The Senate returns to Washington, D.C. for the first time in more than five weeks, but it remains to be seen whether Mitch McConnell will show up for work.
The 84-year-old Kentucky senator has been absent for 92 days after being hospitalized on June 14. His team has remained tight-lipped on whether he would be back after the August recess.
The Senate convenes at 3 pm ET for the first time since leaving town on August 10. The first vote is at 5:30 pm ET.
McConnell has missed 60 votes to date, since he vanished from public view, but his Republican colleagues have expressed optimism that he would be well enough to return after the August break.
The Daily Beast has asked his team whether the senator will return on Monday, but did not receive an immediate response.
The last update McConnell’s team provided on his recovery came more than a month ago, on August 6, when they released a statement attributed to the senator saying he had been discharged from a rehabilitation center and would continue his recovery at home.
Since then, they’ve refused to provide further updates to the multiple questions from the Daily Beast.
His top staffers, including chief of staff Terry Carmack, who makes more than $226,000 annually, have also ignored questions when cornered about their boss on Capitol Hill.
According to his office, McConnell has been working with staff on legislative matters since before he was even released from the hospital, but they’ve ignored requests for more specific details on how he’s spending his days.
The only two images of McConnell released since he was hospitalized are one put out by his staff on July 12 and a second shared on July 27, said to be from July 26. Critics have blasted the images of him sitting with his wife Elaine Chao as looking too similar.
Through it all, sitting senators receive an annual salary of $174,000, so for the 13 weeks he’s been gone so far, he’s still received $43,500 in taxpayer-funded paychecks.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, who is also from Kentucky, said last week that he expected McConnell to return when the Senate came back into session. But the powerful House Republican also said he had not spoken directly to McConnell, only to his staff.
McConnell was rushed to the hospital on June 14. Dispatch audio revealed that first responders were responding to a call about an unconscious person at his address and administered CPR at the scene. It was not until later that his office claimed he was hospitalized due to a fall.
In a statement not released until July 12, the senator said he took a fall and was briefly unconscious, but he did not suffer from a concussion or have a heart attack or stroke.
