It’s National Truck Driver Appreciation Week, when the American Trucking Associations holds its annual hot dog and hamburger lunches for the same drivers it spends the rest of the year screwing through its lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C.

This year, however, drivers might enjoy the free food, cheap swag, and various other perks — if they happen to be in the yard for them — with just a little less cynicism. That’s because the industry’s annual PR stunt happens to coincide with something considerably more valuable: the kind of tangible political “appreciation” that actually produces real change.

Most Americans would probably be astonished by how easy it has been to summon a trucking company into existence.

On Monday, August 31, Vice President JD Vance gave a speech in Sterling Heights, Michigan, in support of Republican congressional candidate Mike Rogers ahead of the midterm elections.

Though Vance started with praise for Rogers and other members of the party, he quickly pivoted to problems in the trucking industry and the administration’s efforts to address them, while also highlighting the hard work and sacrifice of American truckers and the displacement they have faced in recent years.

“For too long … the Biden administration allowed American workers and American drivers to be endangered and have their jobs stolen by foreign fraudsters,” Vance said.

“Today is about restoring the basic principle that if you want to drive a big truck on America’s roads, you ought to be able to speak English, you ought to be a legal resident of the United States of America, and you ought to have basic qualifications because trucking is too important to let it go to foreign fraudsters.”

Flooded with foreign labor

Vance, like anyone else paying attention, can see that the trucking industry has been flooded with foreign labor, helping keep the freight costs of Fortune 500 America low while externalizing the real costs onto everyone else.

The Trump administration’s crackdown has illuminated the scope of the problem. A 2025 analysis prepared for J.B. Hunt by transportation economist Noël Perry estimated that the administration’s English-language requirements, immigration enforcement, and restrictions on non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses could ultimately remove as many as 614,000 drivers from the industry — nearly 16% of the nation’s heavy-truck driver population.

Speaking more freely to Overdrive, Perry said the number could go as high as 800,000 — a figure more in line with estimates I’ve heard coming from administration insiders.

The obvious losers in all of this have been legitimate American trucking companies. An already brutal freight market has been made even harder by competition from unscrupulous operators willing to cut corners by skirting the licensing, training, labor, and safety standards responsible carriers have to meet.

And the problem is compounded by Mexican trucking companies engaging in illegal cabotage — hauling domestic loads between American destinations using Mexican trucks and drivers.

More than 20 trucking-related companies sought bankruptcy protection during one 30-day period this spring alone, and another 21 transportation and supply-chain businesses filed for Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 between late July and August 25.

The administration’s crackdown is finally beginning to tighten the freight market and push rates back up. But in a classic case of you win some, you lose some, diesel prices have now hit record highs.

License to kill?

Vance’s speech also coincided with an announcement from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy of a “whole-of-government” attack on another part of the problem: deficient CDL schools churning out poorly trained and sometimes completely unqualified drivers onto American highways.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, a division of DOT, issued immediate shutdown notices to 110 truck-driving schools and put another 160 on notice that they could be removed from operation.

The stakes are much higher than faulty paperwork. According to DOT, non-domiciled drivers who would no longer qualify for licenses under the administration’s new rules were involved in at least 17 fatal crashes that killed 30 people in 2025 alone. Yes, 30 innocent Americans died thanks to drivers who can’t read road signs, don’t know the rules of the road, and have no business getting behind the wheel of what is essentially an 80,000-pound missile. On the other hand, somebody saved a bundle on labor costs.

Say their names

This summer has been just as deadly. In July, 21-year-old University of Massachusetts Lowell soccer player Tobias “Toby” Forsythe was killed on Interstate 71 in Ohio when a tractor-trailer driven by 42-year-old Bekhzod Asrarov slammed into the back of his car.

Asrarov, an Uzbek national who entered the United States through the diversity visa lottery in 2024, held an Ohio CDL but needed Google Translate to communicate with first responders at the scene. According to court records and law-enforcement sources, he also tried to destroy or conceal his dashcam and other electronic devices after the crash.

Ah yes, another highly skilled, conscientious immigrant doing his part to help alleviate America’s fake trucker “shortage.”

And the deaths continued during the very week of Duffy’s announcement.

