Early next month, Texas congresswoman Kay Granger will finish her 14th and final term in the House of Representatives, but the 81-year-old Republican didn’t cast a vote during last week’s shutdown fight. She hasn’t voted at the U.S. Capitol since July. This weekend, it emerged that Granger has been suffering from dementia and has been residing at a senior living facility — which neither she, her congressional office, nor House GOP leaders had disclosed to the public. The news has renewed concerns about lawmakers of advanced age remaining in office beyond the point when they can effectively handle their responsibilities, and her absence has drawn criticism since the House GOP holds such a slim majority.
Granger, who was first elected to Congress in 1996, announced a year ago that she would not seek reelection in 2024. Granger had served as the chair of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, but she stepped down from that role in April. According to her congressional website, the last vote she cast in the House was on July 24. In November, Republican Craig Goldman won her open seat.
On Friday, a right-wing news site called the Dallas Express reported that it had been unable to contact Granger about how she would vote amid the shutdown fight. The publication, whose CEO ran against Granger in 2020, said that it “received a tip from a Granger constituent who shared that the Congresswoman has been residing at a local memory care and assisted living home for some time after having been found wandering lost and confused in her former Cultural District/West 7th neighborhood.” It then visited the facility and reported that two employees had confirmed Granger was living there. The news site also aired concerns about Granger being unable to represent her district, about why no one seemed to know about that, and whether her staff or others had hidden her declining health.
She missed several votes in the House in the second half of the year. But on multiple occasions, her staff submitted official “extensions of remarks” from Granger into the Congressional Record. Reporter Jamie Dupree notes those submissions “make it look like the Texas Republican was still on Capitol Hill” but she wasn’t.
Granger was last seen in D.C. at a November 19 reception honoring her accomplishments. Several photos from the event, where her official portrait was unveiled, were shared on her official X account over the next eight days:
On Sunday morning, the congresswoman’s son, Brandon Granger, told the Dallas Morning News that his mother has been “having some dementia issues late in the year” and that she had moved to a senior living facility. He denied that she was living in the facility’s memory care unit:
Brandon said his mother is living at Tradition Senior Living in Fort Worth, but she is not in a memory care facility, as some media reports have stated. He said that while the facility has a memory care community on the same property, Rep. Granger resides in the independent living facility.
On its website, Tradition Senior Living says it offers “resort-style living with ultra-inclusive services” on “approximately six acres along the Trinity River with miles of walking trails.” Brandon said she made the move because she wanted to be in a more active community of other older people.
“There’s nothing wrong with someone wanting to live in a community with other folks their age,” he said. “She’s in a building with a lot of other folks her age that are super active that she really loves. She has exercise classes, she gets to be around people all the time, it’s wonderful for her for this point in life.”
Granger’s office also released a statement from the congresswoman in which she said that since early September, her declining health had made it difficult to travel to Washington D.C.
Axios reports that, according to a source, she moved to the facility in July:
[The source] told Axios that Granger would have made different preparations had she known she would be unable to vote towards the end of the session, citing the unforeseen progression of her illness.
Granger was also clear with leadership about her situation and said she would return to D.C. to vote if she was needed, the source said.
The same day the Dallas Express asked “Where is Congresswoman Kay Granger?” her X account shared a post and photo thanking her interns for their service. It was one of many posts shared on her account over the last several months which made it seem as though everything was normal.
The news of Granger’s health issues drew a lot of attention over the weekend, including criticism from House Democrats Ritchie Torres and Ro Khanna (who had publicly called for Senator Dianne Feinstein to resign amid widespread concerns about her cognitive decline).
Republican Tom Massie dismissed the news with a joke:
