Tom Kean Jr returns after months-long absence

Tom Kean Jr takes months of paid leave after opposing it for others, a Republican congressman missed over 100 votes while collecting full salary, Arwa Mahdawi uses the episode to map US leave policy gaps.

Kean was absent from public view for almost four months, according to the Guardian. His office offered only a late-April statement citing a “personal health matter”, and his father Tom Kean Sr told CNN in May that the illness was temporary and that his son would return soon. This week Kean resurfaced and said he had been receiving inpatient treatment for depression, adding that he had stayed quiet because he is “a private person by nature”.

The immediate political fact is straightforward: Congress has no national paid-leave scheme to vote on for its own members, but it does have a structure that lets a lawmaker disappear while pay and benefits continue. Constituents, meanwhile, are left with the practical problem Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed to: representation depends on more than casting votes, and the public learns about long absences mostly through press inquiries and family briefings.

Mahdawi widens the frame to the labour market Kean legislates for. The United States remains the only OECD country without a national paid leave policy, and access depends on employer generosity or state-level programmes. A 2024 Department of Labor fact sheet cited by the Guardian says 95% of the lowest-wage workers have no access to paid family leave, and 90% lack access to short-term disability leave—precisely the workers least able to absorb a sudden health crisis without missing rent. When politicians describe paid leave as an unaffordable burden on business, they are usually describing costs that will instead land on families, co-workers, charities, and emergency rooms.

The contrast is sharpened by Kean’s voting record in New Jersey politics. The Guardian notes he voted against the state’s Earned Sick Leave Act, which mandates five paid sick days a year, and against paid family leave expansions in 2008 and 2018. He also voted against New Jersey’s No Surprise Medical Bills act. In Washington he supported Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”, which the Guardian says cuts Medicaid and Medicare, making life harder for people with disabilities. In practice, the people most exposed to illness and income shocks are also the people whose safety nets are most frequently treated as negotiable.

Mahdawi places Kean alongside other Republican scandals—resignations and revelations that did not stop the party from continuing to campaign as the custodian of “personal responsibility”. The pattern she sketches is less about individual hypocrisy than about who gets a quiet, dignified exit when life collapses, and who gets told to improvise.

Kean’s office gave one vague sentence in late April, and his district went nearly four months without a public accounting. His paycheque did not miss a cycle.