Geriatric Democrats Are Dropping Like Flies
And they're losing critical votes as a result.
Now, more than ever, I beseech you: Let’s stop (re-)electing politicians who are one million years old!
Here’s the non-tariffs news of the day: The House handed Republicans and President Donald Trump a major win by passing the joint budget resolution, a vote that had been in serious doubt for weeks. It didn’t have to happen.
Contained in the bill are deep cuts to Medicaid, provisions to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and cut even further, and hundreds of billions more in spending on defense and border security.
But what’s most striking is that, as Inside Elections’ Jacob Rubashkin pointed out, the Trump budget wouldn’t have passed had the Democrats been at full strength: Rep. Raúl Grijalva, of Arizona, died last month at 77; Sylvester Turner, a congressman from Houston, died two weeks earlier at 70; New Jersey Rep. Donald Norcross, a spring chicken at 66, missed the vote while in the hospital for an “emergency medical event.” Grijalva and Turner both ran for office despite both receiving cancer diagnoses.
What’s even more striking is that this is the second time this week Democrats could’ve won—thus meaningfully setting Trump’s burn-it-all-down agenda back—if they weren’t down three votes for death and serious illness.
The average age of a member of the House for this session is nearly 58 years old; for the Senate, the average age is 64.
There’s something I’ve always found terribly distasteful about running for office to decide on a future that you are, according to actuarial tables, not going to be a stakeholder in. My Dad, a product of the Baby Boomer generation who nonetheless has humane politics, jokes of his cohort’s hubris and general outlook: “We have all the money and we’re never gonna die.”
It would be funnier if it wasn’t such a spot-on encapsulation of how the generation currently in power runs our government and is therefore setting the course for our future: They’re uninterested in Medicare for All, attacking student debt, or making home ownership and starting families more viable for my generation. The only answer is to start electing people who have a vested interest in a more liveable future, rather than pulling up the ladder they were happy to climb in an era of unprecedented and likely singular post-war prosperity. There’s simply no other way.
Age is one thing, but age plus a serious/incurable disease is something altogether different, and failing marks for those staff members of the two Dems recently expired not doing what needed to be done, especially in the light of a nearly even-split House.
There is virtually no opposition, just a few ineffective votes against an extreme agenda. This is traditional politics - deniability being the operative policy. If that be it, then good riddance.