Mitch McConnell Nears Dead-Line

They hate you

As 84-year-old Senator Mitch McConnell’s witness-protection-grade hospitalization nears its fourth week, a key deadline looms: August 3.

Under Kentucky law, if McConnell is declared dead before that date, there's a special election to fill out his term. After that date, the seat sits empty until whoever wins November's already-scheduled race is sworn in on January 3.

In a political system run by the sage leaders that people like McConnell imagine themselves to be, he would have stepped down so voters could have an orderly election and decide for themselves. Instead, we have a mad dash for partisan power.

A longtime Capitol Hill source tells me congressional Republicans don't want to risk a special election, fearing GOP voters might nominate a MAGA candidate over someone friendlier to their party establishment. Kentucky's Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, has now entered the fray, sending McConnell's office a letter today requesting a health update — a first step, potentially, toward appointing an interim senator and flipping the seat blue. (This would require a constitutional challenge to the law described earlier.)

In either case, Republican or Democratic power grab, the voters of Kentucky are deprived of a meaningful say in who represents them.

Congress, meanwhile, only cares about itself. Lawmakers stayed almost completely silent about McConnell’s unexplained absence for more than two weeks. During that stretch he missed more than 20 votes, including a knife-edge resolution to curb Trump’s war powers over Iran. The reason is simple: nobody wants to invite scrutiny of health and fitness in a gerontocracy, especially when members on both sides of the aisle have something to hide.

Independent journalist Desiree Townsend forced officialdom’s hand when she published dispatch audio of the emergency response at McConnell’s home — audio in which a dispatcher reports a “cardiac arrest.” Facing pressure this week for answers, Senate Republican leaders John Thune and John Barrasso offered vague reassurances. They said they’d spoken with McConnell by phone and that everything was fine.

Recent accounts of conversations with McConnell are suspiciously uniform — nearly everyone claims to have talked to him for about 20 minutes about a range of complex policy issues. Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie couldn’t resist mocking the pattern. He posted his own parody version on X:

“I spoke to McConnell for about 20 minutes this morning. He said we should end the war with Iran, quit giving aid to Israel, stop spying on Americans without a warrant, and he’s really sorry about how my primary turned out.”

The image of McConnell hashing out policy with colleagues clashes with medical reality. Fewer than 5 percent of patients McConnell's age survive an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, and most survivors suffer lasting brain damage.

Whatever the truth of his condition, McConnell — or his aides — have decided the public doesn't deserve to know what's going on. Yet by their own account, a handful of officials do deserve to know, as well as one insider who worked for McConnell.

Scott Jennings, a former McConnell staffer turned political commentator and one of the few non-government figures who claims to have spoken with him, was asked about the silence on CNN and said: “Ultimately, these officeholders — you know, they’re in charge of their own operations.”

They’re in charge. Not the four million Kentuckians who have no idea if half their Senate representation is even conscious. Not the 300 million Americans who have to live under the decisions he and his colleagues make. They’re. In. Charge.

Jennings made the remark after a comical exchange with another panelist, Sabrina Singh, the former deputy Pentagon press secretary under Biden. Singh pressed Jennings on why, when his party, the Republicans, made so much hay of the undisclosed hospitalization of then-70-year-old Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, they weren’t willing to come clean about McConnell’s absence. A back-and-forth results in which they’re both right about each other but completely unwilling to accept responsibility for their own party’s actions (which are identical here!)

The bigger question, of course, is why aren’t any of you people able to tell the truth about these things?

Al Cross, a longtime Kentucky political journalist and journalism professor emeritus who has spent decades covering McConnell and says he’s been in touch with him in recent weeks, attributed the silence to pride.

“I suspect his reluctance to say very much about his condition stems partly from his pride,” Cross said on the CNN panel with Jennings. “He’s a person who has a lot of pride, justifiably so.”

Pride — a polite way of saying he thinks he’s better than you. These people don't think they answer to or owe an explanation to the public. They hate us.

After all this, who thinks McConnell’s pride is “justifiably so”?

— Edited by William M. Arkin