This is getting ridiculous.
Six weeks ago, the former Senate Majority Leader was wheeled into a hospital. Since then, aside from a single smiling photograph of him in a hospital bed beside his wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, Mitch McConnell has all but vanished. Where the hell is he?
Are we going to have to get Nic Cage to find him? Why not? McConnell is at least as old as some of the artifacts Cage tracked down in National Treasure.
Before anyone accuses me of wishing the man ill, let me be clear: I don’t. I hope he’s recovering in a nice warm terrarium somewhere.
Then again, I can certainly understand why even the most seasoned political operatives would want to escape D.C right now. Surely DoorDash has been delivering extra amounts of Taco Bell to Congress.
What I can’t understand is the silence.
One of the most consequential politicians of the last half-century has completely disappeared from public view, and Washington’s reaction has been a collective shrug. McConnell’s place of business, the so-called “world’s greatest deliberative body,” has barely uttered a word about the prolonged absence of one of its own. Isn’t that weird?
Worse, McConnell—a lover (and certainly a manipulator) of Senatorial procedure—may be violating the very rules he loved to cite. Rule 6 states that “no Senator shall absent himself from the service of the Senate without leave.” Did Mitch request his PTO before passing out? Has he requested since? If he’s worried about what people will say, he needn’t: Mitch, take all the leave you need.
As has been pointed out by many, most jobs don’t allow you to just vanish for months on end without word. Then again, most jobs don’t offer a security detail posted outside the hospital where you’re no doubt receiving top-notch, government-subsidized healthcare.
It rankles that one of the most consequential people in the country doesn’t have to show up for work, but if I make an appointment at my local Super Cuts, I expect Brandi to be there at the scheduled time. Shouldn’t it be the same for our Senate?
Yet one of the hundred people charged with helping govern the United States disappears into a medical black box, and we’re apparently expected to regard even asking about it as somehow uncouth?
Why?
At the very least, why hasn’t McConnell recorded a brief video message for his constituents? Maybe a lil’ TikTok? Something simple like, “Hello Kentucky. This is Mitch McConnell. I’m not dead… but the SAVE Act is!”
Isn’t that the literal bare minimum we should expect from somebody elected to serve some 4.6 million Americans?
But this is the problem with our gerontocratic ruling class. Wisdom may accumulate over the decades, but so do heart conditions, aneurysms, and cognitive decline. We’ve been here before. Strom Thurmond. Robert Byrd. Dianne Feinstein. Joe Biden. Donald Trump. And now we’ve got this Mitch ‘sitch.
There’s no shame in getting old. Age catches everyone. Plumbers and bus drivers and teachers. It’s just that most professions eventually force the issue. Which is why Joe Namath no longer plays quarterback for the Jets. Not so with politicos.
The issue isn’t the age itself. I’m sure there are plenty of brilliant octogenarians out there continuing to do good work. And there are certainly plenty of incompetent fortysomethings. The current administration is stuffed to the gills with them. The issue is transparency, inasmuch as there is none.
The McConnell camp has kept such a tight lid on the senator’s condition that we legitimately don’t know for certain the man is even alive. McConnell’s hometown paper, the Louisville Courier Journal even published a fake obituary “eulogizing” the man, if eulogizing somebody includes the line “McConnell is every bit the detestable figure that Nixon was.”
Ouch.
So why aren’t more people demanding answers? Rather than demanding accountability, we’ve developed a bizarre culture of deference around our senior leadership. Their colleagues and the press tiptoe around obvious questions of competence, as though acknowledging actual human frailty is some terrible breach of etiquette. It’s not. If a politician can face tough questioning about everything else, why not their age?
We ought to give less deference, not more, to the oldies running the joint. Forget term limits, for every year of service you have in Congress you should have to be able to do one push-up. Thirty years in office? Thirty push-ups.
I want lawmakers running up and down the steps of the Capitol like Rocky to prove they’re still capable executors of the public will. I want Susan Collins leading a Zumba class. Chuck Schumer on the Peloton. Forget their tax returns; I need my elected officials to release their EKGs.
Absurd?
Of course. But is it any more absurd than pretending not to notice when they simply disappear for weeks, or months, on end? Trust in American institutions has rarely been lower. If we’re ever going to rebuild that trust, we can start by treating elected office (and the Supreme Court) like a job, not a lifetime appointment to some exclusive club. I mean, I know the Navy bean soup in the Senate dining room is terrific, but do we really need members hanging around decades past their sell-by dates just to get a bowl?
Maybe Mitch really is on the mend and will be back in D.C. first thing Monday morning. But it’s just as likely he’s never coming back. The problem isn’t Schrodinger’s Turtle, it’s the silence. It’s the sense that our political class is covering for one of their own.
In a nation already reeling from a lack of trust, shouldn’t our elected officials be doing every single thing in their power to get the American people back on their side? Stuffing one of their members into a closet somewhere doesn’t exactly send a reassuring message to a citizenry looking for honesty from the nation’s capital.
The fact that the people around McConnell seem unwilling to demonstrate even that basic amount of integrity tells us everything we need to know. More troubling is the silence from everybody else. Protecting Mitch’s privacy is fine as a personal matter. But this is a national personnel matter. And we need answers.