In the early hours of September 4, in Mesquite, Texas, 33-year-old Lisa Maldonado was killed in a crash involving a truck driven by Khasan Begbaev, who was working for a subcontractor hauling for Knight-Swift, one of America’s largest trucking companies. Begbaev has been charged with manslaughter. Police say he was reversing down a freeway entrance ramp before the crash.

On September 3, 50-year-old Brenda Watson was killed in a head-on collision in Ohio after a semi driven by Manjit Singh pulled out to pass another vehicle and struck Watson’s car. Transportation Secretary Duffy subsequently said Singh was being held on an active Homeland Security detainer and that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration was investigating both his carrier and the training school where he received his CDL.

Two days earlier, police in Moab, Utah, stopped 30-year-old Chamkaur Singh (no relation) after clocking him driving a semi-truck 20 miles per hour over the speed limit. When officers ran his name, they discovered a nationwide warrant for vehicular manslaughter stemming from a California semi crash that killed four people. California authorities had reportedly been searching for him for two months.

Amazon’s shame

Also on September 1, a horrific crash took place in Tennessee involving a tractor-trailer pulling an Amazon trailer. The truck crossed the median on Interstate 40, crashed into several vehicles, and burst into flames. Its driver, 35-year-old Farahov Fhsvaisov, was killed and three other people were hospitalized.

The cause remains under investigation, and little has been publicly reported about Fhsvaisov beyond his registered Brooklyn address — an essentially meaningless bureaucratic detail. As for Fhsvaisov’s actual citizenship and licensing status, that is precisely the kind of information Kathy Hochul’s New York is now suing to keep out of the Trump administration’s hands.

And it’s not just New York. More than 20 states and the District of Columbia have joined the challenge to federal demands for access to commercial-driver information held in state databases. The states cite privacy concerns and argue that the federal government lacks the authority to obtain the information; the administration says access is necessary to uncover fraud and illegally obtained commercial licenses.

Amazon’s apparent involvement in the Fhsvaisov crash can’t help but recall long-standing questions about the company’s enormous network of outside trucking contractors. A 2022 Wall Street Journal investigation found that frequent Amazon contractors were more than twice as likely as comparable carriers to receive poor unsafe-driving scores; a later CBS News analysis found Amazon contractors had unsafe-driving violation rates at least 89% higher than other carriers in every month of the six-year period it examined.

Highway to hell

Yet while Secretary Duffy and other elements of the Trump administration are trying to restore sanity to the trucking industry, truckers are being attacked not only by the forces bringing insourced labor to compete with them, but by many on the left who want to preserve that system.

Truckers are also being threatened by the clumsiness of some of Duffy’s reforms as well as elements in the Republican Party that want to replace truckers not only with insourced labor but eventually with robots.

Let’s start with licensing.

In March, the FMCSA issued a new rule limiting who can be issued what is called a “non-domiciled” CDL.

Non-domiciled CDLs began as a narrow exception for drivers who could not obtain a recognized commercial license where they lived, including certain foreign drivers. Under the Obama administration, the old “nonresident CDL” was renamed the “non-domiciled CDL.”

The category became far more consequential over time. In 2019, during Trump’s first term, the FMCSA issued guidance — later endorsed by the American Trucking Associations — allowing foreign nationals with federal work permits to obtain non-domiciled CDLs.

Then came the Biden immigration surge. As the administration extended work authorization to huge numbers of migrants, it also vastly expanded the pool of foreign workers who could take advantage of the non-domiciled CDL system. Investigations into the system through 2025 found that roughly 200,000 drivers had been issued these licenses illegally and would see them revoked, or at least would not be renewed on expiry.

The Trump administration has now effectively closed the broader EAD pathway, limiting non-domiciled CDLs to a much narrower group of foreign workers with specific employment-based visas.

‘Public’ menace

The new rule is now being challenged in federal court. The lawsuit was filed by Public Citizen, the progressive advocacy group founded by Ralph Nader, on behalf of two immigrant truck drivers, AFSCME, and the American Federation of Teachers. It argues that the FMCSA does not have the legal authority to remove such a large class of legally authorized immigrants from CDL eligibility.

