VIDEO: confused Mitch McConnell needs vote do-over

Speaker Mike Johnson canceled the House's final votes of the week and sent members home for more than six weeks, straight through the midterms, just before Rep. Thomas Massie's forced vote on eight articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth could hit the floor.

The speculation is they made have had the votes to actually do it.

Massie's case: Hegseth launched the June strikes on Iran without authorization, ignored Congress's order to stand down, and got civilians killed doing it. Johnson's response was to call it a "publicity stunt" and to table it — once everyone's back from recess and the story has gone cold.

This is also the Congress that's held floor votes on just 65 of its 243 days this year, the fewest at this point in any midterm year since 1994, and has passed 34 bills into law, roughly a third of what the last Congress managed by this point in 2022.

There is no other job in America where you can decide you just don't want to to work for 2 months and still get paid and free healthcare.

The severely impaired Mitch McConnell appeared to vote with Democrats during a committee meeting Wednesday, almost handing his own party a defeat on a contentious farm bill.

After returning from a months‑long health absence, video shows McConnell confused during a vote and initially said “no” before Republican colleagues leaned in and he changed to “aye.” The bill passed 12–11, with his vote effectively the tie‑breaker.

It was the second time in three days Republicans leaned on McConnell's shaky vote. On Monday, his first day back, he cast the deciding procedural vote for Matthew Byrne, President Trump's pick for a federal judgeship in Ohio.

McConnell's vote broke the 12-11 tie Republicans couldn't manufacture without him back in August. The bill passed. So did the message: in this Senate, showing up is optional and being lucid is negotiable.

House Democrats just tried to impeach Trump for the third time in two years, and it failed — not just because of Republican opposition, but because more than a dozen Democrats voted no and another 46, including Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Minority Whip Katherine Clark, and Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar, voted "present.”

The effort was introduced by Texas Rep. Al Green without leadership support, and one Democrat described the situation to Axios as "f*cked up."

Jeffries and Clark issued a joint statement calling impeachment "a sacred constitutional vehicle" — which is a very dignified way to explain why they didn't use it. Six weeks before a midterm where Democrats are up nine points in the generic ballot, leadership's calculation is: don't give Republicans anything to run against.

Whether that's strategy or cowardice is an open question.

Kash Patel appeared before Congress this week and delivered a "doozy" of a hearing that highlighted the wreckage of his FBI tenure.

The headline-grabbing moment was this bizarre exchange with a GOP lawmaker about bestiality, apparently arising from changes to the agency's hiring rules.

But the moment that should be on every front page: Patel refused to commit to not sending FBI agents to polling locations as the midterms approach. The FBI director declining to rule out deploying federal agents to the polls — weeks before an election where his party is cratering in the polls — is not a gaffe. It's a preview.

Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed accepted a FOX 2 debate invitation the day after it was issued in August.

Republican nominee Mike Rogers' campaign went silent for 42 days, then formally declined the morning of the event.

FOX 2 kept the second podium on stage anyway. El-Sayed stood next to it and called Rogers a "coward" on live television — on Fox — with the empty lectern as his visual aid.

Rogers is a Trump-backed candidate running in a state where Democrats are surging, and his campaign's calculation was apparently that debating El-Sayed carried more risk than the optics of a vacant podium.

El-Sayed made sure that calculation cost them.

The top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Gregory Meeks — not historically a progressive firebrand on Israel — has placed a hold on a $2.8 billion U.S. arms transfer to Israel, blocking a package of 40,000 two-thousand-pound bombs, among the most destructive conventional munitions in the American arsenal.

Meeks cited concerns over the threat to civilian lives.

The hold is one of the largest roadblocks to a U.S. arms transfer in Trump's second term. Forty thousand one-ton bombs is not a defensive package — it is an industrial quantity of destruction — and the fact that even Meeks drew a line here says something about where the political ground has shifted.