596
Mitch McConnell’s staff refuse to answer basic questions on his health
(www.the-independent.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2026
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politics
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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.
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.