Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, was hospitalized on Sunday, according to his spokesperson, who provided no details on the former Senate majority leader’s condition.
“Senator McConnell was admitted to the hospital this morning. He is receiving excellent care,” the senator’s spokesman David Popp wrote in a statement. He did not say why his boss was taken to the hospital.
McConnell, 84, has suffered a series of health problems and falls in recent years, including a series of episodes in 2023 in which he appeared to freeze on camera while speaking to reporters.
He suffered a concussion and was hospitalized after falling at a Washington hotel in 2023, and fell in the Capitol multiple times after that. In February of this year, the former majority leader was hospitalized with flu-like symptoms.
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First elected to the Senate in 1984, McConnell stepped aside in January as majority leader after serving 18 years as his party’s leader in the upper chamber.
McConnell, who is retiring when his term ends in January, has become a more vocal critic of President Donald Trump, whom he famously said was “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events” at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
More recently, the Kentucky Republican has criticized a number of Trump plans, including the president’s proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, which the administration had to abandon in the face of fierce bipartisan opposition. Calling it a “slush fund,” McConnell ripped the payout fund as “utterly stupid, morally wrong.”
Mychael Schnell is a reporter for MS NOW.