https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/23/politics/trump-cabinet-vacanc...

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/11/politics/temps-and-vacancies/...

https://time.com/4703304/why-president-trump-struggling-to-s...

The machine runs itself. I wonder how much ability any elected official has to move the machine in one direction or the other. Probably not much, at least in any meaningful way.

The President also has a fair amount of power too, over seat appointments, usage of Executive Orders, and one we haven't seen since President Andrew Jackson, the ability to willfully ignore things that the President is suppose to do (President Jackson famously ignored the outcome of Worcester v. Georgia to the peril of the Cherokee)

Sometimes government efficiency is a symptom of a something worse than government inefficiency.

Now it makes no sense other than being an obstacle, and therefore one more thing in the way of people actually running the government.

To me, this nihilistic cynicism is self-fulfilling. If the population believes and furthermore accepts, as you do, that politics is inherently irredeemable and corrupt, then that is the politics we will get.

Even if a system is riddled with problems, it is the obligation of a citizen to at least give a damn and expect more from the system.

Additionally, it is ridiculous to ridicule people for trying to fix issue #1 just because there are 10 issues. We can call for fixing, through mere voting or more strictly through law, that legislators are to be mentally fit and retire when they are past a traditional retirement age.

We can also be demanding/expecting our legislators to work for our communities, or lobby/petition to change House elections to Ranked-choice, to lobby for campaign finance reform, or whatever changes you feel are necessary to the structure of our governments.

Source: https://fiscalnote.com/blog/how-old-118th-congress

For most people with Alzheimer's — those who have the late-onset variety — symptoms first appear in their mid-60s or later.

Source: https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/what-are-signs-alzheimers-dis....

So, yeah. Of course there are individuals in Congress on Alzheimers drugs.

Edit: Oh, and Mitch has frozen up for a second time: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-66663389.

There really should be a baseline health test that people in public office must pass.

edit: and staffers are telling her how to do her job: https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/dianne-feinstein-aides-age...

It's called an election.

The problem is that people either don't bother to show up and vote, or vote for candidates purely by party affiliation or campaign marketing dollars.

The first part leads directly to the second. Primary elections are low-turnout affairs, but the extremes of each party are far likelier to participate in them than moderates. We get bad choices in general elections because we abdicate nomination power to nutsos by not voting in primaries.

People only get one choice, so view it as a binary choice on party lines.

Give people a transferrable vote and you'll see parties putting more than one candidate forward with different focuses. Voter's might actually stand a chance of getting what they want rather than voting against something they don't like.

The historical makeup and achievements of this body reflect these requirements.

Also, a rather important update tacked to the bottom:

> After this story went viral, the pharmacist interviewed provided an additional statement clarifying his remarks. “I am not aware of any member that actually has Alzheimer’s and would certainly not disclose any such information if I did know.” He added, “patient privacy is a very serious matter that I am committed to upholding.”

> He said that he was “[s]peaking very broadly about disease states that the general American population have and that it also applies to everyone including members of the U.S. House and Senate since they are also people just like you and I.”

It's an interesting question whether this is ethical. On the one hand, representative democracy requires competent representatives, and knowing they have cognitive impairment is really important information for the whole country. On the other hand, I absolutely don't trust a random pharmacist to decide which personal, extremely sensitive information is important enough that they should be able to non-consensually share it.

Agreed that a random pharmacist, with unknown motivations, should be disclosing any of this. The doctor who prescribed the meds should be (a) encouraging the representative to resign; (b) disclosing it to a proper authority; (c) disclosing to the news media if nothing is done.

There have to be tradeoffs. If you still want privacy, have it, but then you get to stay just a normally wealthy, powerful person and can live out your days sipping mai tais on tropical beaches and doing hookers and blow every night, but not being put in charge of a military with the power to glass half the planet if it wanted to.

And if pharmacists choose to share what they know, wouldn't that drive people to get their prescriptions filled another way (fake IDs, assumed identities, black market, cross-border/mail-order) or just not get medicine for fear of a medical secret being announced?

A better alternative: We should stop electing people who are clearly having a hard time thinking.

* Drafters of legislation

* Debaters of policy

* Thought leaders for the nation at large, or for any subset of it, including rather perversely, Congress

* Experts of any sort on issues that matter at a national level

So basically, there is no reason Alzheimer's medication is incompatible with their job duties.

Calling them "legislators", or "lawmakers" is misleading. Those are just one way they can do their job. Yes, they are uniquely empowered to write laws, but blocking laws their constituents don't want, or even better, repealing laws their constituents don't want are also things that they should be doing. Everything should be secondary at best to representing their constituency's interests.

Maybe she should have been taking her meds.