Wednesday was the day for answers. Per Senate custom, McConnell was scheduled to address the Republican conference during their weekly lunch that afternoon, followed by a press conference with Democratic and Republican leadership. For the past decade and a half, McConnell has used these weekly press conferences to spar with the press, delicately dancing around reporters’ jabs and dishing out a few haymakers of his own. But now, following the freezes, the press seemed to have caught him off balance. Surely, we would get something — some new information about the freezes. The hallways surrounding the Senate chamber were even more crowded with reporters and photographers, and a dozen or so camera operators were unloading their rigs for the press conference. Anticipation was mounting.
That morning during a vote on the Senate floor, McConnell stood still near the front of the chamber as his colleagues were pulled, one by one, into his gravitational pull. A handshake from Mitt Romney. A pat on the back from Roger Wicker. As McConnell moved to exit the chamber, the scrum re-formed in the hallway outside.
“What do you say to those who are calling on you to step down?”
“We’ll have a stakeout this afternoon,” McConnell replied — the first complete sentence he had uttered to the press. (In the parlance of the Hill, the “stakeout” is the leadership’s weekly talk with the assembled press.)
“Do you plan to address your health during this afternoon’s press conference?”
Silence.
On the other side of the chamber, another scrum of reporters was gathering in the elevator bank outside the Republican conference lunch, catching members as they arrived from the vote.
Was there a movement afoot to oust McConnell as leader, a reporter asked?
“I don’t know the answer to that,” said Josh Hawley, one of a handful of Republicans who voted against McConnell’s leadership bid last December. “I think that’s a question for the folks who supported his leadership.”
Meanwhile, the crowd in front of the podium was expanding like a fast-growing amoeba. The more assertive onlookers elbowed their way to the front of the crowd; the more cautious stood on tiptoes at the back. A press staffer was called over to settle a territorial dispute between a photographer and a reporter. “Shhh,” hissed a staffer over the din of the crowd.
Despite the jostling, the scrum was united by its morbid curiosity in McConnell’s condition — and make no mistake: This fascination was decidedly morbid. For all the decorum that usually dictates interactions between members of the press and members of Congress, this was a macabre scene, with reporters preparing to inch as close as possible to ask that question.
Officially, we were there to get answers about McConnell’s fitness to serve as a member of the United States Senate, but the real questions — the ones that, though never stated outright, floated silently below the surface of the scrum — were of a more primordial nature: Have the vagaries of old age finally got the best of McConnell, that seemingly immortal fixture of the Senate? Is biology scrambling our tidily constructed political reality? Is Mitch McConnell about to die?
As 3:00 p.m. approached, following remarks from the Democratic leadership team, McConnell emerged once again from the Senate chamber, flanked by the members of his own leadership team. His pack of aides followed from behind but let the leader maneuver to the podium on his own. The scrum waited patiently as McConnell re-stated his support for Ukraine; as Republican Whip John Thune — a potential successor to McConnell — discussed spending packages; as John Barrasso — another potential McConnell successor — denounced “Bidenomics”; as Joni Ernst recapped her 99-county tour of Iowa; as Shelley Moore Capito riffed on her trip to the women’s World Cup; as Steve Daines also denounced “Bidenomics.”
At last, McConnell returned to the podium. McConnell’s staffers, standing off to the side, looked on nervously. A reporter teed up the question that was on everybody’s mind.
“Respectfully, can you tell us what is afflicting you?”
A dodge: “I think Dr. Monahan covered it.”
Another reporter: “What have doctors said is the precise medical reason for those two freeze ups?”
Another dodge.
A third: “What do you say to those who are calling on you to step down?”
“I’m gonna finish my term as leader, and I’m gonna finish my Senate term.”
And with that, after three questions, McConnell turned around, walked away, disappearing into his office. The crowd of reporters slowly dispersed, the camera operators began packing up their equipment and a team of staffers whisked away the podium.
But the essential question remained: Is Mitch McConnell OK?