Capitol Hill is a place of serious, muscular business. We are facing a volatile yield curve, complex geopolitical instability, and a midterm cycle that will define the rest of the decade. Yet Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York is currently demanding a committee hearing on menopause, an issue that affects roughly fifty million American women but has absolutely zero implications for the carried interest loophole.
Let's be honest. The optics here are disastrous. When the American people tune into a Senate hearing, they expect to see grandstanding about tech monopolies or theatrical outrage directed at a pharmaceutical CEO. They do not expect to be reminded that the human body undergoes mandatory transitional phases that the medical establishment has simply chosen to ignore. By dragging this poorly understood biological reality onto the dais, Gillibrand is violating the most sacred rule of Washington: if we do not know how to monetize it, we pretend it does not exist.
Think of the sheer logistical nightmare this presents for the chamber. The United States Senate is an institution built on a delicate foundation of octogenarian men who still refer to the internet as the cyber. Forcing them to sit behind a microphone, look a medical professional in the eye, and ask a coherent question about perimenopause is tantamount to elder abuse. Several of my sources close to leadership have indicated that at least three committee members are planning to fake a sudden bout of COVID-19 just to avoid having to pronounce the word ovary on television.
I sat next to a senior member of the Appropriations Committee at a Georgetown dinner party this weekend, and over our third glass of an aggressive Pinot Noir, he confessed his total exhaustion. We are trying to project strength, he told me, nervously checking to see if anyone was listening. I cannot be seen on C-SPAN allocating federal research money to night sweats. My donors manufacture guided missiles. They do not know what an estrogen patch is.
Gillibrand’s central complaint is that menopause is vastly underfunded by federal research dollars. But this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what federal research money is actually for. The National Institutes of Health has a finite budget. Every dollar we spend trying to figure out why women lose bone density is a dollar we are not spending on extending the lifespan of a ninety-year-old defense contractor. We have to prioritize.
I reached out to a trusted voice in the conservative think-tank sphere to make sure I was not off base in my assessment.
If we start treating women's daily physical realities as matters of federal concern, we open a Pandora's box that ends with the government having to care about childcare.
Pendelton is exactly right. Today it is menopause. Tomorrow, someone will demand a subcommittee hearing on endometriosis. Before we know it, the entire legislative calendar will be bogged down by millions of citizens demanding that the medical system actually investigate the things that happen to them, rather than simply telling them to take an ibuprofen and lose ten pounds. It is a slippery slope that ends in total systemic collapse.
Furthermore, this completely muddles the caucus's messaging heading into November. You cannot run a tough-on-crime midterm campaign when your Tuesday afternoon schedule involves listening to a panel of endocrinologists. The base wants to hear about the border. They want to hear about the deficit. They emphatically do not want to be reminded of their wives' fluctuating hormone levels.
And what of our geopolitical adversaries? Xi Jinping is undoubtedly watching C-SPAN. Does it project American hegemony when a prominent New York senator admits that we have not bothered to research a condition that impacts half our population? Of course not. A truly strong nation simply suffers in silence and funnels the research budget into a newer, slightly quieter attack submarine.
I urge Senator Gillibrand to withdraw this hearing. There is a time and a place to discuss the fact that the medical community has neglected women for the entirety of human history, and that time is never. We have midterms to win, talking points to distribute, and a deeply fragile facade of institutional competence to maintain. It is time to get back to the people's work.