Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Abby Livingston. Flags are at half-staff across the country today to honor the life of Jimmy Carter, the oft-maligned one-term president who became a Nobel Peace Prize-winning humanitarian and diplomat after leaving the White House. (Somewhat unfairly blamed for the Iran hostage crisis, Carter is now one of the most popular ex-presidents in history.) There’s a poignancy to the timing of his passing, with memorial services—scheduled for January 8 at the National Cathedral—taking place just as Joe Biden, a young first-term senator at the time of Carter’s election to the presidency, departs the office. Of course, these gatherings always make for intriguing people-watching (and “power mourning,” as Mark Leibovich once wryly observed), especially when the capital’s high church hosts the ex-presidents club. Whether or not Donald Trump will be invited, or will attend, the once-and-future president released a gracious pair of statements, calling Carter “a truly good man.” One hopes this tactfulness will last.

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In tonight’s edition, news and notes on the Kay Granger situation—the so-called “case of the missing congresswoman,” which is more complicated than it’s been portrayed. But first, here’s my partner Dylan Byers, in conversation with John Heilemann, on what the Washington greenroom class can expect from CNN’s newish C.E.O., Mark Thompson, in the new year…

John Heilemann

Dylan Byers

Mark the Calendar

John Heilemann: Mark Thompson seems to be not as adrift as other recent leaders of CNN, but he doesn’t really seem to be wowing anybody over there with his clear, powerful, visionary, well-articulated vision of the post-linear digital future that CNN has to forge if it’s gonna survive. How’s it possible this is the same guy you have on your list of top losers this year? Dylan Byers: The New York Times came up with a digital innovation report, and Mark did a great job executing it when he was the C.E.O. He put the right people in the right place, understood what needed to happen, and gave his charges the tools to make sure it could actually happen. He deserves credit on that front. But The New York Times and CNN are two very different businesses with two very different audience bases. I think it’s far easier to find an audience of 10 million loyal subscribers who are sort of well-educated and have enough disposable income and want to subscribe to the Times as both a news source and a lifestyle choice than it is to inherit a global 24/7 news network that everyone has engaged with without having to pay for it directly. It’s difficult to take that massive audience of general-interest mass-media consumers and tell them they’re going to have to start paying for this—and add on to that, creating something that people are actually going to want to pay for, given the fact that news is a commodity. CNN’s value proposition is video, and particularly video from around the world in breaking-news moments. Short of that, what they’re actually trafficking in is just a commodity that anyone else can do. When a coup happens, or a bomb goes off, or a sentencing comes down, you can get that by a push notification from 1,000 different sources. How do you take CNN and say, We’re gonna take this general-interest product and turn it into something that people are willing to pay for? That’s a really, really, really hard thing to do. Oh, and by the way, you have to take a staff of 3,000 or 4,000 people who have been working in television, and whose muscle memory is in television, and tell them that they need to change how they behave. It’s just a much taller order than coming to The New York Times and saying, How do we modernize the crossword?

Now, on to the Granger situation…

We Need to Talk About Kay Granger

The disappearance of the 81-year-old congresswoman, who stopped casting votes in July and was recently revealed to be residing in an assisted living facility, has reignited a debate on Capitol Hill about how aging members can retire with dignity.

Abby Livingston

On the Saturday before Christmas, as Congress was racing to approve a new spending package to keep the government open, my phone started lighting up with messages about a different, more mysterious Washington scandal. Rep. Kay Granger, the long-serving Texas Republican and former chair of the House Appropriations Committee, hadn’t cast a vote since July. Her office never disclosed where she had disappeared to, or why she had missed so many votes. As it turned out, Granger has spent the past several months living in what the Dallas Express reported was a “local memory care and assisted living home.” Granger’s office issued a correction, of sorts, clarifying that the 14-term congresswoman was not in “memory care” but rather in a “retirement facility” that “provides memory care.” Allies were quick to note that Chris Putnam, the Dallas Express’s C.E.O., ran a failed primary campaign against Granger in 2020. Nevertheless, Granger’s son later confirmed to the conservative news website that his mother had been experiencing “some dementia issues late in the year.”

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Arguably, the grim news about Granger’s health, and the outrage surrounding Washington’s very real problem with aging lawmakers, are not entirely proportionate to her unique situation. Indeed, the congresswoman was in the middle of a reasonably traditional stepping-back from public life: In March, Granger announced that she planned to give up her gavel and that she wouldn’t seek reelection in November. “She’s retiring, she relinquished her gavel, her staff continued to work for the constituents of TX-12. Why do you need to keep kicking an old lady when she’s down?” one Granger source remarked to me. “Would you treat your mother like this?”

