Since she was first elected in 1990 as Washington, DC’s, nonvoting delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) has fiercely defended the civil service in Congress. Nearly a quarter of her constituents work for the federal government. So after the second inauguration of President Donald Trump, as Elon Musk’s US DOGE Service targeted agency after agency with layoffs, smears, and all manner of corner-cutting, Norton was a logical person to host a March town hall on this unprecedented attack.
The event, promotional materials said, would “give Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton the chance to speak directly with the District of Columbia federal workforce and provide resources.” The promise of a real dialogue with the congresswoman, however, proved to be a bit of hype.
Conducted over the phone, the event had plenty of town, but no hall. As the host, Norton was spectral at best. She read some opening remarks, but when participants directed questions at her, union reps or a democracy activist provided most of the answers. “Congresswoman, I’d be happy to jump in” was a typical intervention during her many unexplained silences.
A caller identifying herself as a fourth-generation Washingtonian thanked “Lady Eleanor Holmes” for “fighting for us” and said, “We’re just so blessed to have her.” After describing some of the indignities of living as a disenfranchised DC voter, she asked Norton how people could help her fight for DC statehood.
“Congresswoman? Are you still with us?” the moderator asked after fifteen seconds had passed. Then an additional ten seconds went by before Norton reappeared with a 59-word response, of which 13 were “uh.”
“I always love to make sure DC is treated the same as states,” she said, stumbling through a word salad. “I do have a constituent service office to help constituents. They are here to help. Thank you for your support of statehood.”
Norton’s uncertain performance did not escape notice. “It turns out Rep. Norton defers all responses to her constituents’ questions, to someone else,” a YouTube commenter complained. “Not what I expected.”
Perhaps unwittingly, the commenter was speaking for many of the 700,000 residents of the District of Columbia. Norton, who will be 88 in June, is the oldest member of the House of Representatives, and as the town hall illustrated, it shows. “With all due respect to Del. Norton,” says Wendy Hamilton, a DC minister who unsuccessfully challenged Norton in the 2022 Democratic primary, “I am just not certain that she is the best positioned generationally to meet the moment.”
Norton, however, insists that she remains one of the most effective members of the House. “Throughout my career in Congress I’ve passionately defended home rule and DC’s right to govern itself,” she said in an email. “I’m fully able to continue doing so effectively—including against attacks from President Trump.”
“With all due respect to Del. Norton, I am just not certain that she is the best positioned generationally to meet the moment.”
Broaching the subject of the advanced age of a member of Congress is still considered unseemly. But the issue has become unavoidable over the past year, especially after Democrats’ unprecedented efforts to pressure then 81-year-old President Joe Biden to drop out as the party’s presidential nominee, after he appeared bewildered during his June debate with Trump. In March this year, a local news outlet discovered Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas), now 82, living in a memory care facility, having slipped away from Congress without much notice. And of course, until her death in 2023, the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) descended into dementia in full view of the country.
“There’s no question that somewhere between six and a dozen of my colleagues are at a point where they’re … I think they don’t have the faculties to do their job,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) recently told Politico.
The gerontocracy is spurring some younger activists to action. California Democrats will consider a resolution, introduced by a 36-year-old party member, to explore setting a mandatory retirement age for state candidates at the party’s convention later this month. David Hogg, a 25-year-old vice chair at the Democratic National Committee, recently announced plans to raise $20 million through an outside group to fund primary challenges against some of the party’s oldest members.
Those efforts, however, may be too late to save the District of Columbia. Thanks to a constitutional anomaly, residents of the Nation’s Capital pay federal taxes but have no voting representation in Congress. In 1970, District residents won the right to elect a nonvoting delegate to Congress. And, in 1973, the passage of the Home Rule Act allowed city residents to elect a mayor and a 13-member city council. But Congress still must approve DC’s budget and all its legislation.
