"According to Ms.

"According to Ms. Granger’s roll call vote page, Granger's last vote was on July 24th, 2024 as she voted No to the 'Amendment to H.R. 8998: To reduce the salary of Ya-Wei (Jake) Li, Deputy Assistant Administrator for Pesticide Programs, to $1.'

Since then, Granger has not cast any votes in Washington on behalf of her Tarrant and Parker County constituents.

We then received a tip from a Granger constituent who shared that the Congresswoman has been residing at a local memory care and assisted living home for some time after having been found wandering lost and confused in her former neighborhood."

Just a moment...

(dallasexpress.com)

#USPol

"The son of Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas) confirmed that his mother has 'dementia issues' that have kept her away from Congress in recent months, the Dallas Morning News reported Sunday.

'It’s been a hard year,' Brandon Granger, 52, was quoted as saying by the newspaper. He also said she was living in Traditions Senior Living in Fort Worth, Texas.

Kay Granger, 81, had been the chair of the House Appropriations Committee until stepping down from that position in April, making her absence particularly noticeable during the recent negotiations over legislation designed to avert a government shutdown."

Just a moment...

(www.politico.com)

#USPol

There is a classic problem here in that, while it seems inarguable that a Member of Congress who is living in a memory care facility shouldn't be a Member of Congress anymore, none of their people will have any incentive to make that happen.

Careers are made in politics by hitching your wagon to a star. Staffers can go their entire working lives supporting a single politico, following them from office to office, moving up as The Boss moves up.

If The Boss becomes incapacitated, their whole career is therefore suddenly at risk. So they have every incentive to cover it up, if they can, for as long as they can.

#USPol

This was actually the plot of a decent (if pulpy) TV potboiler, Starz's "Boss" (2011-2012). It's about a Daley-style all-powerful mayor of Chicago who gets diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, and the ensuing struggle by him to hold on to his power while everyone around him tries to figure out what to do as the star they hitched their wagon to starts to fall apart.

U.S. viewers can stream "Boss" free with ads on Tubi.

Theoretically there are counterparties who would like that star to be occluded so their wagon can rise with the next one. Too much party power? Too much one hand washes another?

@jalefkowit

@clew Sure, but for something like this the declining star's staff has access to more information than outsiders do. If they are competent, they can close ranks and keep outsiders from discovering the truth for a very long time.

(Arguably something like this also happened with Joe Biden, whose team was able to swat down rumors of his diminished capacity until he got up on a debate stage and demonstrated it.)

@clew There's also the problem in environments like Congress that power there is based on seniority. So if you have a senior member who's accumulated a lot of power, and that member starts to decline, there will be hungry young guns looking to replace them. But the young guns will come in starting at zero on the seniority clock, and have to build up all that seniority over again to reach the same level of power. So the party overall has an incentive to keep the old hand in place as long as they possibly can.

@jalefkowit @clew I’m just a crank but my gut tells the one offense the Democratic Party elite will not tolerate is jumping the line. It’s their big takeaway from the 2008 presidential election and they’d rather give up control of all three branches than let someone win who hasn’t paid their dues

@flyingsaceur @clew That's true on both sides of the aisle. The people who run things in both parties are by definition the ones already at the head of the line; they have every interest in making it hard for new people to nip at their heels.