Jim Newell of Slate Magazine briefly conversed with Senator Diane Feinstein of California. The Senator does not recollect being in medical absence for two and a half months due to a case of the painful Shingles Virus.
It was about a minute later that I encountered Feinstein coming off an elevator, sitting in a wheelchair and flanked by staff. It’s been hard to find the senator since her return; she’s kept her movements mostly to the least-populated passageways and skipped luncheons and non-urgent committee hearings.
I asked her how she was feeling.
“Oh, I’m feeling fine. I have a problem with the leg.” A fellow reporter staking out the elevator asked what was wrong with the leg.
“Well, nothing that’s anyone concern but mine,” she said.
When the fellow reporter asked her what the response from her colleagues had been like since her return, though, the conversation took an odd turn.
“No, I haven’t been gone,” she said.
OK.
“You should follow the—I haven’t been gone. I’ve been working.”
When asked whether she meant that she’d been working from home, she turned feisty.
“No, I’ve been here. I’ve been voting,” she said. “Please. You either know or don’t know.”
After deflecting one final question about those, like Rep. Ro Khanna, who’ve called on her to resign, she was wheeled away.
The Senator returned a week ago and has voted with the majority since then. Her colleagues did not want to discuss her mental state at the time of Slates's reporting.
I watched my mother's mind deteriorate over the years; it was excruciating for our family. I wish her and her loved ones all the strength to find peace with this challenge.
I remember Senator Kennedy and his long battle with cancer, where he died in office. He did not resign, and we ended up with Scott Brown, who obstructed what could have been a meaningful national healthcare system.
Dianne Feinstein and the Cult of Indispensability
Feinstein’s condition spurs a question that looms over American politics for obvious reasons, given the age—for the moment, at least—of the top candidates in the next presidential election: When does the beneficent version of gerontocracy give way to the destructive version of it? Admirable reasons for handing power to senior citizens almost inevitably become the justification for their never relinquishing it. The cult of experience becomes the cult of indispensability.
You can see a hint of this problem in the viral video from 2019 that captures Feinstein lecturing young protesters from the Sunrise Movement, a climate-activist group, who occupied her office, hoping to hector her into supporting the Green New Deal. She tells the kids, “I’ve been in the Senate for over a quarter of a century, and I know what can pass and I know what can’t pass.”
At the time, I thought to myself, Damn straight. That’s the essence of legislative politics: Getting stuff done can necessitate the trimming of sails and unsavory concessions to grubby allies. But her argument also had more than a whiff of self-satisfaction. Believing that the whippersnappers don’t understand what it takes to do the job can easily become a pretext for never letting them try.
And because American politics are so volatile, experienced officials may never feel like the time is right to yield power. There’s always one more threat to democracy to stave off, one more international crisis to avert. Rather than entertaining plans to retire, older politicians come to regard staying in office as a patriotic duty. Gradually, gerontocracy can become a self-protective cartel, where the tricks of the trade are deployed for the sole purpose of remaining in the club.