As a result, the District of Columbia is frequently subject to the whims of members of Congress hoping to score points with folks back home. For instance, Congress forced charter schools on the city in the 1990s. A longstanding budget rider prevents the city from spending its own funds on abortion services. Over the past two years, members of Congress have even tried to ban the use of automated traffic enforcement like red-light cameras in DC, a strictly local concern if there ever was one.
But DC residents have never needed a forceful advocate in Congress more than they do right now. Republicans in both houses have introduced legislation to repeal the DC Home Rule Act and return the District’s management to Congress. Trump also has threatened to seize control of the city. He said in February that local officials are “not doing the job—too much crime, too much graffiti, too many tents on the lawns…we can’t have that in Washington, DC.” At the end of March, he issued an executive order creating a federal task force to oversee District affairs.
Now, there’s a much more immediate crisis. As Congress scrambled to pass a continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown in March, it failed to include a few sentences to allow the District to keep spending a previously approved budget, most of which consists of the city’s own funds. For the past two decades, Congress has included such language in continuing resolutions. But this year, the resolution treated DC like a federal agency and cut its spending levels to that of the previous fiscal year. If not corrected, the District will be forced to slash $1 billion from its current budget, a draconian measure that will require immediate, large cuts to public schools, police, and the Metro system.
DC Mayor Muriel Bowser has already imposed a government hiring freeze and limits on overtime and is making plans to furlough city employees. The cuts could affect police coverage for major events this summer, including a military parade for Trump’s 79th birthday on June 14, which happens to coincide with the US Army’s 250th anniversary. “After this week,” Bowser wrote in an angry post on X in late April, “if the House has still not passed the POTUS-approved DC budget fix for FY25, we will be forced to finalize plans and make real cuts to deal with a fake budget crisis.”
One of the grim realities of addressing this “fake” crisis is that the city’s only elected representative in Congress is Norton. The DC delegate, like those from Guam and Puerto Rico, can introduce legislation and vote in committee, but not on final bills. Nonetheless, as Norton herself has proven during her 35 years on the job, the role is not without power.
A legendary civil rights icon, she had worked for Bayard Rustin on the staff of the 1963 March on Washington. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed the Yale law school graduate as the first woman to head the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. When the first DC delegate, Rep. Walter Fauntroy stepped down after twenty years on the job, Norton left her post as a Georgetown law professor and succeeded him.
Since then, she has used her sheer force of will to advance DC statehood and fend off attacks on the District’s self-governance. She has won some victories, too, such as the creation of the 1999 Tuition Assistance Grant that provides up to $10,000 to help DC college students attend public universities or HBCUs outside the city.
A video that went viral 17 years ago shows why Norton is so revered in DC. While she was speaking on the House floor about a DC voting rights bill, a colleague interrupted and asked her to yield her time. “I will not yield, sir!” she thundered back. “The District of Columbia has spent 206 years yielding to people who would deny them the vote! I yield you no ground.”
Today, however, that forceful voice has been greatly diminished just when the city needs it the most. Many critics—mostly off the record— have blamed Norton for contributing to DC’s current budget crisis. “She was conspicuously absent when all this was going down,” says Stephen Jackson, a former head of the DC Ward 6 Republicans. He notes that Norton has been able to “slide under the radar until something big like this happens, and now it’s like, oh.”
In early March, Norton introduced an amendment to fix the budget issue. But inexplicably, she failed to testify in its favor before the House Rules Committee, the rare forum where she could have made her case directly to Republican colleagues, many of whom didn’t seem to understand the gravity of the city’s situation. “Even the guy from Guam testified about an amendment that he had,” Jackson notes. But to be effective in this venue, he continues, “You have to be sharp. You have to stick up for what you want to say.” The amendment failed.
Jackson observes that the Democrats’ aging problem probably contributed to the DC budget crisis in the first place. Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), 77, and Rep. Sylvester Turner (D-Texas), both died within a week of each other in March, right before the close vote on the continuing resolution. Turner, a 70-year-old freshman, had replaced Rep. Shelia Jackson Lee, who died in office in July at the age of 74.
