Congress Can’t Require Members To Show Up Or Quit
The article discusses the issue of members of Congress who stop showing up for work without resigning or facing immediate consequences. It provides past and recent examples,such as Senator Karl Mundt,who stopped participating after suffering a stroke,and current cases like Senator Mitch McConnell,who has been hospitalized with limited facts about his condition. Other cases include Representatives Kay Granger, Tom Kean, and Frederica Wilson, who were absent for extended periods due to health or personal reasons but remained in office and continued receiving pay. The piece highlights the challenges of holding elected officials accountable when they are absent from their duties, emphasizing that the political system often allows them to keep their seats despite not serving their constituents. The author suggests that meaningful change woudl require Congressional action,which appears unlikely.
The South Dakota Republican Karl Mundt left the United States Senate when he retired in 1973, but he really left when he had a stroke in 1969. A long effort to secure his resignation failed. He just stopped showing up, leaving a state with half its representation in the upper chamber. A member of Congress who wins a seat holds the seat, and gets the paycheck, until he loses an election or decides to give it up. He doesn’t have to come to work to have the job.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican and former Senate majority leader, had a serious medical emergency three weeks ago that left him in the hospital. With his office declining to offer details, what we know since then can be explained by dueling headlines and social media posts that say he’s “dialed in” and working from the hospital and also that he’s “brain dead.” We’ve entered the realm of the blindfolded dart game, with more speculation than information.
When that happens, what often happens next is nothing.
In the summer of 2024, Rep. Kay Granger, a Texas Republican, disappeared without an explanation. Reporters visiting her offices found the doors locked and the windows covered, the phones unanswered. For months, her district went unrepresented.
A news story in the Dallas Express describes how that long mystery ended: “We then received a tip from a Granger constituent who shared that the Congresswoman has been residing at a local memory care and assisted living home for some time after having been found wandering, lost, and confused in her former Cultural District/West 7th neighborhood.”
Lost, confused, institutionalized, and drawing a salary as an elected official in Washington, D.C., while not ever going there. Members of Congress have medical privacy rights, but their constituents have a right to be represented.
The conflict between those competing rights keeps coming up. The example of Karl Mundt echoed the example of Sen. Carter Glass, a Virginia Democrat serving in the 1940s “who had taken his last Senatorial oath at his Lynchburg home, in carpet slippers.” He was urged to resign after two years of unbroken absence, and greeted the demands with “no public response whatever.”
In the most recent examples, Rep. Tom Kean, a New Jersey Republican, stopped coming to work for four months, offering no explanation for his absence. Reappearing in the House, he announced that he’d been hospitalized for depression.
Similarly, Rep. Frederica Wilson, a ludicrous Florida Democrat who is famous for her colorful hats, missed more than 40 votes in a long absence from the House before announcing that she had skipped work to recover from eye surgery.
Not participating in deliberation while serving in deliberative bodies, and not providing representation while holding office in a representative government, members of Congress who wander away from the job face no immediate consequences. They hold the seat long after they lose their ability to do the work.
To change that, we would have to get Congress to act. You can see how likely that is.
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