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Mitch McConnell is unfit to serve in the US Senate and should resign immediately — that is, presuming he’s lucid enough to wittingly make that decision.
For liberals and Democrats, the Kentucky senator’s career-long opposition to campaign spending limits, theft of two Supreme Court seats, and gutless refusal to convict Donald Trump after the January 6 attack on the Capitol already disqualified him on partisan and ideological grounds. But that’s a matter of policy and political dispute.
McConnell’s profound cognitive decline, however, is indisputable. His staffers and Senate majority leader John Thune’s office are violating the public’s trust by pretending McConnell can ably serve his constituents and the nation. (Consider Mitch’s barely conscious state in the below TMZ video shot just before his return to the Senate this week.)
That critique is nonpartisan: Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein was similarly incapacitated during the late stages of her too-long Senate career and should also have resigned.
McConnell would never be allowed to drive a car, babysit young children, or file his own taxes. Why, then, should a cognitively incapacitated 82-year-old retain one of the most important positions of power within the national government?
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American gerontocracy
In the fall of 1988, during my senior year in college, I took a trip to Washington DC. While touring the Capitol, I needed a bathroom break and found myself standing at a urinal next to Strom Thurmond. I recognized South Carolina’s senior senator immediately: His ashen face and trembling voice were burnished into my brain the year before during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings on Judge Robert Bork’s appointment to the Supreme Court.
Thurmond was a Senate legend. An unapologetic racist and the only senator ever elected by write-in votes, Thurmond drafted and signed the disgraceful Southern Manifesto, filibustered the 1957 Civil Rights Act for more than 24 hours, and defended Jim Crow as the States’ Rights party’s 1948 presidential nominee — all while hiding the fact that in 1925 he fathered a mixed-race daughter with a black teenager who worked for the Thurmond family.
A youthful 86 at the time I encountered him in that Capitol men’s room, Thurmond eventually became the oldest senator ever to serve and remains the only member of Congress in either chamber to serve to the age of 100. When he retired, Thurmond set the standard, at 47 years, for the longest-serving senator in history. (Democrats Robert Byrd, Daniel Inouye, and Patrick Leahy later eclipsed him, as will Republican Chuck Grassley if he finishes his current term.)
I share my Thurmond encounter because a staffer had to guide the octogenarian senator back to the Capitol hallway. That’s right: At 86, Thurmond was already too senile to safely navigate his way out a public men’s room. His mental decline was also evident from the Bork hearings, during which Thurmond monotonically read questions from note cards, incapable of extemporaneous back-and-forth discourse with the nominee. Yet Thurmond was reelected twice more and served another 13-plus years after my chance encounter with him.