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...
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.
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.
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.
So, what do we do?
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.
Put another way, what rules of the Senate benefit length of service over anything else?
https://www.senate.gov/about/traditions-symbols/seniority.ht...