At This Point, I Don’t Even Care If Mitch McConnell Is Dead or Alive

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It’s been roughly two months since anyone has actually laid eyes on Mitch McConnell. Two months of silence around the senior senator from Kentucky — and this past week was supposed to be when that silence finally broke.

A lot of people had talked themselves into this deadline conspiracy: that any day now we’d get the announcement McConnell had died, quietly timed so there’d be no special election, no messy democratic process, nothing. The last twenty-four to forty-eight hours were supposed to be the window — the moment we’d finally learn what the hell is going on, or the moment somebody made a move.

The answer, as far as I can tell, is nothing. Nothing is going to change. We’re just going to keep drifting through this stalemate while the people who are supposed to run this country keep playing games with the disappearance of a sitting United States senator.

And I’ll be honest with you: at this point, I don’t even really care if Mitch McConnell is dead or alive. I don’t wish the man ill. I had significant political disagreements with him — that’s well documented — but that’s not what has me angry. What has me angry is the way the whole system works. I’m angry that everything in this country is treated like a game. That it’s covered like a game by the media. I’m angry at every single person who has played a role in this charade. And I keep coming back to the same conclusion: these are not partisan issues.

We cannot have a functioning government where multiple members of Congress can simply vanish and nobody seems to care. We cannot have a functioning Congress where members — Democrats and Republicans alike — are dying of what is essentially old age, and still expect that anything is going to get done to make our lives better.

Some of you are going to read this and think it’s about ageism. It isn’t — truly. There are plenty of people out there with real wisdom and hard-won experience, and that wisdom should be shared, some of it in the halls of Congress. But when you have a Congress that is this far out of step — politically, culturally, spiritually — with the people it claims to represent, you get exactly what we have right now: a government that is not responsive in any meaningful way to what we actually need.

The President of the United States is an old, demented freak — the oldest man ever elected to the office. He doesn’t know what day it is, let alone how you’re suffering inside the economy he helped build. The average member of Congress is sixty-eight years old. The average voter is forty-one. The average person in this country is thirty-eight. How could these people possibly understand what’s happening to the rest of us?

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At this point, I’ve talked myself all the way into it. Term limits. Age limits. Radical transparency for financial records, so we can finally root out the corruption and the outright theft of taxpayer money happening inside our own government. And radical transparency for health records, too. Because here’s the truth: you give up your right to privacy the moment you go serve in the federal government. That’s the penalty you pay. We cannot keep letting people head to Washington for no reason other than to get rich and famous. That has to stop.

And I know Washington is not going to suddenly wake up and solve any of this. What’s happening to McConnell right now has happened to Democrats before — I’m not going to sit here and list them all out, but we all know, deep down, that this is not a partisan problem. It’s a function of a system built to protect itself.

I’m flabbergasted. I’m exhausted. And every little update chips away at my dignity and my sanity in ways I didn’t see coming. It is a constant indignity to watch McConnell’s staffers stroll smugly through the halls of Congress with no answers. To watch members of Congress act like they expect to see him again, when they don’t know a single thing more than you or I do. To watch sitting United States senators in their sixties and seventies tell us we don’t need age limits or term limits — because they’re personally planning to serve until they’re eighty, ninety, a hundred, God knows how long. It’s too much.

We have a government so unresponsive to our needs that it now lives in an entirely bizarre world of its own. And I’m sure plenty of people in the DC consulting class are going to read this and decide I’m being unfair to them. I don’t believe I am. I think I’m speaking for how most Americans actually feel right now. People are tuning out and checking out of our democracy every single day. A lot of that is the economy, obviously — but a lot of it is simply people feeling like their government does not represent them. That is not a left or right issue. It’s not conservative or liberal. It’s not the DSA versus the Nick Fuentes wing of the Republican Party. It comes down to one thing: whether people believe their government wakes up every morning trying to make their lives better.

And yeah — it’s easy to sit here and blame Donald Trump for all of it. Obviously Trump is an old, demented man and a genuinely terrible president. My record of calling him out for well over a decade speaks for itself. But this problem is so much deeper than him. Trump is a symptom. A healthy, functioning democracy — a healthy society and culture — never lets a man like Donald Trump ascend the way he has. It never lets an entire generation of failed political leaders cling to power this long.

So reforming our democracy has to be a must. Massive campaign finance reform. An end to gerrymandering. Reversing Citizens United. And a dozen other fights beyond those. It’s going to take a lot of people making a lot of very hard decisions — and realistically, it’s the Democratic Party that’s going to have to do it, because for all its imperfections, the Democratic Party is the only real force for good and change left in our system.

So we keep fighting. But man, I’ll tell you — there are days I am absolutely losing my fucking mind. And I appreciate this community more than you know. I read every comment. I read every reply that lands in my inbox. I don’t always write back, but I read them, and your rage and your anger remind me that I am not alone. It keeps me in the fight. And I hope, in some small way, I’m doing the same for you.

Stay safe.