At a whopping 90 years old, California Sen. Diane Feinstein is still actively serving in Congress - despite having just signed over power of attorney to her daughter.
Which, to say the least, raises a few eyebrows.
According to this, Feinstein, whose health problems prompted her to take months away from her elected, taxpayer-funded job in Washington, D.C. earlier this year, just authorized her 66-year-old daughter, Katherine Feinstein, to legally represent her, at least in part to help the senator manage her late husband’s estate. While there are apparently multiple family disputes going on concerning the inheritance, one argument between the Feinsteins and the three biological daughters of Feinstein’s late husband, Richard Blum, reportedly concerns who gets Blum’s life insurance. According to a lawsuit filed by the younger Feinstein, her mother needs the money to cover her increasingly "significant medical expenses.”
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Feinstein is the oldest serving senator in Congress, and it shows. The 90-year-old has publicly displayed several mental and physical lapses since returning to Congress earlier this year, regularly needing her staff’s help to remind her to do basic tasks like cast a vote. At one point, she insisted to reporters that she hadn’t taken two months away from D.C. to recover from a severe bout of shingles back in February, bizarrely telling the media that she’d been at the Capitol the whole time.
She hadn’t.
While there (still) aren't any legal age restrictions or term limits on people serving in Congress, Feinstein’s situation raises a serious and concerning question: how can a woman seemingly incapable of handling her own legal business be entrusted to have a say in matters that affect a nation of 330 million people?
Then again, she's hardly the only serving elected official who's turned some heads thanks to their cognitive abilities - or, rather, lack thereof. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell raised questions just last week when he froze up during a press conference, leading many to wonder if the 81-year-old Kentucky senator had had a stroke on live TV (he's since insisted he's fine). Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman regularly bungles words and has trouble interacting with his staff and reporters thanks to a stroke in 2022 that left him with limited audio processing and slurred speech, but somehow didn't keep him from landing a seat in Congress. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden's lapses in memory, verbal gaffes, and physical impairments have left millions of Americans wondering why an octogenarian who nibbles children and has to be told how to get off a stage is running the most powerful country in the world.
But hey, I'm sure everything's fine.