Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy.
Scott Jennings went on CNN’s The Arena with Kasie Hunt in July and told a room full of adults, with a completely straight face, that he had just wrapped a cozy, heart-warming twenty-minute phone call with Mitch McConnell. According to Jennings, the two men covered a massive swath of global geopolitics: Iran, Ukraine, the Maine Senate race, his own personal field trip to the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, and, because why the hell not, a little Senate history for flavor.
Look, I gotta admit—the story almost moved me to tears. It was painted as such a tender, sweet, tear-jerking check-in between old pals that you practically expected Scott to tell us they ended the call by whispering, “No, you hang up first” before blowing kisses into the receiver. A devoted former aide whose heart just bleeds for his old boss. Truly beautiful stuff.
Then McConnell vanished into thin air. Days turned into weeks; weeks turned into months. A solid chunk of the political media space—myself included—started genuinely asking if the man had shuffled off his mortal coil. Not in a hyperbolic, tongue-in-cheek way, but in a literal, “has anyone checked his pulse or seen him in daylight” way. Democratic Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear was getting hounded by his own constituents to intervene. Even my wife, who does not watch cable news panels for sport, kept asking why Beshear wasn’t forcing Republicans to prove McConnell was still breathing. I had to tell her I didn’t have an answer. I’m not always Beshear’s biggest fan among Democratic governors, but I couldn’t find a statutory mechanism that allows a governor to force a sitting U.S. Senator to prove he possesses a heartbeat and measurable brain activity.
Then, on September 14, we finally got our “proof of life.” Not a video update, not a press conference, but McConnell himself being wheeled out of his home to hit the Capitol for his first floor vote in three months. He didn’t look like a statesman who’d spent the summer having breezy, wide-ranging policy chats about Ukraine. He looked like a man who needed a GPS, a sherpa, and a miracle just to remember what city he was in.
If that grim spectacle wasn’t enough, two days later at a Senate Agriculture Committee markup, McConnell had to be physically ushered through a simple 12-11 vote by a full retinue of staffers and colleagues. His name was called. Blank stare. Nothing. Called again. Still nothing. Finally, after his handlers practically operated him like a marionette, he managed a hoarse “aye” to break the tie. And all I could do watching that horror show was stare at the screen and wonder: Scott Jennings. How in the absolute hell does this motherfucker still have a job?
If this all feels like reruns, that’s because it is. Capitol Hill has an old, proud, deeply bipartisan tradition of quietly propping up members who probably shouldn’t still be there, then dressing up the staffers running the show behind the curtain as just another normal Tuesday in representative democracy. Former Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) lived through her own version of this in 2023, when her name was called for a committee vote and she just… started reading prepared remarks instead, forcing Chair Patty Murray to gently walk her back with a soft “just say aye.”
