Where retirement goes to die: Inside America’s geriatric government

The TOI correspondent from Washington: Mystery surrounds the health condition of powerful US Senator Mitch McConnell, whose prolonged absence from the Senate after a hospitalization has once again revived an old Washington joke: the United States Senate is less a legislative chamber than an elite retirement community that can still shake the world. While political gadabouts like Laura Loomer are already pronouncing McConnell, 84, “brain dead” even before he was loaded on to an ambulance stretcher this week for another round of hospitalisation, his current status has prompted another round of national soul-searching over a peculiar feature of American democracy: the world's most powerful legislature is also one of its oldest. The median age of US senators in the current Congress is 64. More than half of senators are older than 65, a quarter older than 75.