Paid Leave and Healthcare for Me, Not for Thee
Republican members of Congress become the poster children for the safety net they voted against.
Welcome to August and the kickoff to Month Three of Sen. Mitch “MIA” McConnell’s taxpayer-funded medical leave. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear recently wrote a letter demanding that McConnell make a public address or issue his immediate resignation. The hypocrisy in collecting a paycheck since June 14, the last date McConnell showed up at work, makes one thing abundantly clear: the Republican Party has zero shame.
When it comes to paid sick leave, the United States is a global outlier in its refusal to require employers to provide it for workers. Of course, this is in large part thanks to McConnell’s decades-long tenure in the Senate. In 1993, he notoriously voted against the landmark Family and Medical Leve Act (FMLA), one of only 27 senators to do so. Thanks to the FMLA, most employees are guaranteed 12 weeks of unpaid leave after the birth or adoption of a child, to recover from an illness, or to care for an immediate family member with a serious health condition.
Personal note: FMLA was the only form of maternity leave I was afforded for my firstborn in 1996, and I was back on the job 12 weeks later; grateful as I was for the legal mandate that my position be held for me, our nation’s inability to ensure universal and paid parental leave is beyond a disgrace.
But I digress. McConnell’s FMLA vote to derail even unpaid leave was hardly a career one-off. During the height of the pandemic, he blocked various federal paid sick and family leave extensions in congressional stimulus packages — and then laughed about it. In 2022, he voted against a proposal that would have guaranteed seven days of paid sick leave for freight rail workers.
We get it, Mitch. Paid sick leave for me but never for thee.
The double standard goes even deeper. Conspiracy theories flooded the Internet over a pair of Weekend at Bernie’s-style photos, a response to public speculation as to his whereabouts (which achieved exactly the opposite of assurance that he is alive and kicking). But it was his companion written statement crowing about the excellent health care he’s receiving while hospitalized that was so galling — something millions of fellow Americans can barely imagine today thanks to his longstanding effort to repeal and stymie the Affordable Care Act.
McConnell’s written statement was also rife with reminders of his lifelong physical challenges from childhood polio and his fears of being on the receiving end of age discrimination. He’s not been a vaccine-denier, I’ll give him that, but his overall record on supporting truth in science and equal treatment under the law is long, self-serving, and ugly.
Meanwhile, McConnell is not even the only Republican in Congress who has been off the job while collecting a paycheck. Rep. Thomas Kean Jr. also failed to show up for nearly four months, missing every House vote from March 5 to June 30. He, too, has rallied against legislation to require employers provide paid sick leave for workers during his prior stint in the New Jersey state Senate.
When Kean eventually returned to work, he grudgingly shared that he had been receiving inpatient mental health treatment and sought to maintain his privacy. Privacy, ahh, must be nice — now unheard of for any female of reproductive age in this country. I dare say McConnell’s singular and most significant contribution to the downward spiral of American democracy is his engineering of the current composition of the U.S. Supreme Court, which made its first order of business decimating a constitutional right to privacy when it overturned Roe v. Wade. As for Kean, pro-choice groups uncovered a trove of deceptive statements about abortion he’s made over the course of his political career. Privacy, dignity, and control of one’s healthcare are similarly “me” and not “thee” rights.
[Another presumably missed vote by McConnell will be the confirmation of Todd Blanche as U.S. attorney general; Politico reported yesterday that Blanche was caught on tape pledging he would deploy the Justice Department in concert with Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration, and the White House to curtail abortion rights nationwide.]
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We all surely know that the dysfunction of our democracy means the likes of McConnell and Kean have little incentive to serve, let alone empathize with, their constituents. The way they’ve flouted decency and flaunted their respective leaves-of-absence proves it. With fewer than 100 days to go until the midterms, the moment is ripe to make a lesson out of these stories. That entails doing more than calling out the hypocrisy — bald-faced and infuriating as it is — but pointing toward real policies like paid sick (and parental) leave, access to healthcare, and reproductive freedom and dignity, all of which undergird the benefits in which they’ve basked. We all deserve the same.
Jennifer Weiss-Wolf is executive director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center at NYU School of Law. She also leads strategy and partnerships at Ms. Magazine.
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