The Republicans won the narrowest House majority in a century in November, and the Democratic gerontocracy has widened it since. Republicans are struggling to pass a “big, beautiful bill” that would take away health care from millions of poor people as some of their members push back against the bill for not throwing enough people off Medicaid, while others in the Josh Hawley caucus are pushing for the final version of this bill to be a little less evil to poor people than a significant chunk of the GOP wants. With each Democratic death, passing whatever bill the GOP comes up with becomes easier, as their majority grows and they can sustain more defections.
There are fifteen House Representatives aged 80 or older, and just three of them are Republicans. There are forty members over the age of 75, and just eleven of them are in the GOP. This is a dynamic that is largely confined to the aged Democratic Party.
Every single chart you can find in politics and economics shows that things started going haywire under Reagan. www.nbcnews.com/data-graphic…
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— Jacob Weindling (@jakeweindling.bsky.social) May 21, 2025 at 8:48 AM
Baby boomers and Gen X are overrepresented in the House, while Millennials are underrepresented, which is a really great example of the overall dynamics across all politics today. NBC News found that while boomers are 28.3 percent of the population, they hold 38.8 percent of seats in the House. Gen X is 27.2 percent of the population, but 41.6 percent of the House. Meanwhile, my age cohort of millennials are the largest proportion of the US population of the three generations at 30.3 percent, but comprise just 15.3 percent of the House.
Some vote blue no matter who types are upset today at people pointing out the inherent problem with having a bunch of people in positions of immense power who are older than the average human lifespan, but they are just revealing themselves to be members of a fan club more than a political party. If Rep. Connolly hadn’t been elected by his fellow House gerontocrat supporters over the party’s biggest young rising star to a very important position he even eventually admitted he could not properly serve in, I wouldn’t be writing this. I may not have even written “Democratic gerontocrats plan to keep their death grip on power” last week. This is a serious crisis of the Democratic Party’s own making, and it keeps happening, and given the vast number of aging members of the party, it should keep happening because Father Time is undefeated no matter how much the Democratic gerontocracy wants to pretend otherwise.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg clung on to power until her death and it helped deliver Donald Trump a majority on the Supreme Court. Dianne Feinstein missed dozens of votes during her decline en route to dying in office. Just two months into the legislative calendar, John Fetterman, reportedly struggling with the effects of a stroke, missed 18 percent of votes and continues to do so to today. Joe Biden, recently diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer, is the avatar for the Democratic gerontocracy’s literal death grip on power, as his stubbornness and resistance to dropping out of a race he could not run was the biggest factor in Kamala Harris’s loss in November.
The Democratic gerontocracy is a genuine threat to democracy, because they have proven themselves incapable of truly resisting the GOP’s rabid desire to dismantle it, all while they keep the next few generations of much more representative Democrats out of positions of power. The gerontocrats are either too old, senile or invested in their GOP “friends” as Chuck Schumer says to do the task of representing their constituents to the degree they ask to be represented. Many vote blue no matter who types recoil at any kind of disrespect shown to the party’s aged members, but those of us upset with the gerontocracy are just showing the Democrats the same level of respect they show to everyone else. 84-year-old Rep. Jim Clyburn so helpfully demonstrated to the Wall Street Journal how they see their role, indignantly responding when asked whether he would step down, “what do you want—me to give up my life?” For House members like Clyburn, the plan genuinely seems to be to die in office, and that our country’s increasingly bleak future is for future generations to fix after they’re gone.
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