Weekend Update: The Missing Congresswoman

Congresswoman Kay Granger in November, when her portrait was placed on the wall of the Appropriations Committee Hearing Room.

Amidst the flood of news stories last week, you may have missed this one: 81-year-old Representative Kay Granger (R-TX) has apparently been living in a dementia care facility [update: maybe in assisted living?] for the past several months and has not participated in a Congressional vote since June of 2024. She has made only one trip to Washington in the last six months. The Dallas Express found this out by following a tip that she had been placed in the facility after being found lost and confused while wandering through her neighborhood. Reporters who tried to contact her office were met with silence; emails and phone messages got no response. Reporters who visited her district office found vacant rooms; neighboring offices said that everyone had moved out weeks ago.

I’m going to bypass all of the discussions this situation has generated – primarily about the continuing gerontocracy in Congress, or about the fact that her position until earlier this year was Chair of the all-important Appropriations Committee, or that her absence threatened the already-slim GOP majority in the House, or that she and her staff are apparently still on the Congressional payroll through the end of the year. These are all stories worth exploring, but I’ll let other people do that.

I want to ask a simpler question: how did this happen? And more specifically, what did the House GOP know about this situation? This seems to me to present a binary choice: either House Republicans knew she was AWOL or they didn’t. Let’s look at each of these possibilities.

They knew she was AWOL but Didn’t Want to Tell Anyone.

In the fall of 2023, she announced that she was not going to run for reelection in 2024. She stepped down as chair of the Appropriations Committee in June, assuming the title of Chairwoman Emerita.

Why didn’t they tell anyone when she stopped showing up for votes? Why didn’t she offer to resign at that time? Why didn’t they ask her to resign and hold a special election so that the constituents of her district would have functional representation in Congress? Why doesn’t she resign now and let her Republican successor, Craig Goldman, step in?

I wanted to understand how someone could kind of just go missing like she did. I did a little poking around in the Congressional Directory online this morning and found out whose offices are on the same hall as Kay Granger.

This is the floor plan for the Rayburn House Office Building; the rooms on each floor are numbered according to a set pattern. Kay Granger’s office number was 2308. Here’s what that means: ‘2’ means her office is in the Rayburn Building (the Cannon House Office Building has 3-digit room numbers and offices in the Longwood Building have a ‘1’ prefix). ‘3’ means it’s on the third floor, and ‘08’ is the eighth in that sequence of offices.

From 2300 through 2306:

• 2300 – Michael McCaul (R-TX) !!!!

• 2301 – J. Luis Carrea (D-CA)

• 2302 – Nadia Vasquez (D-NY)

• 2303 – James Baird (R-IN)

• 2304 – Scott Dejarlais (R-TN)

• 2305 – Lois Frankel (D-FL) (also sits on the Appropriations Committee)

• 2306 – Gus Bilirakis (R-FL)

From 2307 through 2316:

• 2307 – Lloyd Doggett (D-TX)

• 2308 – Kay Granger (R-TX)

• 2309 – Adam Schiff (D-CA)

• 2310 – Gregory Meeks (D-NY)

• 2311 – Doris Matsui (D-CA)

• 2312 – Nanette Diaz Barragan (D-CA)

• 2313 – Larry Bucshon (R-IN)

• 2314 – Erica Lee Carter (D-TX)

Five of the Members whose offices are near Kay Granger’s office are Republicans – and one of them is actually from Texas. One of them is on the Appropriations Committee that she chaired until a few months ago. Don’t you think they might have noticed that she just wasn’t around? This is even more unlikely when you consider how people move around the Capitol Complex. On the floor plan above, you see two underground tunnels that provide access to the Capitol Building and other House Office Buildings. People would have walked past her office many times each day to get to the elevators to those tunnels. In addition, staff members talk to people from other offices all the time. Don’t you think the rumor mill would have been activated if a Member of Congress went AWOL?

And Adam Schiff is one of her neighbors? The media are camped out around Schiff’s office all of the time.

They Didn’t Know

I don’t even want to speculate about this option. Meghan McCain, daughter of the late Republican Senator John McCain, blamed the media this morning: "Don't tell me political media isn't a broken hellscape when a well-known congresswoman can just go missing for six months and then show up in a dementia care facility. Like a congresswoman not showing up for 6 months wasn't noticed or worth writing about?!" Meghan blamed the media, but you could also blame the members of the House. Is the place so cold and isolated that no one notices when a long-term member just goes AWOL?

If “they” didn’t know (“they” is doing a lot of work here), how can that be?

Who is to blame for this?

Kay Granger: If she has dementia, she cannot be held responsible for recognizing her condition. If she does not have dementia, then she owes her constituents an explanation.

Her staff: Yes, absolutely. They are receiving their salaries – and probably doing constituent work they’ve been doing for years – but they are not providing the kind of representation people thought they were choosing when they voted for Congresswoman Granger in 2022. A Facebook post from December 20 (yes, last Friday) shows a photo of her with her interns, thanking them for their service.

Somebody’s doing a fraud.

The GOP Leadership: Yes, absolutely. Political parties have whip organizations that regularly canvas their membership to both provide and receive information about possible upcoming votes and other matters of concern. Don’t you think the GOP whips might have been aware that Kay Granger was not able to do her job? It’s clear to me that they knew and decided it was no one else’s business. They would rather have no one in her seat than risk the prospect of a Democrat winning a special election if she stepped down — although her district is a very safe GOP district. Her absence changed both the numerator and denominator in votes, so it simply didn’t matter to the people for whom power is the only important element in anything they do.

The Media: Probably, although they tend to cover the fires – and there are plenty of fires in Congress these days. I imagine they are all working the phones this weekend to get their sources to tell them what they knew and when they knew it. We’ll find out.

Her family: Probably, although not definitively. She has three children and five grandchildren (according to Wikipedia) and they were aware enough of her situation to put her in [or help her move into] a safe space. Did they communicate with the local or state GOP? Did they contact her district or DC office? I don’t know. One of her children finally commented on the situation late Sunday.

Overall, this is a sad ending to a successful career. Representative Granger has represented the 12^th District of Texas since 1997. Before that, she was mayor of Ft. Worth, Texas, for four years.

• NOTE: Late yesterday, the story shifted a bit. Representative Granger’s family reported that she was living in an independent living facility, not a memory care unit — although the facility has a memory care component.

  • They acknowledged that she had been physically unable to attend sessions of Congress for the past six months, but it doesn’t sound like she was the “Lost congresswoman” some (including me) had imagined. But the questions remain.

  • Newspaper accounts indicate that the local Republican party establishment in Fort Worth didn’t know about her situation, and people who contacted her office were still getting the brush-off. It’s not unheard of for members of Congress to take extended leaves of absence for illnesses — strokes, heart attacks, cancer treatments, and so forth.

  • Although Members can do most of their work from home, they cannot vote remotely; an absent Member is a missing vote. If the GOP leadership knew that she would not be voting, they included that information in their whip count and didn’t feel the need to report it to anyone.

• NOTE 2: Although the story shifted, I had already written this post and didn’t want to throw it out. I liked doing the part about where the offices were so I edited and updated a few things and published it.

• NOTE 3: You can’t even blame the Boomers for this one. She was born before the Baby Boom. Now that’s old.

• Note 4: Late Sunday night Brandon Granger, one of her children, commented that his mother has experienced “dementia issues late in the year.” Another
  ”source familiar” added that had the Congresswoman known she would not be able to vote in the second half of the year, she would have handled her health problems differently. Ya think?