Today, Explained - The Senate’s age-old old age problem

Episode Date: April 27, 2022

Dianne Feinstein’s colleagues are concerned the 88-year-old senator is struggling with memory loss, reports Tal Kopan of the San Francisco Chronicle. It’s raising concerns about Feinstein’s ability to do her job and the aging of America's politicians. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

California Senator Dianne Feinstein was at a memorial service for a friend named Ann Halstead. So this took place last summer. She and Halstead knew each other a long time, were very close. She stood up to give some remarks. She accidentally calls Pelosi the Senate Majority Leader and then corrects herself and jokes about promoting Pelosi to Senate because, of course, she serves in the House. That wasn't the moment that was striking, however. She never actually mentioned Halstead, the deceased person who they were all there to memorialize.

The ripple went through the crowd. People were sort of a bit in disbelief. What happens when age catches up with our elected leaders? That's on Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. Tal Koppen is on the Washington, D.C. beat for the San Francisco Chronicle. That's Senator Dianne Feinstein's hometown paper.

And she recently wrote a deeply sourced report in which colleagues of Feinstein say she's different. Tal, what's going on? What was brought to our attention, we feel like, is significantly more than simply a little bit of slowing down and really a pattern of short-term memory issues that exceed what might be ascribed to perhaps a little forgetfulness. So for example, we spoke with a California Democratic member of Congress who said that they somewhat recently had a multi-hour long interaction with the senator. And this is a member of Congress who has known the senator for over a decade. And they were sort of expecting sort of a detailed, rigorous policy debate because that's what she always was sort of up for. And not only did that not take place, but they had to introduce themselves to the senator

and then do so again multiple times over the course of the interaction because she was seemingly unable to recall parts of the conversation that had already happened in the span of this interaction. And we spoke with two senators who have served with her for some time who say they get the sense that she can't always place them when they encounter each other. We spoke with Senate colleagues, the California Democratic member of Congress, and three former staff members of the senator who all have seen very up close what the situation is and were in agreement on their assessments. That they do not believe that she's really up to the job anymore, the job that includes representing nearly 40 million

people in California. It was reporting that we just felt we couldn't ignore. How has Dianne Feinstein made her mark in the Senate up to this point? Well, there's no denying that she has had a tremendous career, and not just in the Senate. I mean, going back in San Francisco politics, breaking barriers as a mayor of San Francisco. This is the body of Supervisor Harvey Milk as it was taken from City Hall.

Her role in the assassination of Harvey Milk. The president of the Board of Supervisors, Dianne Feinstein, spoke. Both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. The president of the Board of Supervisors, Dianne Feinstein, spoke. Both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed. Oh, Jesus Christ! She was a pathbreaker for so long, one of the first women, along with Barbara Boxer,

ever to represent the Senate for California. And that you will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which you're about to enter, so help you God. I will. Thank you. And then in the Senate, I mean,

she's worked and been a leader on so many issues, including gun violence prevention. She has been a leader on the Senate Judiciary Committee. She's served on the Senate Intelligence Committee. She still serves on both of those committees. The report released today examines the CIA's secret overseas detention of at least 119 individuals and the use of coercive interrogation techniques, in some cases, amounting to torture.

And every single one of the conversations that I had for this piece was painful. And the people I spoke with really felt awful about having to even have these conversations because they respect and revere her so much. And many of them are voicing these concerns in part because they wish that she could have a dignified cap to her career and not be remembered for a public embarrassment. They want her to be remembered for this legendary trajectory in politics. You asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for comment. She is both a colleague and a friend of Feinstein's. They're both from the Bay Area. How did she respond? She defended Senator Feinstein and, you know, spoke about her record for in delivering for the people of California, called her tireless. She used the word unconscionable to describe what she characterized as attacks. We don't believe them to be attacks. The people speaking

with us were voicing concerns and very specific details and interactions. But Speaker Pelosi called it unconscionable for these to be raised at this time in particular. Senator Feinstein lost her husband in February. He passed after a long illness. Senator Feinstein issued a statement saying, my heart is broken today. My husband was my partner and best friend for more than 40 years. I am going to miss him terribly. While our reporting absolutely takes into account the sad situation with her husband, the reporting also indicates that these issues predate that situation. And while certainly stress and grief can exacerbate things and we don't have the ability to say to what degree that the situation with

her husband does not explain the episodes that we were told about in the piece. In a statement to KCRA tonight, the senator wrote in part, while I have focused for much of the past year on my husband's health and ultimate passing, I have remained committed to achieving results and I'd put my record up against anyone's. Tal, if Senator Feinstein is struggling with memory loss to such a degree, how is she getting her job done well enough to keep being reelected? She was last reelected in 2018. She has the right to serve through the end of her term in 2024. You know, in the Senate, she's just over halfway through her six-year term.

