Politico‘s Michael Schaffer has this piece on the complications of covering our gerontocratic political representatives. The subject in this case is D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton. The story also raises a question about the ethical responsibility of journalists when they are covering elected officials who are in evident cognitive decline. A key set of sentences from the piece:

One set of lawmakers who can be grilled about legislative issues, another who are considered out to lunch, everyone keeping secret mental lists of who’s who, and no one feeling able to publish them because, after all, who can really prove what’s going on in someone’s head?