, he’s now older than Biden was when he was elected in 2020. And Trump has been opaque about the reality of his own health and vigor, right down to his obvious spray tan.
If Trump does have to leave office before 2028, the line of presidential succession now includes Iowa U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley. As the Senate president pro tem, Grassley is third in line to the White House after the vice president and speaker of the House. Grassley, by the Strom Thurmond standard, has plenty of miles left on his tires. He’s just 91.
