09/15/2026
Mitch McConnell vanished from public view for months—then aides rolled him back onto the Senate floor yesterday so he could cast a vote.
He took three months of paid leave. He kept taxpayer-subsidized health care. He returned to handshakes, visitors, and the full institutional grace afforded to a powerful senator.
And yet this is the same Republican political project that has spent decades fighting paid sick leave, attacking affordable health care, and insisting ordinary Americans should be grateful to work through illness, delay treatment, or risk financial ruin because they got hurt or sick.
For them, health care is a privilege when we need it—but a guaranteed benefit when they do. Time off is “handouts” for workers, but completely normal when a senator disappears for months. Public support is supposedly socialism for the public and standard operating procedure for the people writing the laws.
They do not oppose government assistance. They oppose you receiving it.
They believe taxpayers should subsidize their health care, their salaries, their security details, their pensions, their staff, and their endless recesses—while telling working people to pull themselves up by bootstraps that cost $80 and have no paid sick days.
The cruelty is not a contradiction in their politics. It is the point.