After lobbying by senators from surrounding jurisdictions, notably former Norton intern Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.), the Senate passed a corrective bill to fix the DC budget on March 14. Trump supported its passage. “The House should take up the DC funding ‘fix’ that the Senate has passed, and get it done IMMEDIATELY,” he wrote on Truth Social. “We need to clean up our once beautiful Capital City and make it beautiful again.”
“We should use this opportunity to make certain that DC isn’t wasting money on ideas like DEI or reparations…to make sure that DC is spending its money to Make DC Great Again, instead of on their usual woke agenda.”
The House, however, left for its Easter recess without scheduling a vote, and there’s no sign Republican leadership plans to bring it up any time soon. Some GOP members have seized on the budget crisis to meddle even more in DC affairs. “We should use this opportunity to make certain that DC isn’t wasting money on ideas like DEI or reparations,” House Freedom Caucus chairman Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) said in an April statement. He suggested using Congress’ oversight authority “to make sure that DC is spending its money to Make DC Great Again, instead of on their usual woke agenda.”
Norton declined my request for an in-person interview. Her office also did not answer a long list of questions about her job performance, and whether she had met personally with any of her GOP colleagues to push the DC budget fix. Instead, a spokeswoman emailed a statement from Norton. “I have one response to people with doubts about my ability to serve,” she wrote. “Watch me.”
As with so many elderly people, the first public signs of Norton’s decline started with a fender-bender. In 2015, as she tried to park her car on Capitol Hill, she pulled straight into an angled space, hitting a neighboring car in the process. Failing to properly navigate the space, Norton just walked away. A couple of wags in a nearby office building captured the episode on video. “If she parks like that,” one can be heard saying, “she should not be a member of Congress anymore.”
After the video went viral, Norton promised to take remedial driving classes. Her driving did not improve. In September 2018, according to a police report, she pulled an illegal U-turn in a Capitol Hill neighborhood one night and hit a DC police cruiser, a previously unreported accident that caused more than $1,000 in damage. Norton’s office told me she no longer drives.
The 2018 car accident took place during an election year. By then already 81 years old, she also drew her first serious primary challenge in almost a decade. Former Obama administration official Kim Ford, then 37, won the support of the city’s popular attorney general and raised more than $100,000 for the race. (Ford did not respond to requests for an interview.) She won nearly a quarter of the vote, more than any recent challenger, but Norton’s lock on the seat has remained secure. She’s been reelected three times since then without a serious challenger, garnering nearly 90 percent of the vote. That record says a great deal about city voters but should also be viewed as an epic failure of local media.
I’m a longtime District resident who used to report on the city government. I pay attention to DC politics. Even so, I hadn’t fully appreciated just how much Norton had declined until 2021 when she spoke at my son’s high school graduation. She had trouble pronouncing the school’s name and told incoherent tales of working in the federal bureaucracy. The charter school administration clearly had expected better. And why wouldn’t they? Until very recently, local media have all but ignored Norton’s decline. After the speech, I discovered that her growing frailty and emerging cognitive issues were something of an open secret among local politicos and journalists, but no one wanted to broach the subject publicly. One explained that her status as a civil rights legend made her untouchable.
Periodically, red flags about Norton’s condition have broken through. For instance, in September 2021, a group of zebras escaped from a Maryland farm and captured local attention. While authorities were trying to round up the liberated animals, Norton’s office issued a truly bizarre press release: “Local news has reported that the zebras were let loose on Saturday or Sunday of last weekend, a period of time during which I was enjoying quiet time at home with family,” Norton’s release said. “My alibi is solid but given my career of fighting for statehood for the District, which includes years of explaining the importance of having consent of the governed, and given my recent opposition to fences, I can understand why the charge was made. I hope the owners find the zebras and that all involved live long, full lives.”
Was this some odd lapse? Was it an attempt at humor? Her spokesperson said the release was obviously a joke. Many DC residents, however, were left scratching their heads.