In 2018, she faced her first real challenge in a long time from a Democrat, Kevin DeLeon. He came close to defeating her, but she has had a storied career. She has a very strong reputation in California. It was remarkable that he came so close to defeating her. She has had a storied career. She has a very strong reputation in California. It was remarkable that he came so close to defeating her. But there was one sort of candidate for him. And she got through that without any major slip ups or anything of the sort and won her seat again. And I don't think anyone on Capitol Hill would deny that she has a very experienced and skilled staff. But especially the former staffers I spoke with said it's increasingly difficult for that office to operate at full strength because she does need to sign

off on things and she does need to understand everything they want to put out, every letter they want to send, every statement, every bill they want to sign on to. And the former staffers I spoke with described an increasingly difficult time doing that because they would brief her on something and then perhaps the next day she wouldn't remember or she couldn't follow complex threads. And the staff at least believed it was in part because of these issues and not because it was too complicated to be understood. Does anyone know if she plans to run again when this term is up? We don't know at this time.

She has filed paperwork with the FEC, the Federal Elections Commission, to be able to continue having a political operation. It's sort of a formality. It doesn't necessarily commit her to running. So at this time, she has not made any declarations, but she has also not foreclosed the possibility of running again. If it's true that Senator Feinstein can't do her job anymore, like in the present tense, is there anything that can be done about it? There's sort of the realistic answer and the technical answer. Technically, the Senate has a process for expelling a member. It requires a vote of the other members of the Senate. Historically, it has pretty much only been used in cases of basically treason. You know,

many of the expulsions took place around the Civil War with Confederate sympathizers. It would take something tremendous to see the Senate resort to that. And I believe it's a two-thirds vote that it's the threshold of that. So realistically, no. There's virtually nothing that can be done. It's up to her whether she wants to finish her term. Your report came out. It got a lot of attention. And reporters get complaints. That's fair. We all know it happens. We've all experienced it. But there was one complaint in particular that seemed to be recurring. It is ageist. It is possibly even sexist to examine an 88-year-old senator's mental fitness, especially when President Joe Biden, Senator Mitch McConnell, Representative Jim Clyburn are still doing their jobs. What do you think? I interact with plenty of politicians in their 80s

on a regular basis who are sharp as a tack. If what was described to me about Senator Feinstein was described to me about someone in their 60s or 50s or any age, it would be a matter of concern and of importance to report. Strom Thurmond was the first person elected to the U.S. Senate as a write-in candidate, and he holds the record for the longest Senate speech, over 24 hours. There are stories of male politicians who, by some accounts, had almost no idea what was going on in the Senate,

who were allowed to be sort of propped up and carry on. I have been here for about 42 years. And every day, there are new challenges. I like challenges. I was not present for any deference that might have been given to them. Now, I completely respect the conversation that is happening about these questions. And one of the things that has been striking to me is how many readers have reached out to me with a very personal connection to the piece. Many folks have written me about difficult conversations they've had to have in their families and with loved ones about, in their instances, diagnosed conditions. And they wrote to me just with how much what we reported resonated with them. You have covered Washington for a long time. Do you know why our lawmakers in this country are so much older than the median age, even elderly in general?

For one, there's a lot of power in incumbency. You know, once you're in, there's some very institutional privileges, including, you know, it's very political nerd, but it's called franked mail. So there's an, you get to have events in your district touting what the government has delivered for people. And anytime you're a challenger to a sitting politician, you come from the underdog place. There are a lot of factors, I think, both in terms of the institutional inertia that keeps people in office for a very long time if they want to be in office. It's also a fundraising benefit to, you know, be in office and have lobbyists supporting you and all kinds of institutional factors. And then I think there's a whole host of sort of personal factors in terms of who actually runs for these

positions and when. It's a very complex thing, but certainly we see that there is a big age discrepancy in terms of who is sitting in the highest positions of power and where the average American is in their life. Thank you. way to keep up with family and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an Aura frame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday and she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids.

And so we wanted to surprise her with the AuraFrame. And because she's a little bit older, it was just easier for us to source all the images together and have them uploaded to the frame itself. And because we're all connected over text message, it was just so easy to send a link to everybody. You can save on the perfect gift by visiting oraframes.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carvermat frames with promo code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A frames.com promo code EXPLAINED.

This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays terms and conditions to apply. Bet MGM authorized gaming partner of the NBA has your back all season long from tip off to the final buzzer. You're always taken care of with a sports book born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style,

there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk and authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly.

If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. There is a minimum age for U.S. Senators. It's 30. A 30-year-old named Joe Biden was sworn into the Senate once upon a time.

Today, the youngest U.S. senator is 35. We see you, John Ossoff. Shauna Chalmers is a professor of political science at Rutgers. She wondered why the young people around her seemed put off by the idea of running for office. So she asked around 800 of them and then wrote a book called Out of the Running, Why Millennials Reject Political Careers. The age kind of increase is not itself about age. I think it is a factor of several other bad trends that I dislike about American politics, particularly in terms of how we finance campaigns. We are the only advanced post-industrial democracy to make individual candidates create brand new organizations to run every single time, to raise all of their ownerrymandering that has only been increasing in the past two decades to protect incumbents.

