McConnell is clearly still capable of doing the job most of the time. This could be a lot of things anywhere between rapidly progressively debilitating and easily manageable. He should almost certainly retire at the end of his current term. Feinstein is clearly not all there any longer. She can barely walk due to physical frailty and often doesn’t, she is clearly confused on what is happening on a regular basis, and her kid has already been given financial power of attorney.
“Oh, it awesome, Jellyman.”
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Canadian senate doesn’t really have any authority though.
Is there a max age for MPs?
The Canadian Senate has exercised little power historically. It is more similar to the British House of Lords than the US Senate in its role.
The only age restriction to be an MP in the House of Commons is the minimum age of 18. However the ridiculously generous pensions for these MP’s is a huge incentive to retire at a relatively young age!
HoL in the UK is basically a joke at this point in time.
The cronyism and outright corruption of the appointments is off the charts.
He’s a couple years behind Diane Feinstein. Just look at her today and that is probably Mitch in 3 years.
I’d surely say Feinstein is more incompetent than McConnell. McConnell clearly still has the “muscle memory” to deliver speeches and holds a lot of power from years of deals in Congress, but I sincerely think his Feinstein days are imminent and he’s not crafting policy anymore so much as being told what to do. If he sticks around much longer he’ll be embarrassing to the right.
First stages?
We’re actuaries - we can sort of estimate his demise pretty accuratley at this point. He had a good run. I still think he can make better decisions than some of the … oh wait… NM
I saw the clip of someone asking him for next prez run. OMG!!!
I’ve heard we have a test…
There’s different levels of too old.
65 is a nice time to retire.
70 is okay too.
75 is too old.
80 is way too old.
85 is stupidly too old.
90 is just wtf is wrong with us.
Then you can actuarially adjust this scale up and down by things like-- does your brain sometimes completely shut-down?
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From people in my life, seems like the decline after 75 or so gets really steep.
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That’s why I said a few year. That’s how it stared with Feinstein freezing up or repeating herself in committee meetings.
I don’t think this is necessarily the right way to think about it.
Our brains don’t have a central processing unit, designed for a particular kind of calculation, that slows down with age.
Instead, our cognition depends on a decentralized set of systems. And different kinds of cognitive performance is needed in different scenarios. I would include emotions as a product of cognition and experience.
If we want to look at geniuses for examples of this, we can look to, say, Heisenberg who needed help from Born and Bohr integrating his genius with existing physics. Or to Srinivasa Ramanujan, who needed help from GH Hardy.
Or comparing fields: theoreticians often do their best work in their 20s. But experimental scientists often do their best work in their 40s or 50s. And a lot of philosophers or theologians often don’t really hit their prime until their 40s at the earliest.
And I believe that emotional resiliency continues to improve well into old age. Emotion is not usually considered part of cognition, but I think this is a mistake.
This may be part of why Pelosi and McConnell are some of the most effective legislative leaders we have ever had in their 70s. I’m not sure anybody has dealt with Trump better than Pelosi has, and that is probably partly because of her age, not despite it.
I’m not convinced that McConnell’s apparent decline necessarily impairs his ability to function as majority leader. Again, our brains are decentralized and specialized, not a central CPU. This means, I believe, people can get legions that leave them of perfectly sound mind, unable to speak, but able to sing clearly.
Appearance is everything in politics. While on balance Mcconnell may be functioning ok it certainly doesn’t appear that way. I don’t expect anyone to force him to leave the senate but I do expect a leadership change.
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Agree.
After my son’s serious TBI, I read many books on brain function which was a topic I had never seriously explored before. In my son’s situation, he has almost totally lost the ability to create and retrieve new memories due to the serious blow he sustained to that part of his brain. Many other cognitive functions seem to be more or less the same.
I believe it is common for memory retrieval to deteriorate as you age. Not that I would want to but, at age 73, I don’t think I could rewrite the actuarial exams because of the level of memory recall required. And I need to work harder to remember the names of new people I meet.
In the case of Mitch and other elder politicians I do think that the memory function is one that often deteriorates. The older politicians are more apt to struggle to find the word they want when they don’t have briefing notes or, in the case of Biden, need his staff to correct afterwards what he meant to say. This is possibly the most noticeable type of mental deterioration in the 75+ crowd?
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I think people just accumulate wealth, connections, seniority, and fame, over the course of their lives. And when in power, they don’t typically lose it. And this is basically true of everyone. We all get promoted for excellence, but rarely demoted later for incompetence.
Theoretical mathematicians are the biggest exception because their work stands on its own.
Rarely demoted, often laid off…
Relevant.
The GOP can handle this. No reason to make laws.
Wondering why this requires amendments. You people know he will die, eventually?