Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said he is “completely recovered” after a series of health episodes earlier this year that raised questions about whether the 81-year-old senator could continue serving.
“I’m in good shape, completely recovered, and back on the job,” McConnell said in an interview that aired Sunday with CBS News’s Face The Nation.
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When asked by host Margaret Brennan if he believes he is fit to continue serving “at a time when we are talking about incredible dysfunction in Washington, McConnell fired back, “I think we ought to be talking about what we were talking about earlier, rather than my health.”
McConnell has experienced several health episodes in recent months. In July, the minority leader was briefly escorted from the Senate Republicans’ weekly press conference after he froze in front of the cameras, the first such public incident that medically is called aphasia. In August, he froze up and stopped speaking, prompting an aide to take him away briefly from a press conference in Kentucky.
The minority leader was hospitalized earlier this year after suffering a fall that required him to complete physical therapy. He experienced a concussion and a minor rib fracture that sidelined him from the Senate for nearly six weeks.
Brian P. Monahan, McConnell’s physician, ruled out a seizure, stroke, or other movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease in September following McConnell’s August episode. Monahan attributed the freezing episode to dehydration and lightheadedness but said he was “medically cleared” to continue his Senate duties as usual.
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However, some medical professionals believed Monahan’s diagnosis was really “a way to calm the public” and was an attempt to offer “benign explanations for something a lot more serious.”
“No one knows what [McConnell] does behind the scenes,” Carole Lieberman, a forensic psychiatrist and a diplomat of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, told the Washington Examiner, “but he’s not taking all of his issues seriously enough.”
