Mitch McConnell disappeared from the Senate for three straight months.

When he finally came back, his own team barely let him speak.

And now Pat Gray says the 84-year-old senator is missing in action again.

A Return That Lasted Barely A Week

US Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) spent three months away from the Capitol dealing with health concerns before he finally showed up again. After a suspicious three-month absence due to health concerns, Sen. Mitch McConnell finally made it back to Capitol Hill — though his team ensured that he was hardly heard or seen at all.

Staffers captured a short audio clip of his re-emergence. In it, McConnell is heard saying, “I wasn’t sure how many of you would be here today. I’m glad to see you.”

A handful of his Senate colleagues insisted he looked fine. But while some senators claimed that McConnell looked “great” during his return, those watching the scarce footage weren’t so sure.

McConnell made it through his first week back on the job. Senator Mitch McConnell made it through his first week back on Capitol Hill after a three-month absence, during which his team largely kept him from being seen or speaking at all — especially on camera.

Then the pattern that defined his three-month absence started repeating itself. On his third trip to the Hill that week, the senator was spotted being loaded into an SUV, where he participated in one vote but did not stick around for two more that afternoon, and he wasn’t spotted inside the Senate or on his short journey home amid continuing concerns about his health.

Independent journalist Desiree Townsend caught the moment on camera. McConnell, seated in his wheelchair, was captured on video being loaded into an SUV outside his Washington, DC home, wearing a green tie, and he smiled for the camera as his team moved him.

McConnell did manage to cast one vote that day. He voted “yea” on a procedural vote to move forward with a bipartisan bill regulating college sports, but video of the Senate floor did not capture the Kentucky senator as his name was said and the vote recorded.

He skipped the votes that followed. McConnell did not participate in the next two votes that afternoon before senators skipped town, making him one of four senators who did not vote on a procedural vote and one of six senators who did not vote to confirm a district judge that day.

Reporters tried to get answers and came up empty. The Daily Beast asked McConnell’s office where he went after the earlier vote and why he did not participate in the rest of them, but did not receive an immediate response.

Pat Gray noticed the pattern too, and he wasn’t buying the explanation his team offered on air.

“Mitch McConnell didn’t show up for work yesterday,” Gray says. “Just remember that took a lot out of him,” Jeff Fisher comments.

Executive producer Keith Malinak took the joke a step further. “Took three months to get that body double to look just right on the C-SPAN camera,” Malinak jokes. “Exactly, and they did,” Gray says.

The Accountability Problem Nobody Wants To Fix

McConnell isn’t the first senator whose office has tried to manage the public’s view of a health decline while the senator kept a seat and a vote in Washington, DC. Voters watched a similar pattern play out with a Democrat senator from California a few years back, and the same questions about transparency applied then too.

But there’s no real mechanism in the Senate to deal with a member who is present on paper but absent in practice. A staff member can wheel a senator in for one procedural vote, wheel him back out before the cameras catch anything unscripted, and call that a return to duty.

And Kentucky voters sent McConnell to Washington to cast votes on their behalf, not to have a communications team manage the optics of his health from behind closed doors. Every missed vote on judicial confirmations or legislation is a vote Kentucky didn’t get to weigh in on through the man they elected.

McConnell has led the Senate Republican Conference for a long time, and he’s spent much of that time as the face of the very establishment wing of the GOP that has repeatedly resisted the America First movement’s push to shake up Washington. That history doesn’t erase the basic question at hand, but it does explain why so few of his colleagues in leadership seem eager to press him publicly on when, or whether, he intends to fully return.

The Senate Agriculture Committee had already stalled work without him during his absence, and Republicans needed every vote they could get on a chamber where margins are thin. That’s the trade-off of keeping an ailing senator in office rather than letting the people of his state elect someone who can show up.

And it raises the same question Pat Gray’s show has been asking for weeks now: if a member of Congress vanished for three months, came back for a photo op, and disappeared again days later, would anyone else call that serving? Most working Americans who missed that much time and that many meetings wouldn’t get to keep drawing a paycheck, let alone keep a vote on judicial nominees and federal spending.

McConnell’s office has yet to offer a real explanation for the pattern. Until it does, the questions Pat Gray and his crew keep raising on air aren’t going away, and neither is the senator’s habit of showing up just long enough to be seen before disappearing again.

Source: Blaze Media, “Mitch McConnell disappears after long-awaited return: ‘Missing in action again'”; The Daily Beast, “McConnell, 84, Goes Missing Again After Senate Return”