Excuse me Mitch McConnell, but are you by any chance dead?

Reporters were prevented by Senate staff from taking videos of McConnell on his return, a sign of just how frail he is and how sensitive the GOP are to the optics. A social media video from September 23rd shows him weakly lifting two fingers to the camera as he was lifted in his wheelchair and pushed into his DC townhouse.

The senate has long been a gerontocracy: its average age – average! – is 65. Chuck Grassley, the Senate president pro tempore (which makes him, by the way, third in the line of presidential succession) is 92. But wheeling the ailing McConnell in makes it practically a nectocracy.

“Today, I’ll cast my first Senate vote since I took a bad fall back in June,” read a statement posted to McConnell’s social media on September 14th, the day he was wheeled back onto Capitol Hill. The statement said his recovery “has been a long and often frustrating process, and the lingering effects of childhood polio haven’t made it any easier.” 

“I’m still not quite back to 100%, but I’ve assured Leader Thune that, as I continue with physical therapy on the advice of my doctors, I will do my best to be present for tough votes when our Conference needs me,” he added.

McConnell’s health has been the focus of particular speculation since July 2023 when, infamously, he glitched out during a live press conference. I urge you to watch the video because it’s so, so weird: he freezes mid-sentence, his eyes glaze over, and he just stands there for fully 20 seconds staring into space until his aides hustle him offstage. A month later, it happened again.

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Then in June this year, McConnell disappeared. And I mean really, just vanished. For weeks his office refused to give any details at all on his condition. Some news outlets reported on a 911 call that night from his location asking for help with an “unconscious man”. Conspiracy theories, of course, spiraled. 

Friend of the magazine Laura Loomer said she had it on good authority that McConnell was “brain dead” and in a “vegetative state”. It wasn’t just conspiracy theorists, though, who filled the information vacuum – Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky, said in an interview in July that two separate federal agencies had told him the senator had died.

After a full month of the rumour-mill running at maximum power, McConnell’s office put out what many compared to a hostage-style proof-of-life photo, complete with a copy of that day’s newspaper. He is propped up on pillows, his smile vacant, his eyes glazed. In an accompanying statement, he said that he had had a fall, and then a “mild case of pneumonia”.

“You all know how folks of my generation often hesitate to share the vulnerability that comes with growing older. Even in the public eye, I feel that same instinct – I can’t help it,” the statement, from one of the most powerful human beings on the planet, added.

McConnell stepped down as leader of the Republican senate conference in 2025, following the storm of speculation over his freeze-up moment. But he remains a core nexus of power as chair of the committee on rules and administration and the defence appropriations panel.

He also has a key vote on the agriculture committee, meaning that while he was away, Republicans were unable to pass the farm bill – a central piece of their legislative agenda, which is the vote they finally wheeled him in for.

If the American legislature is a shell of itself, McConnell is the reason for it. First elected to represent Kentucky in 1985 – the year before I was born, incidentally, which means he has been a fixture of American politics literally for my whole life – McConnell’s use of power became some of the most cynical ever seen in Congress. He became a true master of the art of obstruction, tying up any Democratic legislation or judicial nomination in bare-faced partisan opposition.

This ruthlessly cynical legislating style, which he pioneered, is a big part of what has dragged the US into the chaotic mess it is today. “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for Obama to be a one term president,” he memorably said in 2010. 

He failed in that goal, but was relentless in slow-rolling every piece of Democratic policy, holding up the Affordable Care Act for years – and, crucially, working to deny Obama’s judicial nominations at every turn. 

The latter project was nothing short of a total hijacking of the federal judiciary, and it became much easier when the GOP took back the majority in the senate in 2014. In the last two years of Obama’s term the Senate confirmed only 18 of his district court judges and one appellate court judge, leaving Trump to inherit more than 100 vacancies to fill with cronies when he entered office. 

And then there’s the Supreme Court nomination that followed the death of Antonin Scalia in February 2016. McConnell put out a statement within hours of Scalia’s death that there would be no Senate vote on a replacement until after the 2016 election. 

This was a completely unprecedented move, almost tantamount to a coup, and what it led to – the eventual appointment of Trump’s nominee, Neil Gorsuch, to the court – set the course for a catastrophic change in the balance of the court. 

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Obviously, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in 2020, McConnell had no similar objections when it came to allowing Trump’s third nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, to go through. She was confirmed less than a fortnight before the election.

That whole takeover project, and the disciplined way it was carried out, and its devastating success, was all down to McConnell’s strategic and breathtakingly cynical leadership. As his longtime opponent, the Democrat Harry Reid, majority and then minority leader against McConnell, pithily told the New York Times: “I believe Mitch McConnell has ruined the Senate.”

So if, as some still believe, McConnell is actually truly dead, or close to it, and being propped up as a puppet for the sake of his vote – well, first that’s a sign of just how low the perception of the Republican party is right now. And it is a sign of how low they actually are that it is a genuinely imaginable scenario. 

But it’s worth noting that if McConnell was actually to be Weekend at Bernies’d for the sake of one last bare-faced, cynical political machination, I think we could say with certainty that it is exactly what he would have wanted.