Incumbents, if they aren't old to start with, certainly grow old in office. And then we reward seniority, especially in the Senate. People know the longer you're in office, the more you can get done while you're there because it's a seniority, especially in the Senate. People know the longer you're in office, the more you can get done while you're there because it's a seniority system. So it's like all of these things together, this is a recipe for kind of attracting and then keeping older people in office. Define a word for me, if you would. What is a gerontocracy? Gerontocracy is literally rule by the old. And it's kind of like plutocracy would be rule by the rich,

or theocracy would be rule by religious leaders. Democracy is rule by the people. Do you think the United States runs the risk of becoming a gerontocracy, or is one already? If you look at the demographics, you could certainly make a case that we're already a gerontocracy. The most represented group in Congress is between 60 and 69. That's kind of where the median is. After that, the most represented group is 50 to 59. There's very few under 40s at all. There's none in the Senate.

The leadership is even older on average. And the average for the U.S. population is 47. So that's a serious discrepancy. And the median is even younger, I think. I think the median is closer in age to me, 39 or 40. Right. So you began looking into why millennials weren't running for public office. What was the data that you were looking at that made you think, huh, this is a real thing? What I did is survey about 800 of these law and policy school students who I thought should have been interested in running. The sample was elite law and policy school students in the Boston area.

I looked at Harvard Law School, Harvard Kennedy School students. And then because I did not want it to be just a Harvard-specific project, I had a check by also recruiting and testing students from Suffolk Law School. Suffolk Law School is the institution that sent the most of its graduates into state-level politics. Only about 15% of this highly political and policy-minded sample wanted to run for office. And when you asked them why, when you asked the other 85 percent, why don't you want to run for office, what did they tell you? The most immediate finding, which was repeated across almost everybody I talked to, was about the role of money in campaigns. And that had to do with two different factors. I talk about it in my book as the ick factors of campaigns. I had one interviewee who told me, I don't even like to take 40 bucks from my dad when he puts me back on the bus to go to law school. I don't like to take money from people because then I feel indebted. several people use the word corrupt because even though the Supreme Court has said money is speech

and corporations are people, right, it feels like legal corruption. If you're an idealistic young person looking at the world, you think maybe that's not how I want it to work. And then there's the more instrumental secondary part, which is also I can't get anything done. Because you could imagine working with a lot of good intentioned people and not getting anything done could be frustrating. And that's one kind of deterrent. But working with people who maybe you don't respect and also through a process that you don't like doing, where about 70% of your time is fundraising, which you don't like doing, and that feels icky. That's separate from not being able to get anything done. Those are two separate deterrents. We are not waiting for justice!

Distrustful of politicians and institutions, many millennials turn to grassroots movements, Black Lives Matter demonstrations, boycotts and climate change protests. I cannot tell you how many of the interviewees I talked to said, oh, I'd love to do a career in politics that's not being the politician. Right. I like to do the strategy or I like to do the legislative work. Some political scientists have called it electoral aversion, right? The idea that it's not government per se that is a problem maybe, but our electoral systems in terms of turning young people off. I was doing this research about 10 years ago is when I started collecting the data.

So increasingly since then, I think it is unfortunately getting worse, the sense that there is gridlock and acrimony and a sense of politics as a toxic work environment. There were reporters in the front of the Capitol, and in front of reporters, Representative Yoho called me, and I quote, a f***ing b***h. These are the words that Representative Yoho called me, and I quote, a f***ing b***h. These are the words that Representative Yoho

levied against a congresswoman. The idea of like putting yourself in a bad workplace is less and less appealing. Have older generations made politics so dirty that young people simply want nothing to do with it? I mean, the way that we think about that there was a golden age and we're now fallen out of Eden, it seems a little silly if you think about it. I teach the 1796 election to my students for this reason. That was probably far dirtier than anything we've seen. John Adams running against Thomas Jefferson. Adam spires Hamilton, privately calls him Creole basher in his taunt. The nastiest kind of mud you can imagine even without Twitter.

Sit down, John, you fat... And then the election of 1860 literally did rip the nation apart. Post-Reconstruction, I think of the election of 1884. There was this famous mudslinging thing against Grover Cleveland with a whole song about his illicit love child. Wow. Right. It's always been gross. It is always gross. And yet democracy is just so painful and so difficult. And unfortunately, it is really the best thing we can come up with.

I was reading that Chuck Grassley, who is 88, plans to run again. And it made me wonder, in all honesty, do you think the U.S. is going to stay this way? I do. For the foreseeable future. It won't always be the boomers, right? Because we're going to run out of them. So we, millennials, are likely going to take over and age in office if we keep the current political systems

the way they are, that reward name recognition, that reward incumbency and seniority. All of those things will kind of contribute to young people staying away. And yet I was encouraged to see a lot of young people through movements literally in the streets, Black Lives Matter and Me Too, and kind of this sense that there is something to save, though, that we can revitalize or change things. After 2016, there was a spike in women running for office, especially women of color. It was really an exciting moment in some ways, while also terrifying to those, you know, worried about democracy. So the feeling that our democracy is

in trouble does still seem to motivate at least some young people. Today's show was produced by Halima Shah, edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and engineered by Afim Shapiro, who, like me, is in his 40s. I'm Noelle King. This has been Today Explained. Thank you.