This is an adapted excerpt from the December 17 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
Democrats have now made their choice for leadership of their committee for the 119th Congress. Representative Gerry Connolly of Virginia was elected by his caucus as the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee. Connolly, who is 74 and just diagnosed with esophageal cancer, has beaten back a challenge from 35-year-old progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Connolly’s victory comes amid calls for a new generation of leadership in the Democratic Party. But as Democratic Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia, a Connolly ally, put it: “Gerry is a young 74, despite the cancer.”
To be clear, I’m confident Connolly will do just fine as a Democrat in Oversight’s rankings. I understand the way seniority works in Congress, and there’s often a reason for it. But in light of everything that’s happened in the last decade, it feels like Democrats still have not learned a very important lesson.
When some liberals called for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s retirement from the Supreme Court in 2013, then-President Barack Obama invited the judge, who was at the time an 80-year-old cancer survivor, to a now-infamous lunch meeting. according to The New York Times.
Obama gently suggested that it was time for her to pass the torch before the 2014 midterm elections. Democrats were expected to lose the Senate in those elections, meaning replacing Ginsburg with another ideological liberal was likely impossible would be.
But Ginsburg refused to step aside. During a 2017 interview with the BBC, Ginsburg was asked how long she thought she could serve as a Supreme Court justice. “At my age, you have to take it year by year,” Ginsburg said.
‘I know I’m doing well. What will next year be? However, I am hopeful because my oldest colleague – the one who most recently retired, Judge John Paul Stevens – has resigned at the age of 90. So I still have a way to go.”
As expected, Republicans retook the Senate in 2014 and held it until 2021. Ginsburg died in September 2020 at the age of 87, three years after that interview and seven years after her meeting with Obama. Trump and the Republican Senate replaced her with Amy Coney Barrett, further cementing conservative control of the court for generations and easing the end of Roe v Wade.
You would think this would have been enough for Democrats to start taking the age issue seriously. But that wasn’t the case.
Last April, President Joe Biden announced he was running for re-election, even though he is the oldest man to ever serve as commander in chief. It wasn’t until more than a year later, when Biden gave a cataclysmic performance in his first debate with Trump, that Democrats changed course. After a heartbreaking, excruciating process just months after the election, Biden — to his credit — eventually stepped aside under enormous pressure. But he clearly did not do this under the circumstances that would have been best for Democrats to run a winning campaign.
So you would think that this would have been enough for Democrats to start taking the age issue seriously. But again, it wasn’t.
When Connolly won that vote, he did so in part because of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who scored votes for him. To her great credit, Pelosi has chosen to step aside and hand her job as House minority leader to a new generation of leaders. She also played a huge role in the successful effort this summer to push Biden to step aside, which was the right thing to do.
But now, just months later, Pelosi secured Connolly the Oversight job over the party’s young star — even as the 84-year-old Pelosi is recovering from hip surgery following a fall. It just feels like a moment of real madness.
Look, I know no one wants to think about their own mortality. There are many people who live very long, active lives well into their eighties, even nineties. But in general, this is a very risky venture for anyone. Democrats are not taking this issue seriously, and they should.
Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire has said she has not yet decided whether she will run for another six-year term in 2026, when she will be 79 years old. And again, this is nothing against Shaheen personally. But according to a Pew Research Center poll last year, 79% of Americans support age limits for politicians in Washington.
That’s an overwhelming majority in our polarized environment. Seventy-nine percent of Americans generally disagree something nowadays, but they agree on that. Democrats must listen.
Allison Detzel contributed.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
