The Feinstein fiasco is the end point of the Democrats’ gerontocracy problem

In 2013, President Barack Obama guest Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for lunch at the White House. The president did not directly ask Ginsburg, then 80 and already a survivor of bouts of colon and pancreatic cancer, to resign from the court. She simply noted that the Democrats were unlikely to maintain control of the Senate after the 2014 election.

Obama’s intervention was unsuccessful, and Ginsburg remained in office. The consequences of his decision would become clear nearly a decade later, when his Republican-appointed replacement provided the fifth and decisive vote to nullify Roe v. Wade.

The Democratic Party now faces an all too similar dilemma: A legendary woman with a crucial role in shaping the nation’s judiciary is 89 and ill. Set to retire in January 2025, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has shingles, has been unable to travel to Washington, DC for the past two months, and is unable to provide a timeline for returning to work. Without Feinstein, Democrats lack a majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee and are unable to advance President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees, eliminating one of the few ways to score liberal victories in a divided Congress.

It would seem to call for a similar intervention at the presidential level. The problem? Biden himself is 80 years old and is often asked to brush off similar concerns about age and sharpness from him, making for an awkward and potentially impossible conversation at best.

“It’s his decision,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at Wednesday’s news conference, when asked if there was a point at which Feinstein should resign: “When it relates to something about her future, that’s for her. to make. The president has been very clear about it.”

This is the logical end point of the Democrats’ current gerontocracy problem: an aging president unable to intervene while an even older senator hampers his agenda. The problem of gerontocracy, for Democrats, has long been primarily political, fueling an alienation between younger voters who back the party in large numbers and leaders who feel they don’t understand technology, the economy and the crises that shape the world today.

The political issue has been easy for Democrats to ignore. Millennials and Generation Z are the two most liberal generations in the nation’s history, with majorities in both cohorts viewing Republicans offering little reason to vote for them. The urgency of defeating former President Donald Trump and protecting abortion rights after Roe’s removal has kept youth turnout at the levels Democrats needed in 2020 and 2022.

Feinstein’s absence makes it a governance issue, one not so easily brushed aside.

“If she can’t come back month after month, with this (margin) closed in the Senate, that’s not just going to hurt California. It’s going to be a problem for the country,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) he said on CNN’s “State of the Union” show on Sunday.without ever explicitly calling for Feinstein’s resignation.

So far, the Californian’s absence has not created an insurmountable backlog in the Senate, where something as simple as confirming a judge can require days of debate if, and in the modern era when, the minority party delays proceedings. There are four judicial candidates who received hearings on the Judiciary Committee but have not yet voted due to Republican opposition. (Several bipartisan-backed nominees will leave committee Thursday.)

With Republicans in control of the House, leaders in the White House and Senate have turned to judge confirmation as the best way to promote and protect party goals, especially after Trump’s own judicial reform during his four years in office. Biden managed to confirm more judges in their first two years in office than any of the last four presidents, diversifying the federal bench in terms of identity and profession.

Democrats moved to replace Feinstein on the committee earlier this week, a process that requires 60 votes in the Senate. republicans predictably rejected the attempt, leaving Democrats with no short-term way to take his place on the committee. However, the Republicans indicated that they would allow the Democrats to replace Feinstein if she resigned.

“It is the temporary substitution that is an unprecedented request,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a Republican member of the Judiciary Committee, told HuffPost. “If she wasn’t already a senator, yes.”

Democrats have taken steps to outrun their 70- and 80-year-old leaders. The trio of House leaders Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), Steny Hoyer (Md.), and Jim Clyburn (SC)—with a combined age of 248—gave way to a trio of House representatives Hakeem Jeffries (NY), Katherine Clark (Mass.) and Pete Aguilar (Calif.), who are a mere 154 years old.

Still, there is unease and concern among younger Democratic politicians eager to see the party move forward, in some cases simply from Biden, in other cases from the party’s broader group of baby boomer leaders, including the leader of the majority in the Senate, Chuck Schumer (NY) and even progressive Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

One of the few Democrats willing to say anything has been Rep. Dean Phillips, a moderate from Minnesota who has been outspoken about his desire to move on to a new generation of leaders and has called for Feinstein’s resignation.

“This is not about age. It’s about competition,” Phillips told HuffPost on Wednesday. “And it saddens me that we find ourselves in this position. But there is a crisis of honesty and an unwillingness on the part of many of my colleagues to share.

“I’m afraid it’s being protected by people who are looking out for their own interests and not the country’s, and that saddens me,” Phillips said.

By comparison, senior politicians in both parties are vocal in their desire to block any attempt to create a resignation policy for senior politicians. Both Pelosi, 83, and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), 89, have chafed at calls for Feinstein’s resignation.

“I don’t know what political agendas are going after Senator Feinstein like that,” Pelosi told reporters on Capitol Hill. I’ve never seen them go after a man who was sick in the Senate like that.”

“When Democrats brag about being in favor of women’s and senior issues, I don’t think they have an advantage over Republicans in that regard, but we don’t brag like they do,” Grassley, just three. months younger than Feinstein, told Iowa reporters Tuesday. “And now she’s being persecuted because she’s 89 years old.”

Democratic operatives privately acknowledge that concerns about Biden’s age and quickness of mind are a not-so-subtle factor in his low approval numbers. TO Pew Research Center A poll earlier this month found that just 31% of Americans would describe Biden as “mentally sharp” and just 27% would call him “inspirational.” Even among Democrats, only 56% called him mentally sharp and less than half called him inspiring.

Even if Democrats can somehow convince Republicans to allow a replacement for Feinstein on the Judiciary Committee, they don’t exactly have a spring chicken lined up for the job: 79-year-old Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) would take his place. . Cardin raised just $15,000 in the first quarter of the year, raising speculation that he could retire and make way for one of the youngest politicians on Maryland’s strong Democratic bench.

Don’t count on it. “I’ll let you know when I make a decision,” she told HuffPost. “Money is not going to be a problem for me.”