Ginsburg, Feinstein, Biden
CALIFORNIA SEN. DIANNE Feinstein, age 89, is completely debilitated. She pursued and won reelection in 2018, despite rumors she was in mental decline, and since then those rumors have turned into widely reported facts. On top of her already fading faculties, the New York Times reported yesterday, this year she suffered an attack of post-shingles encephalitis, a previously unreported part of a medical crisis that took her out of the Senate for more than two months. Now she is back in the Senate, or at least her breathing body is; in a brief conversation with Slate's Jim Newell and other reporters this week, she seemed not to be aware that she'd even been away.
Feinstein remains the deciding vote on the Senate Judiciary Committee and an essential part of the Democrats' tiny majority in the Senate overall. While she was out with shingles, Republicans refused to allow Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to swap in a substitute on the Judiciary Committee, giving the minority party the power to stall judicial nominees until she returned. The first day she was supposed to be back, Feinstein missed even more votes, because she was still too frail to show up for a full schedule.
President Joe Biden, age 80, is nine years younger than Feinstein—or, as he starts running for reelection, only four years younger than Feinstein was when she decided to run for reelection in 2017. If Biden wins, he'll be 86 by the end of his second term.
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