Senators' maladies and mishaps cast doubt on world's greatest deliberative body

How did this happen? How did the U.S. Senate go from the world’s greatest deliberative body to the world’s greatest nursing home?

Some haven’t been seen on the floor in months. Some are literally on the floor, having fallen and they can’t get up. The average senator is older than the U.S. retirement age. When they bring up “replacement theory,” you don’t know if they’re talking about Jews or their hips.

Mad props to California Sen. Diane Feinstein, 89, who according to her staff has been “working from home” since February. Who knew that someone of that age would be on the forefront of the remote work movement?

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell fell down and was out of commission for weeks. Age might just be a number, but if that number is sub-50, when you fall, you bounce right up. I’m not saying this to be mean, I’m saying this as the voice of experience. Twenty years ago, when I’d fall I’d think “what a clutz.” Today I think, “is this the one that’s going to land me in palliative care?”

Then we have Sen. Mark Fetterman of Pennsylvania who had a stroke and got elected anyway — voters must have felt he’d fit right in. Instead of a grand hall, you walk into the Senate chambers today and there are blankets over the windows, the heat is set on 85 and everyone’s rooting around in their trash cans trying to help a sub chairman of the Armed Services Committee find his teeth.

I know we’re not supposed to talk about age. Just ask New York Times columnist Gail Collins:

“The people who really need to get their heads around the age thing are younger. It's clearly dumb to treat older people as a doddering population of great-great-grandparents. People will just start wondering whether you're the one who's out of it.”

Yes and no. Certainly this is a conundrum for young, pronoun-sensitive people who add the letter X to assorted cultural and societal groups, whether they asked for it or not. They may rightfully feel that it is Their Time, yet there is no good way to assume power without looking as if they’ve just pushed gramps off the train platform.

Columnists (whose vintage is unknown, but can probably be guessed) argue that “90 is the new 60.” OK fine, but I’m here to tell you, 60 ain’t such great shakes.

True story: This week, because I am, er, working from home, I had the Red Sox game on, but I was way across the room, kind of watching out of the corner of my eye. The pitcher held onto the ball, held it, held it, and I’m thinking, “come on, this has to be a pitch clock violation” and wondering how come I’m the only one who’s noticing this.

The pitcher kept on holding it until finally I couldn’t stand it anymore and went running into the living room screaming for the ump to get with it — at which point I realized that at some point I had apparently paused the TV and forgotten I had done so.

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This is to say, while I may still be capable of writing a dopey newspaper column, you don’t want me making U.S.-senator-type decisions related to national security or surface-transportation policy or, basically, anything that matters.

To be sure, watching an 80-year-old member of Congress trying to wrap his head around TikTok is like watching a toddler trying to eat a poached egg. Tech engineers sit there on the panel giving each other the side-eye as they reckon who’s going to be the one to tell Sen. Blosnalphus that D-RAM has nothing to do with sheep.

And frankly, it’s not as if a lot of these yo-yos were that great when they were in their prime. I feel bad that I have to be the one to tell them the truth — of course by tomorrow they will have forgotten that I did.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: U.S. Senate seems more like a senior center these days