At a Senate hearing back on November 17, 2020, California Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein asked then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey a lengthy and detailed question about a tweet by Donald Trump and the role that social media played in the just-concluded presidential election. Which Dorsey dutifully answered. Feinstein then followed up by asking him the exact same question once again, verbatim, as if she were asking it for the first time.

That’s what we call a hint and a half. And yet the incident wasn’t a one-off. Late that same year, after the confirmation hearings for Justice Amy Coney Barrett, then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had a conversation with Feinstein during which he removed her from her position as ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee. But Schumer had to tell her the same thing in a subsequent conversation, because Feinstein forgot the first conversation.

And yet here we are, two years later, with the 88-year-old Feinstein’s cognitive decline having now become so obvious and alarming that her fellow Democrats are discussing it with the media, albeit anonymously. Here’s what one of those colleagues, a California Democrat who’s known Feinstein for 15 years, said about a recent interaction with her — an hours-long interaction that included repeated small talk by Feinstein and repeated reintroductions by the anonymous Democrat, whom Feinstein kept forgetting:

I have worked with her for a long time and long enough to know what she was like just a few years ago: always in command, always in charge, on top of the details, basically couldn’t resist a conversation where she was driving some bill or some idea. All of that is gone. She was an intellectual and political force not that long ago, and that’s why my encounter with her was so jarring. Because there was just no trace of that.

On a call with the editors of her hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, Feinstein defended herself and said she has no plans to step down. “I meet regularly with leaders,” she said. “I’m not isolated. I see people. My attendance is good. I put in the hours. We represent a huge state. And so I’m rather puzzled by all of this.”

Got that? She’s “rather puzzled” by all of this.

We’re puzzled, too. We’re puzzled by the tenacity with which Feinstein and certain other of our elected representatives hang on to power despite clear and compelling evidence that they’re well past their cognitive prime. Is it their staffers who keep them hanging on while they conduct business and call the shots on their boss’s behalf? We don’t know for sure, but we certainly don’t tolerate this sort of hanging-on in other occupations. As columnist Maureen Callahan writes: “Commercial airline pilots are forced to retire at age 65. Air traffic controllers must retire at age 56. Yet we have a 79-year-old in the White House who, on any given day, thinks that his VP is his wife, or that his wife is his sister and his sister is the first lady, or that Michelle Obama is the vice president or that Barack Obama is Donald Trump and vice versa.”

Ah, yes, Joe Biden — the American president who was last seen taking media direction from the Easter Bunny. Biden’s cognitive decline was well documented on these pages long before the 2020 election, and his condition certainly hasn’t improved. Indeed, what we wrote about him on Election Day of 2020 has held up exceedingly well: He’s unfit for the presidency.

And with reliably leftist stalwarts like The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus tacitly saying it’s time for Dianne Feinstein to go, we have to wonder how much longer she’ll remain in office. And we also have to wonder, as Steven Hayward does at Power Line, “whether this effort to drive Feinstein from office is a dry run for how the left will try to remove President Biden at some point soon.”

There’s no way the Democrats will continue to tolerate the damage being done to their party by Joe Biden — not until January 20, 2025.