The Hubris of Staying in Office
Public office is a trust, not a possession. When elected or appointed officials can no longer reliably perform the basic functions of the offices they hold, remaining in power is not a mark of dedication; it is often an act of hubris that deprives the public of the representation or judicial service it is owed.
The core problem
The recurring issue is not simply age, illness, or disability. Illness deserves compassion, and treatment deserves respect. The problem arises when an officeholder remains in power despite prolonged incapacity or disappearance from public duties, while staff, family, or loyal allies ask the public to accept vague assurances instead of actual accountability.
That is where hubris enters the picture. Hubris is the belief that a title is more important than the actual performance of the office, that the official’s continued occupancy of the seat matters more than whether constituents or the country are receiving functioning representation.
Mitch McConnell and the right to know
Mitch McConnell, the senior United States senator from Kentucky and the longest-serving Senate party leader in history, has been hospitalized for more than three weeks — since June 14 — after emergency responders were dispatched to his home for an “unconscious” person and CPR was reportedly underway for cardiac arrest. His office has provided very limited public information about why he was admitted on June 14, even as statements maintained that he remained engaged in Senate business.
At some point, the issue stops being personal privacy and becomes democratic legitimacy. A state is entitled to senators who can visibly appear, deliberate, answer questions, and vote. To senators who can represent them and fulfill their constitutional duties. When a senator is hospitalized for weeks with no candid disclosure of functional capacity, voters are asked to accept representation as a legal fiction rather than a living reality.
Congress is not an FMLA workplace
A useful legal distinction sharpens the normative problem. Ordinary employees may have rights under statutes like the Family and Medical Leave Act. Members of Congress do not hold ordinary jobs. They hold public office on behalf of constituents, funded by taxpayers, and the constitutional system offers no general entitlement to disappear for months while still claiming to be fully serving.
The Constitution sets qualifications for office and gives each chamber authority over its proceedings, but it does not require a representative or senator to attend a minimum number of votes before a seat is vacated. That design gap means that prolonged absence often produces “representation by staff,” in which aides continue constituent services and issue reassuring statements while the actual officeholder is absent, impaired, or invisible.
Tom Kean Jr., John Fetterman, and missing representation
Representative Tom Kean Jr., a Republican from New Jersey’s 7th District, disappeared from public view for nearly four months earlier this year and missed more than 140 House roll-call votes before returning and disclosing that he had been hospitalized and treated for depression. Treatment for depression is not a scandal. The democratic problem was the prolonged silence and the expectation that constituents should simply tolerate the absence of an accountable representative while the office gave only vague explanations.
Senator John Fetterman, the junior senator from Pennsylvania, has likewise raised difficult questions about the line between compassion for health struggles and the public’s need for functioning representation. Since taking office in 2023, he has missed about 13 percent of all Senate roll-call votes, roughly 200 out of 1,542, and in 2024 alone he missed 58 votes, about 21 percent. Reports in 2025 also described him as having missed 44 of 45 committee hearings during one stretch, amid renewed scrutiny over his mental health and attendance.
None of this means that depression or recovery should disqualify a person from office. It does mean that public officials cannot treat sustained nonattendance as a private matter when the office belongs to the public. A senator is not merely a person with a title; a senator is one of one hundred votes in a national legislature.
Feinstein and the contradiction of public incapacity
Dianne Feinstein, then the senior United States senator from California, granted power of attorney to her daughter in 2023 while continuing to serve in the Senate. That arrangement highlighted an uncomfortable contradiction: in her private affairs, legal authority had been delegated because of diminished capacity concerns, yet in public she remained a voting senator with enormous responsibility over federal law and judicial confirmations.
Feinstein died in office later that year. Her final months in the Senate intensified a broader question that Washington repeatedly evades: if an official needs others to manage significant personal decisions, what level of candor and institutional response should the public expect before that same official continues to exercise sovereign public power?
Kay Granger and office by absence
Kay Granger, a Republican representative from Texas and former chair of the House Appropriations Committee, had not cast a House floor vote for months before reporters discovered she was living in an assisted-living or memory-care facility in Fort Worth. Her office had not publicly disclosed that arrangement, even though she remained a sitting member of the House of Representatives while missing major votes and effectively disappearing from public life.
Granger later left office at the end of her term, but the damage to public trust was already done. Her case demonstrated how easily a seat can be occupied in name only, with party leadership, staff, and institutional inertia allowing a representative to remain in place even after meaningful service appears to have stopped.
Presidents and justices are not exempt
The same pattern appears in the presidency and on the Supreme Court. Joe Biden ran for reelection in 2024 with the expectation of serving into his mid-80s if he won a second term, while Donald Trump also sought and won another full term that will leave him in office until about age 82. The public was often told that asking about age, stamina, and capacity was impolite, but those are unavoidable questions when the office at stake is the presidency.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an associate justice of the Supreme Court, declined to retire in 2013 or 2014 when President Barack Obama and a Democratic-controlled Senate likely could have confirmed a successor with a similar jurisprudential outlook. Convinced that her voice on the Court was indispensable and that no one else could carry forward her work in quite the same way, she remained on the bench through repeated bouts of cancer and died in office in 2020, after which her seat was filled by a justice with a sharply different judicial philosophy.
Clarence Thomas, now the longest-serving current justice, has remained on the Court while facing sustained ethics criticism over undisclosed gifts and luxury travel, and commentary around his tenure has emphasized his longevity on the bench as part of his legacy. He has openly signaled a desire to stay long enough to set the record as the longest-serving justice in Supreme Court history, treating that personal milestone as a central part of his legacy.
The ideological valence differs across these examples, but the underlying instinct is the same: the belief that one’s personal tenure is more important than institutional continuity, public trust, or the predictable transfer of power.
A better norm
A healthier democratic norm would be simple: when an elected or appointed official knows that hospitalization, incapacity, or disappearance from duties is likely to last for months rather than days or weeks, resignation should be understood as a duty, not a disgrace. That principle would not punish illness. It would respect the public nature of the office and the rights of voters to actual, functioning representation.
No one is entitled to a Senate seat, a House district, a Supreme Court chair, or the presidency as a matter of personal legacy. Those offices belong to the public. The moment an officeholder begins to treat continued occupancy as a private right rather than a public trust, hubris has replaced service.