The Pinewood Box Caucus

Until somewhat recently, there was a code of omertà on Capitol Hill regarding the most geriatric lawmakers, who comprise a substantial portion of senior leadership. While younger members enter the House by bounding up the marble steps on the chamber’s east front, an elevator on the other side of the room empties out waves of members in their 70s and 80s as they make their way to the floor. It’s not unusual to see an older member wave to reporters, colleagues, and staff while cruising by on a mobility scooter or staffer-escorted wheelchair. Earlier this month, a photographer snapped a picture of a newly wheelchair-bound Rep. David Scott, the 79-year-old Democrat who recently lost his ranking position on the Agriculture Committee. “Who gave you the right to take my picture, asshole?” Scott shouted at him. (That would be the First Amendment…) There’s an off-color term for these senescent legislators: the Pinewood Box Caucus, the implication being that the only way they’ll leave the Capitol is in a coffin. Alas, in Congress, seniority is often a function of, well… seniority. Members in their eighth or ninth decade of life may risk overstaying their welcome, but it’s only after many terms of service that they finally gain real clout—ascending to wildly powerful committee positions where they can best help constituents and pass legacy bills. In Granger’s case, she reached the peak of her power as the first Republican woman to serve as Appropriations chair—possibly the most coveted job in the entire House—only in her last term. Had she retired earlier, she would have given up her shot at the gavel after a quarter-century of patiently waiting her turn. The gerontocracy was somewhat weakened this past month when certain Democrats, emboldened by forcing Joe Biden off the presidential ticket, and still frustrated by failed efforts to force Dianne Feinstein and Ruth Bader Ginsburg to retire, launched a multifront campaign to replace several committee ranking chairs with much younger colleagues. After an election in which the oldest-ever president will be replaced by the second-oldest president-elect, there’s more desire than ever for leadership to resemble the future of the country, rather than its past.

But there are logistical obstacles to early resignation. Granger, for example, is said to have felt up to the job at the beginning of a term, but found herself declining midway through. She was hoping to finish her term with a minimum of business on Capitol Hill, and was prepared to return to D.C. as needed, according to a Granger source. And while her district office had mostly closed up shop—a detail that was sensationalized by the Dallas Express—that’s standard operating procedure for retiring members. In brutal fashion, members are evicted from their offices as soon as the election is over—sometimes sooner. (The government tries to get members out of their district office space by the end of their term on January 3, to avoid taxpayers having to cover unnecessary rent. ) Sure, Granger could have resigned early, in the spirit of transparency—and maybe she should have. But Congressman-elect Craig Goldman, her successor, wouldn’t have been appointed in her place. In Texas, as in most states, law dictates that a House vacancy is filled via special election, not appointment. If Granger started to decline in September and subsequently resigned, her seat would likely have remained vacant through January 3, leaving her constituents without an advocate with executive branch agencies, helping to secure Social Security checks, veterans benefits, passports, etcetera. Especially with Elon Musk threatening to kill the F-35 fighter jet program—a major economic concern in Fort Worth—the district is arguably better off with a well-staffed, absent representative, than with no representative at all.

The Appropriators

The larger problem in Congress is not aging members, themselves, but the skewed incentive structure that encourages incumbents to become Hill lifers. Granger, after all, wasn’t the first elderly member to spend decades ascending the greasy pole to lead an Appropriations committee. Indeed, the late senators Robert Byrd (who died in office at age 92), Thad Cochran (who resigned at age 81, a year before he died), and Dianne Feinstein (who died in office, age 90) were also appropriators. Because the committee is so powerful and slots so coveted, once members get on Appropriations, they don’t leave. The other thorny issue is that most members do a poor job of retirement planning. It is the most avoided topic on the Hill, and members tend to charge ahead with their various agendas and projects as if they’ll live forever. Aging in office is often treated as a surprise development; Granger’s family seemed caught off-guard that her decline occurred before the end of her term. The other night, a Fort Worth pal wondered to me how much Granger’s last act will eclipse her accomplishments on her Wikipedia page. It’s not in dispute that Granger was a towering figure in Fort Worth and on the Hill, feared as much as she was beloved. But much like Feinstein, her final days in Congress are a humiliation. Unless other members get their own affairs in order, she won’t be the last.

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