Massie, who recently lost his Republican primary, said he wasn’t interested in “the same circus with different monkeys.”
Rep. Thomas Massie has shut down speculation that he’d seek a Senate seat if Sen. Mitch McConnell were to leave office early, telling an interviewer he’d rather stay exactly where he is.
In a recent interview, Kentucky Republican U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie shut down any notion that he’d seek U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell’s seat if he were to leave office early.
“Not interested,” Massie told a TMZ reporter in Washington, D.C., on Capitol Hill.
He explained that if a special election is called for McConnell’s U.S. Senate seat, he would not run.
He told the reporter, explaining Kentucky’s Senate replacement law, “What people need to know is there’s only a special election for his unfulfilled term, which would go till January.”
That means the winner of the special election required to be held if McConnell leaves office before August 3 would just serve out the last few months of his term.
“Even though my sentence got commuted, I still have to spend six more months in this chair,” Massie said.
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The reporter then said the Senate might just be “a different prison cell” to which Massie did not disagree.
Massie lost the Republican House primary for Kentucky’s fourth congressional district in May to Ed Gallrein, a retired Navy SEAL who was recruited to run by President Donald Trump. Massie got caught in Trump’s crosshairs after breaking with the president several times, including helping force out the Epstein files as well as being outspoken against the war on Iran.
He told the reporter that the clearest reason for wanting to stay in the House was the procedural tool he used to force the Epstein files out.
“The problem with being in the Senate is they don’t have a discharge petition, and that’s how I got the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed,” he explained.
In the House, the discharge petition allows members to force a floor vote over leadership’s objections since the leadership is who normally sets the agenda.
Giving that up, Massie said, would mean he would be trading what he says is real influence for a seat among colleagues he wasn’t necessarily eager to join.
“I’d have to really consider giving up the power that we have here in the People’s House to go over there and serve with a bunch of geriatric, you know, folks that should be in nursing homes,” he said, referencing the age of many senators. In the Senate, the average age is 65. Newsweek notes that over a third of senators are 70 or older.
Asked again about the Senate, Massie gave a direct response: “Not interested,” he said.
Pressed again by the reporter, he added, “Not really. It’s the same circus with different monkeys.”
This article first appeared on Queer Kentucky | Kentucky’s Only LGBTQ+ Newsroom and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
