U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) missed both Senate roll-call votes Thursday and still has no announced return date more than one month after a fall left him briefly unconscious, sharpening a question The Dallas Express raised nationally in 2024: Who represents voters when an elected official remains in office but cannot cast a vote?
The Senate invoked cloture on the nomination of Kara Marie Westercamp to the U.S. Court of International Trade by a 49-48 vote. McConnell was one of three senators who did not vote. He later missed a 46-50 vote in which the Senate rejected a motion to proceed with a resolution challenging a Medicare prior-authorization rule.
McConnell also missed two Senate votes Wednesday. The Senate reached outcomes without him, but Thursday’s one-vote margin demonstrated how little room can separate success from failure.
McConnell says he continues Senate work
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, McConnell entered the hospital June 14. His office issued brief recovery updates but did not publicly identify the fall or pneumonia until July 12.
McConnell, 84, said in a written statement that he developed pneumonia during his hospitalization and moved to a rehabilitation center after doctors ruled out fractures, a concussion, a heart attack, a stroke, tumors and hemorrhages. The attending physician said McConnell was medically cleared to continue intensive physical therapy.
“And on the advice of my doctors, I won’t be able to return to the Senate floor to vote quite yet,” McConnell said. “But rest assured that, in the meantime, I’m not taking a break from the Senate business that matters to you. I’ve been working closely with my legislative staff on current issues, and with my Kentucky team who help me provide timely constituent services across our Commonwealth.”
McConnell said he remained in contact with Senate colleagues about appropriations, midterm politics and other matters. He said he intended to finish his term and return to the Senate floor as soon as his doctors permitted.
His office had not announced a return date as of Thursday afternoon. The public record does not establish that McConnell has a cognitive impairment. It establishes that Kentucky’s longest-serving senator cannot cast votes while his seat remains occupied.
The warning from Kay Granger
In December 2024, The Dallas Express revealed that then-U.S. Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas) had not voted since July 24. Calls to her district and Washington offices went to voicemail, and a DX reporter found her Fort Worth district office locked and apparently closed.
The reporter then visited an assisted-living facility that also offered memory care. Two employees confirmed Granger lived there, and Assistant Executive Director Taylor Manziel said, “This is her home.”
The article was updated after Granger’s son, Brandon Granger, told The Dallas Morning News that his mother had been “having some dementia issues late in the year.” By the time her term ended January 3, 2025, Granger had gone more than five months without casting a House vote.
How Washington missed the story
POLITICO later examined how The Dallas Express uncovered the story while the Washington press corps missed it. A March 2025 follow-up interviewed The Dallas Express CEO Chris Putnam, who said the newsroom received a tip from a senior Granger staffer in 2023 but lacked enough evidence to publish.
“I checked roll call, and I saw that she hadn’t cast a vote since early July,” Putnam told POLITICO.
Putnam said the newsroom then sent a reporter to Granger’s district office, contacted local sources and followed a tip to the assisted-living facility.
Putnam challenged Granger in the 2020 Republican primary. POLITICO described the eventual report as a major scoop for a Texas website with an editorial staff of 10 and examined how the decline of hometown congressional coverage allowed Granger’s prolonged absence to escape national scrutiny.
Granger did not resign, so no vacancy existed. No substitute could cast her vote, and successor Craig Goldman could not take office early. The story became national news, but the underlying constitutional gap remained.
Death creates a vacancy. Incapacity does not.
The problem is not confined to one party.
U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) missed more than two months of Senate work while recovering from shingles in 2023. She returned using a wheelchair and voted only occasionally before she died in office on September 29, 2023, at age 90.
Feinstein’s death created a vacancy that California’s governor could fill. Illness alone had not.
The same dividing line appeared this week after U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) died on July 11. South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster appointed Graham’s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, on July 13, and the Senate swore her in on July 14. South Carolina regained its second voting senator three days after Graham’s death.
Death, resignation or expulsion creates a Senate vacancy. Illness, hospitalization and incapacity do not. The distinction can leave voters without a temporary voting representative whenever a living member remains in office but cannot perform the job.
The SAVE America Act raises the stakes
The unresolved gap now intersects with one of President Donald Trump’s top legislative priorities.
A March cloture vote on a photo-identification amendment tied to the SAVE America Act failed 53-47, seven votes short of the 60 needed under regular Senate procedure to overcome a filibuster. The broader SAVE America Act includes proof-of-citizenship and voter-identification provisions.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) said Graham may have been considering a way to advance parts of the measure through budget reconciliation, the New York Post reported Thursday. Thune stressed that he did not know whether that was what Graham had discussed with Trump.
The House Budget Committee unveiled a $95 billion budget framework Wednesday that includes $10 billion in grants intended to incentivize states to implement portions of the SAVE America Act. The committee approved the resolution 20-14 along party lines Thursday, clearing it for consideration by the full House as early as next week.
Budget reconciliation can pass the Senate by a simple majority without overcoming a filibuster. The Byrd Rule, however, permits senators to challenge provisions whose budgetary effects are merely incidental to their policy goals, leaving the Senate parliamentarian with a central role in determining what survives.
McConnell’s absence is not the reason the measure remains stalled, and his vote cannot be presumed. Reuters reported before his office disclosed the fall and pneumonia that he had opposed eliminating the filibuster to enact the measure. That does not establish how he would vote on a differently structured reconciliation package.
The new strategy still makes every available Republican vote more important. McConnell’s absence leaves Senate leaders with one fewer vote and less room for defections if a qualifying reconciliation package reaches the floor.
Congress has no 25th Amendment
The Constitution provides a disability mechanism for the presidency. Sections 3 and 4 of the 25th Amendment allow presidential powers to transfer temporarily to the vice president when a president declares an inability or when the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet initiate the process.
Congress has no equivalent. The Seventeenth Amendment lets states fill vacant Senate seats. Article I requires elections to fill House vacancies and lets each chamber compel attendance, punish members and expel a member with a two-thirds vote. It does not let a member transfer a vote temporarily to a substitute.
Congress examined the problem more than two decades ago. At a 2003 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said the Constitution provides “no immediate mechanism for filling vacancies in the House, nor for addressing incapacities in either chamber.”
Norman J. Ornstein, senior counselor to the Continuity of Government Commission, testified that “The 17th Amendment to the Constitution does not deal with incapacitation; it deals with death.”
“We have had members of the Senate who have been incapacitated for years, unable to function,” Ornstein said.
Ornstein drew a distinction between one absent senator and mass incapacity. He said one unavailable senator generally would not prevent the institution from operating, while the incapacity of more than half the chamber could leave the Senate without a quorum.
Later in the hearing, Ornstein said a constitutional amendment could permit temporary appointments until incapacitated members declared themselves ready to resume service. The proposal under discussion focused on mass incapacitation after a catastrophic attack, not the illness or absence of one lawmaker.
One absent vote can still matter
McConnell’s case is not Granger’s or Feinstein’s. His office has disclosed a physical injury, pneumonia and rehabilitation, and no public evidence establishes cognitive incapacity. Treating rumor as proof would be irresponsible.
Ornstein was addressing whether one absence could stop the institution from operating. Thursday’s 49-48 vote shows the separate problem: One unavailable vote can still narrow the margin on a nomination or major bill.
Voters elect one person, and only that person can cast the vote. If a member remains alive and does not resign, no family member, staffer, governor or party leader can temporarily fill the seat.
Age alone does not establish incapacity. Secrecy does not establish it either. But when voters cannot see an elected official, hear directly from that person or obtain a return date, speculation fills the vacuum while representation stops at the chamber door.
Congress recognized the gap decades ago. It still has not closed it.
