On Thursday afternoon, Democratic Rep. Raúl Grijalva of Arizona went off on “President Trump’s latest reckless decision to fire thousands of employees at the Department of Education,” saying in a post on X that it “jeopardizes critical student aid programs, weakens protections for students’ civil rights, and undermines essential support for students with disabilities.”
The post was over 1,100 characters, an impressive rambling considering that only the first 280 characters are visible on X posts. Also impressive: The post was made — and passed off as if they were the outraged thoughts of the congressman in that very moment — a few hours after Grijalva died.
A statement that day from his media office said that Grijavla “passed away this morning due to complications of his cancer treatments.”
“A former radical who was unapologetically liberal and often blunt, Grijalva, D-Ariz., was a fixture of Tucson politics, first as a school board member in the 1970s, then as a Pima County supervisor in the 1990s,” The Arizona Republic noted.
“He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2002 and went on to serve 11 full terms, making him one of the longest-tenured members in Arizona’s history.”
Now, obviously, one doesn’t wish to dunk on a congressman just after he has died from lung cancer, no matter how much you disagree with him. (I cannot personally think of an issue of legislative import or character I agreed with him on, in full disclosure, but there are plenty of people in Congress like that, and I don’t wish physical ill — much less death — upon them.)
The post, however, — which said that Trump’s “move severely threatens every child’s access to a quality education nationwide” — drew scorn for both its tone and timing.
“Trump and Musk are prioritizing tax cuts for the wealthy over the future of our students. It’s selfish, and it’s illegal. This radical gutting of the Department will mean funding cuts for every student,” whoever wrote the post as Grijalva said.
President Trump’s latest reckless decision to fire thousands of employees at the Department of Education jeopardizes critical student aid programs, weakens protections for students’ civil rights, and undermines essential support for students with disabilities. This move severely…
— Raul M. Grijalva (@RepRaulGrijalva) March 13, 2025
Should there be an age limit in Congress?
The point, of course, isn’t his “opposition” to the job cuts at the Department of Education. The reaction on X — including from Elon Musk, who said that the writer of “the above post is impersonating a deceased Congressman” — got halfway to the heart of a critical issue:
Whoever wrote the above post is impersonating a deceased Congressman
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 14, 2025
OMG this congressman died this morning before noon, democrats forgot to stop spamming their propaganda so they used a dead guy’s account, this is how bad the party is.
Not serious people, just here to cause division.
— Suhr Majesty™ (@ULTRA_MAJESTY) March 13, 2025
This you ? pic.twitter.com/p89vsdRPZk
— Mostly Peaceful Memes (@MostlyPeacefull) March 13, 2025
Grijalva, whose career in local politics began in the 1970s, has been in Congress since his 2002 election. More critical, however, is this tidbit from the Arizona Republic obit: “Grijalva announced his cancer diagnosis in April 2024 and took time away from Capitol Hill while undergoing treatment.”
In other words, this wasn’t exactly as if the man keeled over in his office from some heart ailment and a few scheduled posts went out in the afternoon. Every one of us, alas, has probably known someone who has died a death of cancer, probably more than one. I don’t need to say the obvious or to bring up old wounds: It’s painful, taxing, and — most critical here — sapping. Sapping of energy, of life, and of clarity.
Last year, pretty much everyone on both sides of the aisle went bonkers — and not wrongly so — when it became clear that Texas Republican Rep. Kay Granger, who was the chair of House Appropriations Committee until her resignation in April was having, as her son put it, “dementia issues.” She had missed numerous votes, announced she wasn’t seeking re-election, and had stepped aside as House Appropriations Committee chair; in December, it was confirmed she was in an assisted living facility.
Granger was held up as the perfect example of the Beltway gerontocracy. Republicans and Democrats were alike in condemning Granger for not stepping aside earlier — although one suspects, a few months on from that scandal, that Democrats were just sort of relieved to have someone not named Joe Biden or Dianne Feinstein who could be the poster adult for problematic diminishing returns whilst in elected office.
You don’t have to do the math here.
Yes, Grijalva had stepped aside as the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee while he sought treatment, but this was a man who clearly didn’t have the energy to devote to the office in the last few months of his life. Yet, here we have him posthumously posting to his X account, proving that he was basically a flesh puppet of his staff and of the rest of the Democratic caucus at the end, and … crickets. It’s not nice. Don’t speak ill of the dead, even if they’re still “speaking.” The special primary election for his seat will be on July 15. Thank you for coming, move along, and shut up.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that the Democratic Party hasn’t learned the lessons from Biden and Feinstein. There was a brief moment during the Rep. Granger saga that the lengths staff went to in order to cover for an incredibly sick, incapacitated woman became a scandal for everyone in Washington, but the shrug-emoji response of the left and the media to the beyond-the-grave X post from Grijalva — along with what we can surmise about his final months from the limited information we have — proves that this was just because of the R after Granger’s name for Democrats. Any object lesson lasted about as long as the headlines did for them.
It’s not heartlessness to note the obvious about the implications of a dead man’s purported outrage at Trump’s job cuts: The Democrats have an age problem, and if they won’t solve it for themselves, voters should solve it for them. If there was ever a morbid example of how Washington politicians fail their constituents, this is it.
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