Former DC councilmember Mary Cheh told me that the last time Norton ran for reelection, “there were conversations. Should we really be voting for her again? Frankly, if you see her get up to a podium, you can see that she’s suffering from physical difficulties. She’s getting up there.” DC pols, she said, have hoped that Norton would “see the writing on the wall” and step down, while helping to identify a good replacement. But, Cheh said, “she doesn’t seem to be moving in that direction.”
What’s notable about Norton’s recent tenure though, aren’t the car crashes or the weird zebra press releases, but just how absent she has been from public life. Last year, she raised more than $200,000 for a virtually nonexistent reelection campaign. She skipped the DC Pride parade, a command performance for local officials, and her usual meeting with the Ward 8 Democrats. She barely put up any campaign signs.
Kelly Mikel Williams, a local advisory neighborhood commissioner who’d worked in the Clinton administration, ran against Norton in 2022 and 2024. He said some DC residents were upset with him for raising Norton’s age in the campaign. “You can’t make that issue with Joe Biden at 81 and not make it with her at 87,” he told me. “They would say she’s gonna die in that office.” And yet, he said, no one wanted to be responsible for pushing her out.
During the recent election, Norton’s opponents say she refused to participate in any debates. One of her few media appearances made it clear why. In May 2024, Team Rayceen, the production company of local LGBTQ personality Rayceen Pendarvis, featured Norton in a series of online candidate interviews. Norton got the softball questions in advance. Even so, she appeared to read the answers from a script.
“I am Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton,” she said when asked to describe her background. “I have been the congresswoman for the District of Columbia since ’91. I am running for reelection again this term. I am a native Washingtonian, and I guess that’s the long and short of it.” She repeated the questions the way a middle school student follows a writing rubric. Question: “Tell us about the importance of the position you are running for.” Answer: “The importance of the position is that I would represent the people of the District of Columbia.”
“I was surprised by the lack of engagement on substance. There were a number of one-word responses. In one interview, you can hear somebody whispering things to her.”
Erin Palmer, a former DC advisory neighborhood commissioner who ran for the DC council in 2022, was involved in the producing interviews. She says Norton’s performance left Team Rayceen stunned. In the end, they managed to coax about three minutes of talk out of the congresswoman. “The collective consensus was like, ‘What just happened?’” Palmer told me. “I was surprised by the lack of engagement on substance. There were a number of one-word responses. In one interview, you can hear somebody whispering things to her.”
Palmer even half-expected Norton’s staff to call and ask them not to air the interview. But Norton returned for another one in August and her performance was similarly lackluster.
The videos weren’t widely viewed. If they had been, the Jewish magazine Moment might have reconsidered the optics of giving Norton an award in November named after the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Norton is the same age Ginsburg was when she died in 2020. The trailblazing justice had famously refused to retire during the Obama administration, and her legacy was badly tarnished when her death allowed Trump to secure the court’s conservative majority with the appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
This year, Norton has served on the DOGE subcommittee, a grandstanding platform stocked with some of the House’s loudest firebrands from both parties. She can’t compete. Consider her recent appearance at a March hearing called “Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the heads of NPR and PBS Accountable.”
Reading from a script, Norton plodded through her remarks, mangled the names of witnesses, and chuckled as she described a DC student participating on a local public radio quiz show as if she’d never heard the story before. Her comments dragged on so long that committee chair Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) let a witness answer Norton’s last question with a surprisingly gentle reminder that the congresswoman’s time was up.
While I was reporting this story, everyone from reporters to political activists to ordinary voters told me that Norton’s condition didn’t matter because she can’t vote in the House anyway. But as the recent budget crisis has proven, having a functioning DC delegate is more critical than many city residents seem to realize.
As lobbyist and former Rep. Tom Downey (D-NY) explains, “A really good member of Congress, regardless of whether they’re voting on the floor, still has committee responsibilities and assignments. It is much more a relationship job than how many bills you’ve gotten passed.”
