Mitch McConnell

We were glad to see the photo of a smiling Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), alongside his wife, Elaine Chao. The 84-year-old McConnell revealed Sunday that he had been hospitalized following a rough June 14 fall at his home leading, he said, to "mild pneumonia."

Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-N.J.) disappeared for some four months, missing House votes throughout, before finally revealing on June 30 that he had been suffering from depression and had been hospitalized.

The complexity here is that we're all legally entitled to some privacy over our health and rightly so. But we'd argue that elected officials should not stay silent when they have to be absent from votes nor (as in Kean's case) merely reference a "personal medical matter" that gives constituents insufficient reasonable information.

These officials are not obligated to disclose everything, but there is a reasonable middle ground that respects voters' rights to know about the health of their representatives.

On a related matter, we also were glad to hear the office of Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died Saturday, provide the presumptive cause of death but emphasize that details would come only after a full autopsy report. The death of the senator from South Carolina also was a catalyst for some Americans' nastier instincts--a continuance, you might say, of President Donald Trump's refusal to be gracious about the public service of Robert Mueller following Mueller's death in March.

We of course support the full journalistic accounting of a political figure's professional life. But we can believe in that and still abhor the cruelty and lack of grace we see all around us these days. Given that reality, secrecy only makes things worse.