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The Minority Leader Must Step Aside
At a press conference in Covington, KY, today, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had another “incident,” the second such incident in the last two months. (Video: WLWT Cincinnati, OH)
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Yikes!
The same thing happens to me when I think about him running again.
He clearly has some serious health concerns and it is a shame that he is still in that position. Where is his family and doctor? Are politics that important? He holds an important position and should volunteer to step aside, but can he even understand that ? Someone asks if he is running for re-election? That is appalling.
Feinstein: “I’m fine!”
Turtle: “Hold my beer”
Maybe we should ask Jerry if he thinks Mitch is fine.
Very sad. I’ve said for a long time here that the days of the octogerontocracy ought to be over and done with, whether it be Biden, Trump, Pelosi, Feinstein, McConnell, or anyone else.
Mitch had his day. This ain’t it. Time to step aside.
It’s one thing if his sycophants/justifiers/jockeying for position morons in the political sphere think he shouldn’t. I wouldn’t expect anything other, or anything better, from them.
But his family??
HELLO??
I don’t know. I do know that I wouldn’t draw a final conclusion about someone’s mental condition from a 47-second video. This one looks bad, and it’s not edited, but I don’t know if there’s an explanation that would make this a temporary problem.
I looked to see if he had another recent speech, and found this short one of about 5 minutes from earlier this month. He seems fine and lucid in this one.
A parody Twitter account nails it.
Great idea- do you have any idea who the governor of Kentucky is? They will appoint a Dem to finish his term. I am sure Biden wholeheartedly supports your idea. He will have a significant advantage in the next election (Senate seats turnover about as slowly as the late Soviet Politburo seats did).
For that matter, where are term limits?
Oddly (so sue me) I think it might be fair to draw a conclusion about the “mental condition” of an elected representative based on MORE THAN ONE indication it’s not that good. And–there has been MORE THAN ONE such WRT McConnell lately.
This is all rather tending towards a comment I made a few weeks ago on the subject of Andrew Tate (remember him?) and the strenuous support offered to him by Nick Dixon (of whom I’m very fond). But Nick’s almost hagiographic encomia to Andrew seem largely based on the idea that he (Andrew Tate) speaks in some sort of code that the unwashed can’t understand and which–if only they could understand it–they’d realize he was a really, really good guy.
Sorry. Interpreting the vague and the inaccessible doesn’t really work for Andrew.
And it certainly doesn’t work for Mitch.
Mitch is losing it.
Time to bless his heart, thank him for sparing us Garland on the Supreme Court, and cut bait.
Yes, it’s very sad to see cousin Mitch, like so many politicians, not know when it is time to step aside for a replacement. It seems that even well-meaning politicians believe he/she is indispensable.
Power is a helluva drug.
These old politicians are like athletes well past their prime and don’t retire because they still think they can play . . .
For the people around them, perhaps as much as the person themself, even moreso in the aggregate since there are more of them.
As with my previous comment, I expect their staffs and others are probably telling them they’re doing fine. Because THEIR jobs depend on it too.
Is that it? Or is it merely a grasping of power? I’ve noted before that a problem in both parties is that the old war horses show little interest in training up the next generation of leaders to replace them. Rather, the very idea that they’d be replaced makes them angry.
America can stand a Dem Senator until special election is held. This is an opportunity to upgrade the GOP.
Umm. No.
Just taking the 21st century as an example, we’ve had (as Senate Majority Leader):
What we’re looking at today might be an actual problem if it would reverse party control in the Senate today. But it won’t.
And even if it did, history says that won’t matter all that much in the next couple of election cycles.
The only open question is whether or not the Republican party has the chops to address this with the American people.
McConnell need not resign his seat, just his leadership position. However, in anticipation of his potential health problems the Kentucky legislature passed a law in 2021 specifying that congressional vacancies had to come from the party which won the seat. The Democratic governor vetoed the bill but the legislature overrode it.
The absolute worst Gov. Beshear could do is leave the seat vacant. He could challenge the law but it might take years to wind its way through to the Supreme Court.
I wouldn’t risk it. Republican efforts at strategy tend to backfire on them.
Cool. So there’s no reason he can’t step down immediately.
Yeah well, except there are plenty of squishy/RINO candidates he could nominate who would be as bad as a Dimocrat.
Although as EJHill mentioned, they wouldn’t automatically become the minority leader just because McConnell was.
I found a CNN video describing the first time that this happened to Sen. McConnell, at a press conference on July 26, 2023. They reacted with much more concern and compassion that I’m seeing here.
Here is the CNN video, which shows Sen. McConnell freezing at the podium, and being helped away. The CNN reporter mentions that the Senator later returned and answered questions, but they didn’t show those questions being answered. I did find this suspicious. CNN had Dr. Sanjay Gupta discuss the situation, and he mentioned several possibilities: dehydration, medication, petit mal seizure, or a transient ischemic attack.
I was able to find the entire video of the July 26 press conference, but it’s at CSPAN, so I don’t know whether I can embed it in this comment. You can watch it here. Sen. McConnell froze during the first 1:30, and the video appears constant thereafter, with other Senators speaking. McConnell returned at around 13:13 on the video, answers questions, and seems fine and cogent.
I found a couple of news reports of the first incident indicating that a McConnell spokesman stated that he “felt momentarily lightheaded and paused during his press conference today.” This seems accurate, to me.
So maybe it was dehydration, or medication, or a brief episode of low blood pressure. Maybe it was something more serious, like a petit mal seizure, or even a transient ischemic attack, but I wouldn’t jump to such a conclusion. Even if it was one of these, they are passing, and I wouldn’t think that they would necessarily require someone to quit working.
I am quite troubled by the continuing tendency of people here at Ricochet to jump to conclusions on the basis of brief videos — in this case, a video of less than a minute.
I see cause for concern, but not much, based on my brief investigation into this issue — an investigation that was vastly beyond anything indicated by the rest of the comments here. I actually watched another speech given between the two episodes, and a news story on the first episode, and then the full video of the first episode. I see no reason to jump to any conclusions at this time.
MiMac referred to Senate seats, not the position of Majority Leader. Naturally, the Majority Leader typically changes when control of the Senate changes.
If you want to look at leadership, MiMac still has a point. There have been only three Republican leaders, and three Democratic leaders, in the Senate since 1996:
So, not a lot of turnover.
I feel compassion for people struggling with alcoholism, but I don’t want to be riding on a bus driven by someone half in the bag. I feel compassion for people with Parkinson’s Disease but I don’t want a surgeon with Parkinson’s operating on my heart. I wish no ill for Senator McConnell, but one has to wonder if he is up to serving the citizens of Kentucky in his present condition. It’s not like his career is being unfairly cut short if he steps down at age 81.
The Republican party has seemed leaderless for the last several years only because the Republican party has been leaderless for the last several years.
Yes, but, looked at another way, that’s a total of 6 leaders over less than 30 years. So less than 5 years per leader, on average. That’s less than ONE 6-year Senate term, each.
The bigger problem would be how long each of them managed to be a Senator, not how long they were a Leader.
Watching no video news is always a good option.
I don’t think that these are good analogies, Randy.
Sen. McConnell’s job doesn’t involve the sort of imminent, immediate problems that can be created by a medical problem on the part of someone driving a bus, or flying a plane, or performing surgery.
He’s a legislator. If he needs a short break, there’s no problem. He can take a short break, and then everyone can get back to work.
I want to add that I don’t know Sen. McConnell’s condition. He should be getting medical advice. I just don’t see any reason to conclude, based on two brief episodes of about a minute each, that he can’t continue to carry on with his job.