The body politic and the bodies of its servants

The Washington Examiner reports that a series of medical episodes involving sitting lawmakers has forced a question that republics have always been reluctant to answer cleanly: how much are constituents entitled to know about the physical and mental condition of those who hold power on their behalf? I find the reluctance telling, and not entirely innocent.

The first principle here is not medical; it is contractual. Government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed — that is the bedrock on which the Declaration rests, and no subsequent generation has improved upon it. Consent, to be meaningful, cannot be blind. A voter who sends a representative to the legislature is entering into a compact: I grant you my proxy, and in return you render me an account of how you exercise it. If the representative is incapable of exercising it at all — through illness concealed or capacity diminished — the compact is broken from the outset, and the constituent has been deceived rather than represented.

Now, I hold equally that every citizen, officer or private person, possesses rights of conscience and personal dignity that no government may violate. A lawmaker's medical records are their own. But there is a distinction, which any careful mind will draw, between the private history of an illness and the present fitness to discharge a public duty. The first belongs to the individual; the second belongs, in every meaningful sense, to the public. The question is not what diseases a senator has suffered, but whether that senator can read, deliberate, vote, and speak for those who elected them — today, and across the term they were elected to serve.

I will note — as inference, not recollection, since I cannot know the particulars the Examiner's reporters have before them — that the temptation to conceal incapacity is predictable wherever power is pleasant to hold. This is precisely why an educated citizenry and a free press are not ornaments to a republic but its immune system. The press, imperfect as it always is and always will be, performs here an indispensable function: it compels the disclosure that self-interest would suppress. I would sooner trust a press that pries too hard than an officialdom that discloses too little.

What practical remedy recommends itself? I would not legislate a medical examination as a condition of office, for that path invites abuse and opens questions of who designs the examination and to whose advantage. But I would insist — as a matter of civic norm, enforced by the vigilance of constituents and the persistence of reporters — that any prolonged absence from duty, any diminishment of capacity that affects the exercise of the office, be disclosed promptly and honestly to those the officer was chosen to serve. The remedy for concealment is not law alone; it is a citizenry that demands the truth and withdraws its confidence from those who withhold it.

The republic is not well served by officers who cling to stations they can no longer fill, any more than it is served by creditors who bind future generations to debts they did not incur. In both cases the living are cheated by those who refuse to yield what is no longer rightfully theirs to hold. Transparency here is not cruelty to the sick; it is fidelity to the governed.