Why do these people continue to be re-elected at all?
Surely there's some other (D) that could have replaced Feinstein a decade ago - but California keeps re-electing her? There's near unanimous agreement she "lost it" long ago - yet here she still is.
A mandatory retirement age is great and all... but maybe we need to figure out why people vote for someone nearly nobody wants in the first place. Just the "safe" vote? That can't be all of the story...
I think it's a combination of risk aversion and the cost of acquiring information.
Most people don't do extensive (or any) research before voting. They choose a candidate based on party affiliation or the information on TV. So for that majority of people, they will vote for a candidate whether or not the candidate is of sound mind. They assume other people have done the due diligence.
On the other hand, you have the parties themselves. The Democratic Party would rather have a senile Democrat than a non-senile Republican. And the Democratic Party is itself strongly influenced by other Democrat politicians who may even appreciate a senile coworker since that coworker can be more easily manipulated. So they have no incentive to risk losing that by suggesting or supporting a different Democratic candidate.
That in turn means new Democrat candidates will struggle to get the amount of support or funding which is necessary to publicize oneself enough that the complacent members of the public mentioned earlier could vote for them.
Only 24% of registered voters in California are Republican, so the election hinges on the Democratic primary. You don't get to a position in a political party where you can realistically run for and potentially win a US Senate seat by making a habit of attacking people in your own party. Those that do get ostracized long before they have that kind of juice, and the people who could potentially do it are not likely to risk the entire thing on running now when they could more safely run in another term or two, especially if they've already got a comfortable elected position.
So the answer on the inside is that nobody willing to run against her has the power to, and nobody with the power to is willing. On the outside, it's people who don't care who is running, they only care about the letter next to the name, so would never vote for a Republican or an Independent.
Is this true, or are these just benefits of someone who has been in the Senate for 30 years having good working relationships with 70 other Senators, and the branch new Senator being lucky to know one or two?
Put another way, what rules of the Senate benefit length of service over anything else?
I don't personally think age is really the problem - mental (and to some extent, physical) abilities are, however.
There's the good 80 years old, and then there's the bad 80 years old. We all know it when we see it... and we're watching it in real time in multiple places within our federal government right now.
We, as a country, are about to face this very same question again, as President Biden is expected to announce his re-election bid shortly. Are we OK with that as a country, given his obvious decline in the past few years? Objectively, and without red or blue coloring, he's not the Joe Biden of 2008.
This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but I don't want people born before Hitler rose to power to be in the government at all. I don't care how sharp you are and I don't care how progressive or conservative you are.
If you're old enough to have had strong opinions about LBJ when he was in office, your time has passed and we really don't need you in the Senate, or the White House, or anywhere else in government making decisions that will have impacts decades after you're gone.
There's this idea that someone shouldn't run against an incumbent. It goes against both parties. The boomer generation was a large group, they often see the world in a more common way (that world of the 50s and early 60s?), they still want to see themselves as being in power, even as they are all getting close to age 80 (made a typo here originally, I put 60 instead of 80). They don't want to give up. That's why these elderly politicians stay in power.
Surely there's some other (D) that could have replaced Feinstein a decade ago - but California keeps re-electing her? There's near unanimous agreement she "lost it" long ago - yet here she still is.
A mandatory retirement age is great and all... but maybe we need to figure out why people vote for someone nearly nobody wants in the first place. Just the "safe" vote? That can't be all of the story...