Our Dying Leaders

Both Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi suffered falls this week, the latest reminder of the gerontocracy we live under

Sen. McConnell helped along by aide on December 11 | Getty

82-year-old Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell skipped work on Thursday, missing several votes, in order to recover from a fall he suffered on Tuesday. Then late last night, 84-year-old congresswoman Nancy Pelosi sustained her own fall during an official trip to Luxembourg. This resulted in the U.S. military rushing Pelosi via MEDEVAC to a U.S. Army base in Germany, where she was given a hip replacement this morning.

In November, Pelosi was reelected to her 20th term in Congress. McConnell, even after his bizarre freezing episodes, has said that he intends to serve out the rest of his term, which ends in 2027. He has served in the Senate since 1985, with his career in government stretching back to the Gerald Ford administration, where he served as Deputy Attorney General.

If it feels like Congress is out of touch, it probably doesn’t help that some of its most prominent leaders like Pelosi and McConnell were born before the widespread availability of the ballpoint pen. That these two leaders are members of opposing parties shows how bipartisan America’s gerontocracy (rule by the elderly) problem is. The problem is also a systemic one, stretching far beyond just these two officials, as the following chart demonstrates.

Source: Business Insider

Congress is literally dying to stay in office. In August, New Jersey congressman Bill Pascrell Jr. died in office at the spry age of 87. As I reported at the time, Pascrell was just one of over a dozen octogenarians still in Congress, exercising a death grip on their positions of power.

It doesn’t have to be this way, as we saw when public outrage succeeded at getting President Biden to drop out of the presidential election. The reason it is this way, I think, reminds me of the major media’s response to the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. In the immediate aftermath, the coverage felt like a eulogy, celebrating him as “well liked,” a “visionary leader” and “beloved” husband. It’s understandable that people wouldn’t want to say anything negative given the circumstances of his death. But being polite isn’t journalism. So it fell on outsider media like me to actually look at the facts and see that Thompson was being sued by a firefighters pension for insider trading and fraud, that he actually wasn’t universally “well liked” by employees, and so on, as I reported.

Some people called me insensitive for these stories. The truth, unfortunately, is often not sensitive, and serious journalism isn’t either. Not understanding that is why so many can’t state the obvious about our dying leaders and take grandpa’s keys away: it’s mean. But unlike your grandpa, elected officials and CEOs are powerful people with whom we don’t have personal relationships. It’s time the media start covering them that way.