706
Mitch McConnell’s staff refuse to answer basic questions on his health
(www.the-independent.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2026
706 points (99.4% liked)
politics
31081 readers
3260 users here now
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles. Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to US politics and contain quality and original content. Social Media adjacent hosts like Substack are allowed, but ONLY if they tie back to a company/subsidiary. No personal or friend group blogs and no self-promotion. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and re-hosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing other users of being bots or paid actors.
- No memes, trolling, misinformation, or low-effort posts/comments (including reposts). If you see posts like this that anger you, do not engage. Report, block, and live a happier life than they do. Any slap-fight is subject to comment removals. Fights full of rule violations will result in temporary bans to cool off.
- No manipulating votes via bots or alt accounts; this will result in permanent bans. Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in an account ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be permanently banned.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules and use critical thinking when reading, posting, and commenting. Users that repeatedly have comments or posts removed, weaponize reports, or violate the code of conduct, will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users. The reason(s) behind moderator action(s) are publicly available through the Modlog.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm out of the loop. Why August 4th?
Before August 4: Governor runs a special election and seat gets filled that way.
After August 4: seat remains vacant until new senator is elected in generals and new crop of senators gets sworn in.
Republicans are fairly certain they would lose a special election. It doesn't seem they are too confident on keeping the seat in November, either.
For them, an empty seat for 5 months is better than one filled by a D.
This, poetically, being brought to us by the same shmuck who held up replacing Alitos seat, and countless others in lower federal courts in Obama's last term because it was "too close to an election"....a problem that didn't occur for AC(a)B when RBG died at the worst possible time (even closer to an election!), effectively nullifying her whole career.
Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed on October 25, 2020. Early voting was already open in a number of States and ballots had already been cast. So technically her confirmation hearing happened during an ongoing election, not just closer to one.
GOP already does not want to acknowledge any voting outside of that one specific Tuesday during mostly working hours.
They also seem to only want to count ballots until the end of the day. Anything after midnight shouldn't count. Because those are mostly the rural votes, because the population is so much smaller, the counting is a lot faster.
Shit thanks for sharing this. So post August 4 is highly likely then I imagine.
3rd of August is the actual deadline date. So 4th of August or later.
She was a bitch for not stepping down WWII l when Obama could have replaced her. This whole fucking SC situation is partly her fault
Seriously. She she strived so hard to be a strong, unyielding feminist, that she ended up dieing as a stubborn bitch.
It's really the shittiest part of the whole thing. Like she spent her life as a champion of women's rights and feminism, but ironically, her only real legacy is that she didn't step aside when given the opportunity. That one act (ultimately, saying 'no' to a man) in the long term, will have ended up erasing most (if not all) of what she accomplished.
The fact that her replacement that is undoing it is a younger and objectively hotter woman, chosen by the ultimate chauvinist, is just the icing on the irony cake.
That poor woman. The forces exerted by her rotating corpse could boil enough water to power a hundred datacenters.
I don't remember all the details, but for the past years Republicans have stripped away lots of powers of their Democratic governor. And somewhere in there, they also had a rule change that doesn't allow a special election if it's so many months away from a regular election. So basically if they run out the clock, the governor can't hold a special election to replace McConnell.
Edit: I dug up an article
Multiple articles have stated in 2024 changes to state law requires a special election to fill a vacant Senate seat. Before that, a 2021 law allowed the political party holding the seat to submit three names for the governor to choose from, rather than leaving the selection solely to the governor. Political experts cited in the report say timing requirements mean the window to call a special election would be tight, with an estimated cutoff of Aug. 3 based on candidate filing and notice deadlines. It's why if it's announced Aug 4th it'd would have been weekend at Bernie's essentially and why people are calling on Governor Bashear to just call a special election to force their hand.
It's worth noting that the laws the other people are mentioning are just state laws and therefore do not supersede Kentucky's state constitution, which gives Beshear the power to simply appoint a replacement. Including a Democrat, if he wants.