Democrats Should Start Assuming Mitch McConnell is Dead and Force the GOP to Prove Otherwise.

An undated proof of life photo with a barely visible newspaper and a weak statement full of excuses is just further proof that the GOP thinks Americans are all stupid.

**disclaimer** Lindsey Graham died over the weekend while I was finishing this up, and some have been left with confusion over why his staff and Mitch McConnell’s staff have handled their respective situations so differently. If I had to bet, it’s because Graham’s party controls the process to replace him. Meanwhile, McConnell clings to “life” via support from machines plugged into an outlet in the wall because there’s a Democrat in the Kentucky governors seat. Now, on to the article!

Mitch McConnell has been dead for three weeks now. Nobody can deny that until they can prove he is alive, but all we have so far is a spokesperson repeating the same sentence over and over again, every few days like we’re all stupid: “he continues to improve, he’s working closely with staff,” and now the worst proof-of-life photo ever created, complete with a barely visible newspaper and his blood-sucking wife by his side, after vacationing in China without him. Bullshit.

I can’t understand why the Democratic Party is dropping the ball here. I get that in normal times, something like a Senator’s health might be something that needs to be handled with some sort of grace. But these are not normal times, and I want you to sit with a hypothetical for a second, because it will tell you everything about you need to know about what the GOP thinks about legitimacy, and how the Democrats regularly fail to stand up and challenge them.

Flip it. Imagine it’s a long term, consequential Democratic senator in that hospital bed, in a state with a Republican governor. Three weeks, no answers, aides going quiet, a cardiac scare that leaked out through a police scanner instead of a press release, etc. You already know what would happen. The MAGA media machine would have every chyron on TV counting the hours since we last heard from them. There’d be demands for medical records, calls for a competency hearing, maybe even a state legislator standing outside the Senator’s house, questioning whether they are even alive to give informed consent to their own medical care. The right wing machinery of doubt would be running at full volume by day two, and by the end of the first week? That Republican governor would have already declared them dead, and begun the process to replace them.

That’s not a guess. That’s just the modern Republican political strategy, as perfected and practiced for the last decade. Dianne Feinstein got a preview of it while she was still breathing in 2023, when McConnell’s Senate refused to let the Democrats replace her committee seat while she was sick and dying. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg got the full McConnell in 2020, when he dismissed his own made up 2016 rule, that no SCOTUS seat should be filled in an election year, to let trump fill hers as quickly as possible. Of course, Democratic President Barack Obama was in office back then, and it was the hugely conservative Antonin Scalia that was gone. It took 419 days to replace Scalia, but just 39 to replace Ginsburg.

Now here we are, three weeks going on four into the Democratic Party allowing Republicans to gaslight the entire country into believing a dead man is not only still alive, but able to have multiple phone calls with multiple people, oh but only with partisan colleagues, and oh, only for exactly 20 minutes each, and oh no, he can’t call anyone else because he’s recovering, don’t you know? Oh but here’s a picture taken just yesterday, where he looks fully healthy and 20 years younger, and he’s even got a newspaper!

This is the opportunity a lot of people on the left have been waiting for: the Democratic Party can finally prove to the nation that the GOP is full of shit, and declare McConnell dead while moving forward with the process to replace him. Every incumbent Democrat should be saying he’s dead and the GOP are hiding it, and force them to produce some REAL proof of life evidence we all know he can’t deliver, like a live interview or press conference.

Instead, we have a garbage photo and a weak statement full of excuses anyone could have written. And the worst part? The GOP saw this coming, and prepared for it in front of the entire country.

In 2024, Kentucky’s Republican supermajority passed House Bill 622, or McConnell’s Law. Before that law, they had already made it so if a U.S. Senate seat opened up mid-term, the governor could only pick a temporary replacement from a list of three names supplied by the departing senator’s own party, but a real appointment nonetheless. HB 622 killed that. Now, if McConnell’s seat goes vacant before January, Governor Beshear has no appointment power at all. None. The seat sits empty until a special election, one with a filing deadline so tight it might not even happen before the seat’s regularly scheduled replacement takes office anyway.

Beshear vetoed the bill. The GOP legislature overrode him without blinking. Did you even hear about it? The MAGA media machine strikes again!

And notice the timing: HB 622 was introduced the day after McConnell announced he was stepping down as Senate GOP leader, February 21st, 2024. Not after some abstract concern about democratic principle bubbled up in a think tank somewhere. Once McConnell’s own political mortality became visible on the horizon, his party immediately moved to make sure his seat would never touch the Democratic Party, even for a matter of months.

One of the bill’s sponsors, state Rep. Steven Rudy, insists this was never about McConnell, it was about principle. “One person should never pick the senator,” he said, invoking the 17th Amendment like a man who just discovered the Constitution exists. That helps explain where their principles were back on February 10th, 2021, when this same legislature passed the first power stripping law, restricting the governor’s ability to appoint from whoever he wanted to a hand-picked list submitted by the outgoing senator’s own party. Neither of those were about democratic principles. That was just a party making sure the family keeps the house keys, until the moment the Democrats might get to use them, at which point the door gets bricked over entirely. That’s just the Republican way.

Going back to 2023, when Senator Feinstein died in office, Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom appointed Laphonza Butler to fill her California seat. No bill was introduced to make sure the Democratic Party protected the process with their supermajority. There was no manufactured doubt about whether Feinstein was alive, dead, or fit to serve in her final months, even though by then it was an open secret in Washington that she was struggling. Butler served out the term, Adam Schiff ran for the seat outright and won it in the next election, and the system did what it’s supposed to do: kept the seat functioning without treating the nation like they were hiding a body.

That’s the mirror. One party trusts the existing process. The other rewrote the entire process specifically to make sure it could never be used against them, and they’d always come out on top. Oh, and btw, McConnell’s law might not even survive itself.

Kentucky’s own constitution, Section 152, says the governor appoints when a statewide office goes vacant. Both bills conflicted with the state’s own founding document, but even though legal scholars are already flagging that Beshear has real constitutional grounds to challenge it, I guess we’re just going to wait until it can be tested in court. That’s right, the law Republicans built to guarantee they’d never lose this seat by accident could collapse the moment it’s actually needed, because they were in such a hurry to entrench power that they didn’t bother checking whether it was legal to take it, but that’s just how they operate: break the law now, deal with the consequences waaaaaaay later, when it doesn’t matter anymore.

This isn’t a story about McConnell’s health; he’s already dead. This is a story about a political party that understands power as something to be locked in, not earned, and never given up. This is a party that will invoke “the will of the voters” as a rhetorical shield while it’s busy making sure those voters have no say at all.

They didn’t write McConnell’s law because they trust elections. They wrote it because they don’t trust the voters’ choice in Andy Beshear, and they were willing to gut their own state’s constitutional authority rather than risk it. Remember that the next time the talking heads on TV tell you the GOP is the party of small government and local control.

Republicans are all about complete control of a government run solely by themselves, and they will do whatever it takes to get it, keep it, and destroy everyone else, and if it’s up to the Democratic Party to stop them, I got some bad news, my fellow Americans.

We’re fucked.