We Need a Congressional Injury Report

This new trend of lawmakers going absent for an extended period of time, leaving their constituents in the dark about their health and well-being, is both untenable and intolerable.

Aaron Judge, the star hitter for the New York Yankees, has been out of the lineup since the first week of June as he recovers from a stress fracture to one of his ribs. His timeline for return has major implications for the Yankees’ postseason hopes this year, so it is naturally the subject of endless scrutiny from sports media in New York City and beyond.

If only we knew as much about the medical status of our elected officials. Judge, despite his name, does not wield any official power on the American people’s behalf. Those who do are increasingly aged, infirm, and secretive about their health. Congress has been greatly weakened as an institution and a branch of government over the past few decades. Now it is increasingly diminished in a physical sense as well.

Five lawmakers have now died in office in this current Congress, with the latest being South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who suffered from an aortic dissection earlier this month. A handful of others have gone missing for extended periods of time as they deal with serious medical events. Even more of them are visibly declining, with multiple lawmakers stepping down or retiring after their physical and mental impairments became impossible to ignore.

There is no shortage of reforms that Congress could enact to strengthen itself. Perhaps the most useful one for the public would be to take a page from professional sports and create a congressional injury report. Baseball, basketball, and football teams are required by their leagues to publicly list when and why players are unable to compete at regular intervals. The nation’s legislature should do the same thing.

The American government is no stranger to covering up serious illnesses and incapacities. After suffering a stroke during his second term, President Woodrow Wilson was increasingly reliant on his wife Edith to carry out basic tasks for the last two years of his presidency. For a time, she even served as the sole conduit of communications between Wilson and his Cabinet. Congress and the states later ratified the 25th Amendment to provide mechanisms to remedy the possibility of presidential incapacity.

There is no mechanism to remove a Supreme Court justice other than impeachment. On at least one occasion, however, the justices have effectively stripped a colleague of power. Justice William O. Douglas suffered a major stroke on New Year’s Eve in 1974 that seriously damaged his memory and cognitive abilities. He refused to resign, however, because he held out hope that his replacement would be appointed by a Democratic president after the 1976 election.

While the public knew of the stroke and newspapers reported rumors about his mental condition, Douglas publicly insisted that he was capable of staying on the court. Only in 1979 with the publication of Bob Woodward’s book The Brethren did Americans learn the extent of his incapacity at the time. Douglas’s condition was so severe, Woodward reported, that the other justices secretly agreed to punt cases in which he cast the deciding vote to the following term—an ad hoc way of stripping him of his power until he finally announced his retirement in November 1975.

But what was........

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