Monday, August 3, 2026
Mitch McConnell is Never Coming Back to the Senate
After a brief hiatus during which nothing much happened on the Mitch front, I’m back with the news for August 3, the last day for Governor Andy Beshear to call a special election to fill the senate seat that remains in the death grip of the all but dead senator Mitch McConnell. Spoiler: Beshear ain’t doing a thing, and here’s his post on Twitter (I’m never calling it X, sorry) addressing the issue:
Is a SCOTUS justice retiring?
Here’s a synopsis of today’s news about the missing Mitch:
Amanda Marcotte states the obvious in an article for Salon in which she asserts that McConnell’s days as a senator are done and that he won’t be coming back to work. Ever. She states that “Despite the conspiracy theories, the likeliest reason to conceal McConnell’s condition is more pathetic than calculating: It’s hard for these powerful old men and their families to let go of power.”
She goes on to give example after example of politicians on both sides of the aisle holding on way past their mental and physical expiration dates, Biden and Trump included.
For the New York Times, Emily Cochrane covered the senator’s absence from a picnic at some outpost called Fancy Farms, which is apparently a yearly shindig attended by Mitch and company — Cochrane notes that the senator has attended the event at least 30 times over the past decades. The senator previously announced that he would not be attending this year’s event. Cochrane writes, “for nearly 150 years, Fancy Farm, an unincorporated community of less than 500 people, has hosted the picnic, which features piles of barbecued mutton and pork. It is first and foremost a charity event for the local Catholic church, St. Jerome.”
Other than pointing out that he wasn’t there, that people showed up to chant “Where’s Mitch?” while other people wondered why we can’t all just get along, the piece was fairly vacuous.
And that’s pretty much all there is: Mitch is missing, Mitch will never return to the senate, and there’s a pic-in-ick in Kentucky that he would be attending if he weren’t so dead-adjacent.
Regardless of whether or not he’s alive he’s done in politics, and everyone knows it.