The death of Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), announced Wednesday, marks the third sitting member of the House Democratic caucus to pass away this year alone.
Since March, the Dems have lost Connolly, 75; Rep. Sylvester Turner (D-Texas), 70; and Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), 77.
All of the last eight deaths of sitting lawmakers in both chambers of Congress have been Democrats.
The deaths have boosted the GOP’s razor-thin margin for error in the House by at least one vote.
While a few of the deaths were sudden or age-related, most of them were the result of cancer or other ailments that some of the late lawmakers knew about when running for reelection.
Dem insiders on the Hill are getting frustrated that ailing candidates, like Connolly, have been allowed to keep their seats when the stakes are so high.
“It is possible to both mourn the deaths of recently passed Democratic members of Congress and acknowledge that there is a fundamentally broken incentive structure in the party when it comes to aging,” a Democratic congressional staffer told The Post.
The recent deaths have widened the initial threadbare 220-to-215 Republican House majority at the start of the year to 220-to-212 seats.
Because tiebreakers lose, that means the GOP’s margin of error has increased from two votes to three. Unlike the Senate, House vacancies are filled by special elections rather than gubernatorial appointees in most states, meaning it will take time to replace those late reps.
“We cannot say that democracy is on the line and then risk control of Congress (or the presidency for that matter) on the fragile medical status of those who the average person on the street would not trust as their Uber driver,” the House Dem staffer added.
“Let’s get serious.”
This dilemma drew renewed attention Wednesday after Connelly’s death.
He learned of his esophageal cancer diagnosis late last year, and revealed last month that it was spreading rapidly.
Democrats had tapped Connolly as their top member of the powerful House Oversight Committee after his diagnosis was well-known.
Progressive journalist Ken Klippenstein decried the move at the time and has since called out critics who bashed him for doing so.
The response from then-Virginia Democratic Party chair at the time was, “Delete yourself.”
“Nothing you can say about Connolly is meaner than his decades-long ‘friends’ on Capitol Hill refusing to stage an intervention when he decided to run for oversight while terminally ill,” Klippenstein added in another X post.
Turner’s death the day after President Trump’s address to the joint session of Congress in March was seen as sudden and the result of natural causes, but Grijalva ran for reelection last year despite his lung cancer diagnosis.
He had been absent from almost all the votes this year before his passing.
Consternation over this comes against the backdrop of a Democratic soul-searching over former President Joe Biden, who initially opted to run for reelection despite concerns about his mental acuity and then dropped out after a fumbling debate performance against Trump.
Biden, 82, has been top of mind for Democrats lately because of a new book, “Original Sin” that revealed efforts to cover up issues about his vitality and his heartbreaking prostate cancer diagnosis.
