Gastonia, NC Correspondent — The country watched a fitness question answered on live television. That doesn’t mean I want a committee with a stethoscope and a donor list.

Primaries were supposed to be the capacity test voters run. What we saw last week was a party that spent a year insisting the question was a hallucination and then met it under lights.

The failure wasn’t the absence of a formal test. It was a political class that treated questions about stamina as disloyal and treated the calendar as a coronation.

A formal mechanism sounds adult until you ask who writes the rubric. The same people who managed the concealment will write it, and they’ll discover that capacity means ours can read a teleprompter and theirs is a threat.

Owatonna, MN Correspondent — A small city just had the same argument as everyone else. We saw it, we were told we hadn’t, then we saw it again.

Formal tests get written by people who failed the informal one, which is the one where you admit what your eyes report.

What I’d support is process that forces exposure — earlier debates, fewer proxy interviews, a medical summary that’s a summary rather than a paragraph about vigor, and a party willing to replace a nominee in daylight if the nominee can’t do the job.

That last one already exists. Delegates are pledged rather than bound in most states and a convention can do what a convention decides to do. The mechanism isn’t missing. The nerve is.

Prescott Valley, AZ Correspondent — We don’t need a medical college of cardinals. We need parties that can’t conceal a man for a year.

A formal test would be captured because the people who want it now wanted silence in April, and silence in April is the character reference.

If you want a rule, make it a sunlight rule: long-form appearances, release of genuine medical facts, an end to proxy seasons.

The institutional observation is that both parties have been shortening and front-loading the primary calendar for two decades, precisely to reduce the period during which a nominee can be tested. That’s the reform that produced this, and nobody proposing a capacity board wants to touch it.

Dayton, OH Correspondent — Shop-floor people know when somebody can’t do a shift. They also know a foreman who invents a fitness policy to remove the man he already wanted gone.

A party capacity test is that foreman with a national logo. The impulse after last week is understandable and understandable isn’t the same as safe.

The primary calendar is the test that doesn’t require a new priesthood. It failed because it wasn’t allowed to run.

Orange County, CA Correspondent — Mixed rooms here watched the same ninety minutes and then argued about the remedy.

The mechanical question is more interesting than the abstract one and nobody is asking it. A nominee who has not been formally nominated can withdraw and the delegates are free. A nominee who has been nominated and then withdraws leaves a national committee to fill a vacancy under its own rules, with roughly four hundred people making the decision.

Those are two very different processes and they’re separated by about six weeks. That’s the actual capacity mechanism available and it’s a scheduling accident rather than a design.

If anybody wants a reform, the useful one is a rule that makes the replacement path clear before it’s needed, rather than a screening board that decides who may run.

Tyler, Texas Correspondent — East Texas doesn’t need a seminar to say what it saw, and it doesn’t need a new class of consultants to certify the next one.

Who sits on the panel? Who appeals? What’s the cutoff — age, fluency, a scan, a board that already disliked the outsider in 2015?

The people most eager for a test now were the people most eager for a firewall then, and a firewall is what capture looks like from the inside.

Use the primary. Use debates that aren’t rare and late. Use the convention if a party has to face the country.

Long Island, NY Correspondent — I draft governance processes, and processes written after a shock are how institutions launder a failure into a new veto.

A capacity test would be captured because the drafters would be the counsel and committee staff who already have a theory of which candidates are safe.

What I’d add is that the Constitution already contains a capacity mechanism for a sitting president, and it requires the vice president plus a majority of the cabinet. It has never been used and it wasn’t designed for a campaign. That’s the ceiling on how far a formal test could constitutionally reach for anybody in office.

For a nominee, the answer is party rules and a convention. Both exist. Neither requires a clinic.

Cheyenne, WY Correspondent — We saw it. A board would have told us we hadn’t.

No new test run by the same shop. More hours in public.

If a party must change a nominee, do it in daylight with the rules it already has.