Mitch McConnell has not been seen in public in almost a month. The senator from Kentucky and former majority leader was hospitalized on June 14, and his staff has declined to elaborate, instead recycling the same statement: “The Senator continues to improve, and is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters while the Senate is out of session.” Speculation, theories, and questions have filled the void this week, prompting McConnell’s allies to share that they had recently spoken with him. But they’ve faced a deluge of doubts themselves. Yesterday, the Kentucky governor sent a formal letter requesting a health update from the senator, while President Trump told reporters he had “no idea” how McConnell was doing.
McConnell is hardly the first member of Congress to go MIA. Representative Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey, a Republican running for reelection in a highly competitive district, disappeared for nearly four months this year and missed 142 House roll-call votes before resurfacing in late June. Kean explained that he had been receiving treatment for depression. In 2024, then-Representative Kay Granger of Texas, a Republican and former chair of the House Appropriations Committee, was absent from Congress for months before The Dallas Express reported that she was living in “a local memory care and assisted living home for some time after having been found wandering lost and confused.” Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who died in 2023, remained in office as her health rapidly deteriorated and her staff downplayed her condition.
Although a seat in Congress comes with baseline expectations of being on the job when the House or Senate is in session, there are no formal rules governing disclosure of medical conditions for lawmakers and no official procedures for declaring a member medically incapacitated and removing them. The norm on the Hill is to fiercely shield and protect the private lives of legislators—especially on matters as sensitive as mental or physical health. But in recent years, with Congress ruled by shifting and often thin majorities, it quickly becomes obvious when someone is missing, especially for key votes. And then the theories spread on social media.
[Read: Mitch McConnell and the president he calls ‘despicable’]
McConnell’s absence has prompted a flood of memes, some involving Ouija boards, AI-generated Mitch-zombies, Weekend at Bernie’s–inspired scenes, and reports of the kid from The Sixth Sense having reached the senator. The leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker challenged McConnell to publicly deny that the two are engaged in a romantic tryst. Scott Jennings, a Republican pundit, attempted to combat the speculation by sharing that he had spoken with McConnell “for just shy of 20 minutes” about a range of issues including Iran and Ukraine—only to spawn a new type of meme in which others used his post as a Mad Libs–style template for reporting fake conversations with the senator. Representative Thomas Massie, a fellow Republican Kentuckian who recently lost his primary to a Trump-backed opponent, sarcastically wrote that he spoke with McConnell for “about 20 minutes” about how he’s “really sorry about how my primary turned out.” CNN mistakenly ran a screenshot of a parody account claiming to have spoken with the senator.
In November 1980, Maryland voters elected Gladys Spellman to a fourth term in the House. Days before Election Day, she had suffered a heart attack; she survived but fell into a coma and never regained consciousness. Through a first-of-its-kind House resolution, passed in February 1981, her seat was declared vacant. That April, in a special primary for the Democratic nomination, Spellman’s husband, Reuben, finished second to Steny Hoyer, then a 41-year-old lawyer and former Maryland state senator. Gladys Spellman died seven years later. Hoyer climbed the ranks and spent two decades in top House Democratic leadership. Now in his 23rd term, he announced earlier this year he would not seek a 24th.
That resolution remains the lone example in modern memory of House members taking action to formally remove and replace a colleague who is unable to perform the job as a result of a medical crisis. To longtime observers, McConnell’s and Kean’s recent absences are not unprecedented or even that unusual; they’re par for the course. There is a long history of staff members attempting to shield ailing legislators from the prying eyes of journalists and political opponents, even if it comes at the expense of transparency with constituents. “This is a story as old as Congress itself,” Jim Manley, a longtime aide to Harry Reid who spent more than two decades on the Hill, told me.
Senator Carter Glass of Virginia spent his last four years in office, in the 1940s, absent from public view due to illness before dying in 1946; he did not answer 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 almost three years before deciding not to seek reelection in 1972. When John F. Kennedy served in the House and the Senate, as well as during his campaign for president, he hid his diagnosis of Addison’s disease—an adrenal insufficiency—from voters.
Numerous lawmakers in more recent years have stuck to their offices even as they grew visibly frail or as their mental capacity was called into question—and as their staff members demurred or outright denied that anything was amiss. Aides around West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd—who died in 2010 at age 92 and was the longest-serving senator in history—were especially tight-lipped as the lawmaker’s health declined. Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran’s frailness and disorientation was an open secret before he decided to step down in 2018, a year before his death.
[Read: A different kind of fading president]
There’s always the possibility that these recent headline-grabbing cases of mysterious disappearances might mark a turning point toward reform. Congress returns from recess on Monday, and if McConnell’s absence continues, it could complicate the Senate’s business—particularly attempts to meet the late-September deadline to fund the government for the next fiscal year. McConnell sits on the powerful Appropriations Committee and leads the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which is responsible for military spending. Steven Smith, a social-sciences professor at Arizona State University who studies Congress, told me there should be a rule obligating members’ chiefs of staff or others to report their bosses’ absences, given that they are employees of taxpayers: “It could still be vague, but there ought to be some requirement to indicate that so-and-so is literally not on the job.” Scott Tillman of U.S. Term Limits, a group pushing for putting constraints on the number of times an incumbent can hold a seat, told me that the recent cases involving McConnell and Kean have made their case more salient. “People are really being deprived of representation—they elected someone to be there, and they’re not being represented,” he said.
Others are less hopeful that any of this will change anytime soon. “Each seat is extraordinarily valuable, as is each vote in the House and Senate,” Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University historian of modern American politics, told me. “This leads to keeping these issues as secret as possible.” Plus, when it comes to protecting members’ privacy, staffers’ jobs are on the line. “As long as God created staff,” Manley said, “there’s always going to be folks that are going to try and do what they can to keep this stuff out of the media.”
The post The MIA Caucus appeared first on The Atlantic.
