Republicans ignore their own age issues in pursuit of Biden's frailty

Washington Post

11 hours ago

One political party nominated a 78-year-old candidate for president last summer with a history of obscuring his health.
The same party kept in place an octogenarian congressional leader until earlier this year, despite health battles. And that party just elevated a 91-year-old to a constitutional leadership position third in the line of presidential succession.
Must be Democrats, right?
No, that lineup comes from Republicans: President Donald Trump, who turns 79 this weekend; Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), 83, who stepped down as GOP leader in January; and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the Senate's president pro tempore who chairs the Judiciary Committee.
While Democrats are undergoing a bruising internal debate about generational change, Republicans have shown little appetite for a similar discussion. They don't want to talk about elderly politicians, just Biden's cognitive state.
'This isn't an age issue,' Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Missouri) said Thursday.
'I don't think this is so much about age as it's about cognitive ability,' Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) also said Thursday.
Schmitt, 49, and Cornyn, 73, are co-chairing an 'unfit to serve' hearing Wednesday before the Judiciary Committee examining how much Biden's senior aides concealed his condition.
In less partisan times, senators might have used this moment to launch a sober discussion about creating transparent health and cognitive tests to ensure future presidents do not face similar allegations.
'I think for the country moving forward, it's important to understand how this could happen, or how this would have happened, and make sure it never happens again,' Schmitt said in a brief interview.
But such a bipartisan effort is not likely when Republicans will not acknowledge any potential health risks for Trump, who is slated to turn 82 during his final year in office.
'This is really about Joe Biden, a man who was clearly incompetent,' Schmitt said.
'Some people like President Trump operate on all cylinders at 79, where Biden obviously was incapacitated,' Cornyn said.
The former president, who was diagnosed last month with cancer, has denied that he was unfit to serve or that senior aides were running the government. But post-presidency books have revealed that Biden's mental state had clearly gotten worse over the four-year term, alleging that only a few senior aides and family members were fully aware of his condition.
Democrats have responded to Biden's withdrawal from the race last July and Trump's subsequent victory in November with a furious debate about the standing of their party's elder statesmen.
House Democrats pushed aside three committee leaders who were all over 75 years old in favor of younger lawmakers. And next week they will elect a new ranking member for the Oversight Committee, with a pair of second-term Democrats challenging two 70-somethings for the post.
Sen. Dick Durbin (Illinois), the No. 2 Democratic leader for 20 years, announced he would retire at the end of next year. The leading candidate to replace the 80-year-old is Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), who is 52.
Outside liberal activists have pledged to force older Democrats into primaries next year against next-generation challengers.
Any similar look in the mirror by Republicans is not in the offing.
Yes, after 18 years as leader, McConnell stepped aside in January after a bad fall in 2023 caused several other health incidents. The new majority leader, 64-year-old Sen. John Thune (R-South Dakota), is middle-aged by Senate standards.
But of the five senators who are at least 80 years old, three are Republican: Grassley, McConnell and James E. Risch (Idaho).
McConnell, who is retiring the end of next year, now chairs the subcommittee in charge of almost $1 trillion in defense spending. Risch, 82, chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and announced in early April that he is running again for a term that will end when he is 89.
Grassley has remained resilient despite being 91 and is an active committee chair. But by electing him as pro tem — a mostly honorific position — Republicans placed him in line to succeed Trump, creating the possibility of a nonagenarian president at a moment of national crisis if the vice president and House speaker are not able to serve.
Cornyn, who is around the same age as Biden was at the end of his vice presidency in January 2017, is running for another term that, if reelected, would end when he is just shy of 81.
The average Senate Democrat, at the start of this new Congress, was 66, compared to 64.5 for a Republican, according to a Pew Research study.
In the House, there's no partisan difference: The average Democrat is 57.6 years old, 57.5 for Republicans, according to Pew.
By later this year, after three younger Democrats are sworn in to replace three lawmakers who died in their 70s recently, their caucus will likely be a little younger than the House GOP.
That's a remarkable shift considering, until two-and-a-half years ago, the image of the Democratic caucus was three 80-somethings in the top leadership posts.
Until last summer, when she entered a senior living home and missed most of her final months in office, Kay Granger (R-Texas) chaired the House Appropriations Committee and oversaw its $1.7 trillion pot for federal agencies.
When Rep. Virginia Foxx (North Carolina) reached the end of her term atop the education committee, House GOP leaders installed her as chair of the critical House Rules Committee. She turns 82 in two weeks.
Some younger Republicans are not surprised by the head-down approach from senior Republicans in Washington.
'That's because most people are older, they don't want to talk about it,' said Rep. Wesley Hunt (R), a 43-year-old who is considering entering the race for Cornyn's seat.
GOP primary voters are also itching to find new blood, Hunt said. 'There is a national conversation, I think, that's being held for younger candidates, period. And I think that's happening on both sides of the aisle.'
But in a party where fealty to Trump is so critical — and securing his endorsement is considered crucial for winning a primary — Hunt talks about the president as if Trump is half his actual age.
Hunt said his own travels with Trump showed that the president is 'an anomaly' who faces no health risks.
'His mental acuity and his ability to operate is unlike anything I've ever seen before,' Hunt said.
Schmitt used similar bravado. 'I was just with President Trump. I played golf with President Trump. President Trump has more energy than most 21-year-olds,' he said.
In his first term as president, Trump revealed less about his health than past presidents. A book by a senior aide revealed that Trump tested positive for covid days before his late September 2020 debate with Biden, but did not disclose it after getting conflicting test results.
His fight with the virus in early October 2020 was much more serious than aides ever revealed.
In a rare rebuke among presidential physicians, Barack Obama's White House doctor criticized Biden's doctor for not administering a cognitive test on the then-president.
But Jeffrey Kuhlman, Obama's White House physician, went a step further in a book last year by specifically calling for neurocognitive tests for all national leaders over the age of 70.
In a health report released this spring, Trump's doctors did perform a neurological exam.
Durbin, who has said that upon reflection Biden should not have tried to run for reelection, accused the genial Cornyn of using Wednesday's hearing as a bid to appeal to conservative voters rather than a serious debate about presidential health.
'I think this has more to do with John Cornyn's primary challenge than anything else,' Durbin said. 'He has to show a fiery demeanor, so he's decided to pick on Joe Biden.'
Cornyn rejected that accusation. 'Well, he must be clairvoyant if he knows what information we're going to gather beforehand,' he said.
He grew angry after a question about whether the hearing would include issues related to Trump, accusing The Washington Post and the press of a broad conspiracy to benefit Biden.
'As far as I'm concerned, you're part of the conspiracy,' Cornyn said.
Durbin said the real conspiracy is age, something that comes for everyone eventually, but in uneven ways.
'I think we all have to face the reality that age is unrelenting,' he said. 'It treats some people more kindly than others.'