We were peaceful Americans, worried about democracy. Why did Mitch McConnell’s office call police? | Opinion

The sidewalk was still wet from a pre-dawn thunderstorm when I finally found Senator McConnell’s Lexington office on Thursday morning. A handful of people were already there. More gradually arrived, until about 20 people had gathered to protest.

Like me, they were mostly over 50.

Like me, they had been watching a sledgehammer smash into our federal government for more than two weeks: illegal funding freezes, massive firings and threats, defunding of essential science, plane crashes and trade wars, all capped with the terrifying news that Elon Musk, an unelected billionaire, had been given access to the Treasury Department payment systems and all our private financial information, and had gone on to raid almost dozen other US agencies, too.

That morning, people were deeply unnerved. We wanted to talk with our members of Congress, and we’d been trying to reach them for days. Mitch McConnell’s D.C. office never answers—a recording refers you to a form on his website. In the Lexington office people rarely pick up the phone either, though you are able to leave messages, which are then never answered.

I wanted to express my concern about the nomination of Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025, whose goal is to dismantle the federal government. Project 2025 was so unpopular during the campaign that Donald Trump claimed he didn’t know anything about it, yet here was Russell Vought, nominated to direct the Office of Management and Budget. When Indivisible, a national grassroots group committed to preserving democracy, suggested going in person to senators’ offices to protest, a couple dozen people from across central Kentucky put down our phones, and we went.

We were citizens gathered on a rain-wet sidewalk. A calm, gentle, worried group, drawn together by our belief in democracy.

It was a shock to us all when the police showed up.

Two nice young officers, respectful and professional. They told us we were trespassing on private property and that we would have to remove ourselves to a public sidewalk. The nearest one was far away and out of sight.

We expressed amazement: our tax dollars pay the rent on the office, as well as the salaries of the senator and his staff. How could we be trespassing?

Eventually, with the officers present, the staff agreed to see us, two at a time. We lined up in orderly pairs. A small group of citizens, two uniformed police officers.

Two women went into the office first, and after a few minutes they emerged, satisfied. It had gone well, they felt. They had expressed sympathy for Senator McConnell after his recent fall, and they had been able to state their concerns calmly to the staffer, who wrote them all down.

The next pair of citizens tried to enter, twice, but they remained locked out. An officer went in to see what was happening. After a pause, a middle-aged female staffer emerged and started handing out blank comment forms. She wouldn’t meet our eyes. She said we could take the forms and mail them in — they would, of course, arrive long after the vote was done. She refused talk to anyone else. We were told to leave.

When someone asked why she wouldn’t hear our concerns, she turned abruptly and hurried back into the office, taking most of the comment forms with her, and locked the door.

She seemed so nervous, so afraid. She’d called the police out of that fear. But we were just a group of older citizens, deeply upset by the assaults on our country, who wanted to have our concerns heard by our senator. That’s democracy, right?

We weren’t a threat, so what else was going on? Why the refusal to speak with us, and why the police? Why is Senator McConnell doing everything possible to keep his constituents far, far away?

Why are they all so afraid of us?

I have some thoughts on that.

Maybe hearing the anguished concerns of real people who are losing their constitutional rights hits too close to home. The destruction of our democracy will harm us all, a grievous loss that’s almost too painful to think about.

Maybe it’s too hard to face the people who elected you as they tell what keeps them awake at night, knowing already that you’re not going help them because you’ve promised huge tax cuts to your obscenely wealthy friends out of state.

Maybe it is, finally, an utterly terrifying feeling, a free-falling sense of panic, to look your constituents in the eye and realize that you’re on the wrong side of history and the opposite side of love, betraying the people who trusted you and setting off tsunamis of suffering in the lives of millions.

The door to the office slammed shut, and our little group of citizens left the building peacefully, escorted by the police.

We never got to voice our concerns, not on the phone and not in person. We were not represented. Voices calling into a vast silence, is how it felt.

That’s not democracy.

On Thursday night, Senator McConnell voted to confirm Russell Vought.

Lexington resident Kim Edwards is author of the international bestseller “The Memory Keeper’s Daughter,” and other books.

This story was originally published February 10, 2025 at 2:25 PM.