Mturn on McConnell has not been seen in public for about a month. The Kentucky senator and former majority leader was hospitalized on June 14, and his staff has declined to comment, instead referring to the same statement: “The senator continues to improve, and is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate issues when the Senate is out of session.” Rumors, theories and questions have filled the void this week, prompting McConnell’s allies to share what they’ve been talking about with him recently. But they themselves have faced a flood of doubts. Yesterday, the Kentucky governor sent an official letter requesting a health update from the senator, while President Trump told reporters he “didn’t know” how McConnell was doing.
McConnell is not the first member of Congress to go MIA. Representative Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey, a Republican running for re-election in a hotly contested district, disappeared for about four months this year and fell 142 votes short of convening the House before re-emerging in late June. Kean explained that he has been receiving treatment for depression. In 2024, then-Representative Kay Granger of Texas, a Republican and former chair of the House Appropriations Committee, had been absent from Congress for months beforehand. Dallas Express information that he was living in “conservative care and assisted living at home for a while after he was found wandering lost and confused.” Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who died in 2023, remained in office as her health deteriorated and her staff downplayed her condition.
Although a seat in Congress comes with the basic expectation of being on duty while the House or Senate is in session, there are no formal laws governing the disclosure of medical conditions to members of parliament and no formal procedures for declaring a member medically incompetent and removing them. Mlimi Mlimi’s norm is to protect and protect the private lives of members of parliament – especially on sensitive issues such as mental or physical health. But in recent years, with Congress dominated by so many shifting and often thin people, it becomes obvious when someone is missing, especially for a key vote. And then the theories spread on social media.
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McConnell’s absence has led to a flood of memes, some involving Ouija boards, AI-generated Mitch-zombies, Weekend at Bernie’s– motivated events, and child reports from The Sixth Sense after the arrival of the senator. Left Twitch streamer Hasan Piker challenge McConnell has publicly denied that the two are having an affair. Scott Jennings, a Republican analyst, tried to combat the rumors by share that he had spoken with McConnell for “just shy of 20 minutes” on a variety of issues including Iran and Ukraine—only to spark a new kind of meme in which others used his post as a Mad Libs-style template to report a fake conversation with the senator. Rep. Thomas Massie, a fellow Republican Kentuckian who recently lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger, ironically. he wrote that he spoke to McConnell for “about 20 minutes” about how “he’s really sorry about how my elementary school turned out.” CNN by mistake ran a screenshot of a fake account claiming to have spoken to the senator.
In November 1980Maryland voters elected Gladys Spellman to a fourth term in the House. A few days before Election Day, he was to suffer heart attack; he survived but fell into a coma and never regained consciousness. Through a first-of-its-kind House resolution, passed in February 1981, his seat was declared vacant. That April, in a special primary for the Democratic nomination, Spellman’s husband, Reuben, finished second to Steny Hoyer, a 41-year-old lawyer and former Maryland state senator. Gladys Spellman died seven years later. Hoyer rose through the ranks and spent two decades in the top leadership of the Democratic House. Now in his 23rd term, he announced earlier this year he would not seek a 24th.
The resolution remains the only example in modern memory of Council members taking action to officially remove him and replace him with a colleague who is unable to do the job due to health problems. For long-time observers, the recent absence of McConnell and Kean is not unusual or even unusual; they are par for the course. There is a long history of labor trying to shield sick MPs from the prying eyes of journalists and political opponents, even if it comes at the cost of transparency with voters. “This is a story as old as Congress itself,” Jim Manley, a longtime Harry Reid aide who spent more than two decades on the Hill, told me.
Senator Carter Glass of Virginia used his last four years in office, in the 1940s, absent from public view due to illness before his death in 1946; he did not respond to a single Senate roll call after 1942. Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota suffered a stroke in 1969 and did not appear on the Senate floor for nearly three years before deciding not to run again in 1972. When John F. Kennedy served in the House and Senate, as well as during his presidential campaign, he to hide his diagnosis of Addison’s disease—adrenal insufficiency—from voters.
Many legislators in recent years have held on to their offices even when they were very weak or their mental capacity was questioned—and when their staff became angry or outright denied that anything was wrong. Aides close to Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia—who died in 2010 at the age of 92 and was the longest serving senator in history————- they were pressed especially when the MP’s health deteriorated. The weakness and frustration of Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran was an open secret before deciding to step down in 2018, a year before his death.
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There’s always the possibility that these recent headline-grabbing cases of mysterious disappearances could signal a shift toward evolution. Congress returns from recess Monday, and if McConnell’s absence continues, it could difficult Senate business—essentially trying to meet a September deadline to fund the government for the next fiscal year. McConnell sits on the powerful Appropriations Committee and chairs the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which is responsible for military spending. Steven Smith, a professor of social sciences at Arizona State University who studies Congress, told me there should be a law that compels supervisors of workers or others to report the absence of their superiors, given that they are employees of the taxpayer: “It may still be open, but there should be some requirement to show that someone is not at work.” Scott Tillman of America’s Term Limits, a group pushing for limits on the number of times an administrator can hold office, told me that the recent cases involving McConnell and Kean have made their case even more important. “People are really being denied representation – they elected someone to be there, and they’re not being represented,” he said.
Others are pessimistic that any of this will change soon. “Every seat is of extraordinary value, as is every vote in the House and Senate,” Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University historian of modern American politics, told me. “This leads to keeping these matters as confidential as possible.” Also, when it comes to protecting members’ privacy, employees’ jobs are on the line. “As long as God created workers,” Manley said, “there will always be people who will try and do their best to keep these things out of the media.”
