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“Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s health episodes show ‘no evidence’ of a stroke or seizure disorder, the Capitol physician said Tuesday… The GOP leader froze up last week during a press conference in Kentucky, unable to respond to a question in the second such episode in a month.” AP News
The right is divided over whether McConnell should resign from leadership, and also if there should be age limits for politicians.
“McConnell has noticeably aged since his bad fall in March, when he sustained a concussion and broken rib, and he should want, for his own sake and that of his colleagues, to go out on his own terms. The details can be left to McConnell, who deserves a large measure of deference. A leadership transition doesn’t need to happen urgently, but the wheels should be turning…
“Stepping aside from leadership would not necessarily require leaving the Senate; McConnell could, like Nancy Pelosi, remain in office, and he would doubtless remain influential so long as he is capable of serving. But the job of caucus leader demands more… The time has come for the Kentucky senator, after his long, impressive run, to make the decision to step aside from leadership.”
The Editors, National Review
“We ought to add an upper age limit [for president, Congress, and judges] in order to head off crises before they happen and hopefully, at the margins, encourage some new blood… It is true that age is an imperfect proxy for the capacity to do the job, but the advantage of bright-line rules is that they are all but self-enforcing in a way that is impersonal and bipartisan…
“Removing a president or a Supreme Court justice from office on grounds of mental or physical unfitness would instigate a titanic political power struggle; doing so because they’d hit a constitutional age limit would be a routine thing. Many state courts, for example, already have mandatory retirement ages. Adding such limits is likely to save us more grief than it will cost us in the services of wise old heads.”
Dan McLaughlin, National Review
Others argue, “We act as if these septuagenarians and octogenarians have been thrust upon us by some unknown force. We put them there. If three-quarters of voters truly believed President Joe Biden is too old for office, they would find someone else to run. But Democrats would rather pretend that the president… is an intellectual and physical dynamo because they want to hold onto power…
“The reality is that when it matters, voters across the country love the old-timers — perhaps because they are known quantities or maybe they bring home the money or maybe people genuinely like them. If they didn’t, none of them would be in Washington.”
David Harsanyi, New York Post
“We agree that too many people cling to power for too long in Washington. But Senate leaders are chosen by their party colleagues, who are in the best position to judge Mr. McConnell’s continuing abilities. If they think Mr. McConnell can still be an effective leader of an increasingly fractious GOP Senate conference, then he should stay in the job.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
The left worries about potential replacements for McConnell, and also the risk of aging leaders.
The left worries about potential replacements for McConnell, and also the risk of aging leaders.
“At a moment when the primary GOP argument against President Biden is that he’s too old to serve a second term, some believe they can win points by saying they pushed out their own aging lion. More importantly, McConnell’s most dramatic feats of partisanship are in the past, and a party still in former president Donald Trump’s thrall is ready to be rid of him…
“Trump himself pours a never-ending stream of vitriol on McConnell, who never worked too hard to pretend that he thought highly of Trump as a person or a politician… But McConnell’s biggest problem might be that he hasn’t made Biden’s life miserable. Instead, Biden got a great deal of legislation passed in his first two years, some of it bipartisan…
“In the coming days, expect more Republicans to say publicly what they might now only be saying privately about the senator.”
Paul Waldman, Washington Post
“McConnell’s hold on the Senate GOP is the fulcrum on which a divided government depends for its rare but essential legislative viability. He’s the often silent partner with the White House and Senate Democrats in figuring out how to cut deals with or overcome a House Republican conference in the firm grip of MAGA fanatics. If McConnell’s health forces him from his position, will that change?…
“It’s unclear that any likely McConnell successor will have the influence and authority to keep Senate Republicans together if the 2024 presidential election devolves into another contested result surrounded by threats of violence…“In his absence, the odds are high that the Senate GOP will become as fractious and irresponsible as its counterparts in the House. And no matter who holds the balance of power, that’s not good for democracy and stable governance.”
Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine
“The latest incident, coming after a similar moment of incapacity at a Capitol Hill press conference earlier this summer, has made clear that something serious is afflicting the top Republican in the Senate. In six months, McConnell has gone from the G.O.P.’s feared power broker to a symbol of how quickly things can go wrong for America’s fragile gerontocracy: running the world one minute, frail and unable to parry questions the next…
“What if Biden has his own McConnell moment? Imagine it happening in the latter days of the 2024 campaign, with Trump as the Republican nominee and the fate of the free world itself on the line. This is hardly an implausible hypothetical. There are, sadly, a million possibilities—a health scare, a bad fall as McConnell experienced, just the accelerated condition of advanced old age. The reign of the octogenarians is a risky bet for a democracy.”
Susan B. Glasser, New York Magazine
