9 July—Not that it matters, but a month after his cardiac arrest, heart attack, stroke, or other unspecified medical emergency has retiring Kentucky U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell really spoken with three selected Republicans—his former aide Scott Jennings, his successor as Senate Majority Leader John Thune, and dependable Trumpublican Whip John Barrasso—the three of whom and only the three of whom, as far as we know—claim he has?

If Mitch is in fact able to communicate (or do anything at all) during his alleged convalescence, why hasn’t he been allowed to communicate with, say, his fellow Kentucky Republican senator Rand Paul, who gleans updates on his colleague’s condition “through the grapevine,” as Dr. Paul puts it.

(Brings to mind Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei who hasn’t been seen in public since he got the job in February. Is he alive?)

And Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear has been trying to speak with Mitch or at least find out how the old guy is doing and as the CEO of his state has every right to be kept informed. You might even say it’s the governor’s responsibility to be kept informed. On second thought, though, Beshear is a Democrat, so he must obviously be kept out of the minuscule privileged GOP—but not Trumpublican—loop and doesn’t have a right to anything in an otherwise reliably Republican state.

It’s not that Gov. Beshear could appoint a replacement should Mitch be unable (for whatever reason) to serve out the last few months of his undistinguished and often dis graceful term, mind you. Because in 2024 Kentucky’s veto-proof Republican-majority legislature relieved him of a governor’s traditional power to appoint a successor, making it only the fourth state to exclusively require a special election for that purpose.

You wonder why they’d have done or even seen a need for a nasty move like that. Could it possibly have had anything to do with Mitch’s triple bypass in 2003 and, more to the point, the unfortunate public “neurological events”—probably TIAs despite the Capitol physician’s public diagnosis of “occasional lightheadedness” caused by dehydration, blah blah, blah—in 2023, one mini-stroke in D.C., the other back home in Kentucky?

And let’s not forget Kentucky’s extremely popular Democrat governor in his second term.

Nor should we forget that in 2016 Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked—on irrational and unreasonable but politically expedient grounds—the merest consideration of Merrick Garland’s nomination by Barack Obama to fill the Supreme Court seat made available by Antonin Scalia’s unexpected death. Not that the GOP majority would have confirmed Garland, to be sure, but it was a possibility.

Shame on Mitch McConnell for abusing his considerable power and the public trust. And his fairly recent break with Trump—only after he decided to retire, of course—doesn’t absolve him . . .