Downey worked with Norton in the House and now is one of her constituents. He says that while she may not have the same powers as other members, she could still be networking and building coalitions to advance her agenda. But it’s not clear that Norton is doing much glad-handing these days, even when she appears in person. (Witness this video she made with WMATA General Manager Randy Clarke last year to talk about transit infrastructure.)
Transit service in the nation’s capital is thriving thanks to @wmata and investments from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
To celebrate #InfrastructureDecade, @wmataGM Randy Clarke joined Ranking Member @EleanorNorton to discuss how the BIL is keeping the momentum going. pic.twitter.com/rzXkNcdS0U
— Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure (@TransportDems) May 24, 2024
In contrast, the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, 52, has been relentlessly working a charm campaign both in Congress and at the White House to protect DC. When Trump was elected last year, Bowser made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago in an effort to shield the District from some of the president’s baser instincts. Observers credit her with helping temper Trump’s DC executive order, which they suspect could have been much worse. Norton’s office did not respond to questions about whether she has asked for a meeting with the president.
The congresswoman has shown little public recognition of her limitations. In late April, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), announced that his cancer had returned and that he was stepping down as ranking Democrat on the powerful House Oversight Committee. An Axios reporter caught Norton on Capitol Hill and asked if, as the committee’s next most senior Democrat, she was considering running to replace him. “I may,” she replied. Her office quickly backtracked. “After consideration and discussion with House leadership,” Norton said in a written statement to Axios that evening, “I have decided not to pursue the ranking member position on the House Oversight Committee.”
Norton may not have the national profile of, say, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the 85-year-old former House Speaker. But her role in the current DC budget crisis is yet another stark example of the hazards of congressional gerontocracy, where succession plans seem to be anathema, particularly among Democrats. A few people involved in District politics told me Norton has long rebuffed their efforts to persuade her to retire with grace.
But Norton still has her defenders. Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, who served as Norton’s chief of staff for a decade and remains close to her, told me, “This is her decision and I trust her to make it.” (In DC political circles, Brazile was long seen as a likely candidate to succeed Norton, but Brazile, now 65, says she has no interest in the job.)
“She may not be able to do the electric slide the way that she used to,” says Phillip Pannell, a longtime DC activist. “But in terms of her being able to speak out about what’s going on on Capitol Hill, she’s about just as into the fight as the Democratic Party is right now.”
E. Gail Anderson Holness, chair of the DC Ward 1 Democrats, is one of many people who have unsuccessfully urged Norton to mentor potential successors. But she also doesn’t believe this is the time for a new delegate. “We can’t afford to send somebody in there cold because of the disrespect we’re already receiving,” she told me. “She’s the one for now, however long now is.”
Norton’s supporters say it’s not her age but the current hostile Republican Congress and White House that makes defending DC an impossible job. “I don’t believe anyone is up to this task alone, including Eleanor,” says Brazile, “and Eleanor is tough.”
Her office, at least, is productive. In the 118th Congress, Norton introduced more than 100 bills. Late last year, she co-sponsored a bill with Rep. James Comer (R-KY) that would give DC control of 174 acres of federal land that once housed RFK stadium. Ever since the Washington football team decamped to Maryland in 1996, city officials have been trying to wrest the run-down stadium campus from the feds for redevelopment and a new stadium.
Congress finally agreed, and President Joe Biden signed the transfer bill on January 7. Standing triumphantly in the Oval Office for the signing ceremony were the owners of the Washington Commanders and Bowser. Notably absent was the woman who co-sponsored the measure that made it all happen.
“She is not the same warrior on the Hill that she once was even four years ago,” laments Troy Prestwood, president of the DC Ward 8 Democrats. “We adore her, we admire her. But is she the one to take us to the next level? The answer is no. I don’t think that Eleanor is equipped today in 2025 to battle the type of Goliath that is facing the District.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.