Gluesenkamp Perez on KGW: “There’s a Real Appetite for Transparency and Good Governance”
Last week, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA-03) joined KGW to discuss her amendment to strengthen ethics guidelines related to the cognitive acuity of Members of Congress – which was voted down by the House Appropriations Committee last month:
Video of the interview can be found here:
A Washington representative’s attempt to add ‘cognitive acuity’ standards for Congress was shot down
Ashley Koch
July 14, 2025
Southwest Washington Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is trying to win support for a “cognitive acuity” standard which must be met by members of Congress – a battle she’s thus far fought in vain.
Gluesenkamp Perez said she wants this mental fitness component to be part of Congressional ethics standards, citing concerns she hears often from constituents in her purple district.
“When I go back home, what I hear from my neighbors is a conviction that Congress is this amorphous mass that hides behind their offices and are not being run by the elected member themselves, but by their staff,” Gluesenkamp Perez said last month at a meeting of the House Appropriations Committee, where she pitched her idea as an amendment to the legislature’s spending bill.
The amendment she proposed is short and to the point, directing the Office of Congressional Conduct to “develop a standard for what constitutes conduct that does not reflect creditably upon the House, as it relates to a Member of Congress’s ability to perform the duties of office unimpeded by significant irreversible cognitive impairment.”
But Gluesenkamp Perez’s amendment was shot down almost immediately by a near-unanimous voice vote in the committee.
“Two-hundred and thirty-thousand people in my newsletter,” she said. “I sent it out and I actually polled them, and we’ve never seen this level of clarity in a poll. It’s obviously not like a scientific poll or anything like that, but 92% of respondents support my amendment. There’s a real appetite for transparency and good governance, and that’s what this is about.”
Congress labors under a number of ethics rules governing what kinds of gifts they can accept, for example, but there is currently no criteria in place if someone has concerns about a member’s cognitive ability and how their decisions are being made, if they’re doing anything at all. Gluesenkamp Perez said she’d like to see the ethics committee develop a standard for complaints.
“The language says if a member’s ability to perform the duties of their office is impeded by significant irreversible cognitive decline, then the ethics committee could evaluate that … they could make a determination about whether or not that applies to the member who this ethics claim was brought against,” she explained. “They would vote to decide if an ethics violation had occurred. And then it would be a secondary vote about whether or not they’re going to make that a public disclosure about the ethics – at which point, presumably, the body could choose to bring it up for removal.
“But, you know, I think it’s providing more information to voters to make sure that there’s clarity. It’s not about, you know, usurping. I believe American citizens should determine the outcome of an election, not a committee, not anyone else, but the citizens of the district itself.”
Gluesenkamp Perez was among the first lawmakers to suggest that former President Joe Biden should drop out of the presidential race in 2024 amid concerns about his age and mental sharpness – in fact, she suggested that Biden should resign from office.
“Like most people I represent in Southwest Washington, I doubt the president’s judgment about his health, his fitness to do the job, and whether he is the one making important decisions about our country, rather than unelected advisors,” she said at the time.
The president would not be impacted by these proposed rules, but Gluesenkamp Perez pointed to other examples as well. In 2024, Republican Congresswoman Kay Granger of Texas was found to have been living in an assisted living facility for months, suffering from dementia, before anyone noticed that she’d stopped showing up for votes in D.C. The story was broken by a small news outlet in Texas.
Another example, according to Gluesenkamp Perez, is Representative Elanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat from D.C. At 88 years old, she rarely attends committee meetings and has appeared to struggle publicly with memory and understanding.
The U.S. Senate, whose members are older on average than in the House, has had a few examples in recent years. Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, now 83, announced his coming retirement earlier this year after several public incidents suggestive of cognitive lapses. In 2023, longtime Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein died in office at 90 after many months of controversy about an ofttimes secretive mental and physical decline.
Currently, the oldest member of Congress is Senate Republican Chuck Grassley, at 91.
Apparently there’s some dispute about whether members of Congress are getting younger or older on average. A Pew Research Center analysis from January noted that the median age of Congress members was down this year, even in the Senate. But around the same time, NBC News reported that this was the third-oldest Congress in history, and was older on average than the prior year.
Gluesenkamp Perez said her amendment isn’t about age, explaining that there are many older members of Congress who seem to keep up with the work well. But, she added, some of her colleagues didn’t see it that way.
“I was disappointed. I mean, there were definitely some hard questions. Some people did take it as a personal attack – but this is not about an individual member,” she said. “This is about the body itself having the self-respect and the transparency with the voters about who is making decisions in Congress.”