For their part, the unions claim to be advocating on behalf of immigrant members who could lose their jobs under the rule. That puts two major American labor unions in the strange position of fighting a reform that could remove a huge pool of foreign labor from competition with American drivers.

How organized labor wound up fighting to preserve cheap foreign competition is a question for another piece. Curious readers might begin by looking into the sprawling network of nonprofits and foundations funding Public Citizen; several of them are also major backers of more permissive immigration policies.

RELATED: The deadly trucker crisis — and why mass migration is to blame

Justin Hamel/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Dalilah’s Law

There is, however, a straightforward way for supporters of the crackdown to fight back: Put the reforms into federal law.

Dalilah’s Law is named after a California girl who suffered catastrophic injuries after the car her mother was driving was rear-ended by a commercial truck. If passed, the law would tighten CDL standards, reinforce English-proficiency requirements, restrict eligibility for non-domiciled licenses, and crack down on deficient driver-training schools.

It would also address the outsourcing of freight brokerages and dispatch services overseas, a little-discussed but important part of the problem. If a load broker in Serbia or Pakistan fails to perform necessary due diligence in vetting a carrier, holding that broker accountable from the United States can be extraordinarily difficult. Dalilah’s Law would bring more of this activity within reach of American regulators.

No good deed

While all this is going on, the FMCSA has undertaken a revamp of the federal system through which trucking companies register. In an interview with “60 Minutes” earlier this year, FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs described the industry as having a “front door” problem: It has been too easy for bad actors — including so-called chameleon carriers, unsafe trucking companies that shut down and simply reappear under new names — to enter or re-enter the market.

Most Americans would probably be astonished by how easy it has been to summon a trucking company into existence. Just pay the $300 federal operating-authority fee, provide insurance and paperwork, and list a U.S. business address.

On paper, that address has to check out, and within 12 months you’re supposed to undergo a safety audit, followed by monitoring for the rest of an 18-month probationary period. But that assumes an overwhelmed system actually gets to you.

To address this, our bureaucrats have decided to bureaucrat some more with a new system called Motus, which has produced the results typical of government: penalizing operators who attempt to obey the rules, while essentially giving a free pass to anyone determined to break the law.

In a detailed examination of the rollout, trucking-industry writer Danielle Chaffin documented legitimate carriers unable to operate because Motus incorrectly showed them as inactive or saddled them with erroneous insurance requirements. At the same time, she found carriers with out-of-service orders — including some with no insurance on file — still showing as active in the new system. As one carrier put it, Motus was “waving the bad actors through the gate and choking the honest ones out.”

It seems like decent American companies continue to get stuck in the pincer between the open border policies of the previous administration, and the seeming unwillingness of government agencies to go full Genghis Khan against the bad actors allowed into the industry.

Backing the bots

As if displacement and replacement by foreign labor weren’t bad enough, we are also looking down the barrel of driver replacement by automation — something the Trump administration is actively encouraging even while it takes steps to protect truckers from foreign labor.

On September 3, DOT released its “National Strategy for Automated Vehicles,” laying out the administration’s priorities for automated-vehicle technology through 2030. The document largely concerns the bureaucratic minutiae of regulating vehicles that may or may not accommodate a human driver at all. But it will also help guide how the government deals with autonomous trucks.

Congress is considering the BUILD America 250 Act, a major surface-transportation bill that includes a federal framework for autonomous commercial vehicles. Republicans are also behind legislation such as the AMERICA DRIVES Act, introduced by California Republican Rep. Vince Fong, provisions of which have been incorporated into the larger bill.

The legislation seeks to limit state-level regulatory authority over autonomous commercial vehicles, including state requirements that certain highly automated trucks have a human being aboard.

Supporters argue that a national framework is necessary to prevent a patchwork of state regulations from strangling an emerging American technology. But Republicans should understand why their messaging looks confused to America’s truckers and why Fong’s bill seems at odds with their usual commitment to federalism.

On one hand, the administration is finally addressing their replacement by foreign labor. On the other, Republicans are working to remove regulatory barriers for technology whose ultimate promise is to move freight without anyone sitting behind the wheel.

Stuck in the middle

Do we have any friends in government at all?

The left appears happy to defend policies that allow American trucking companies to replace domestic labor with cheaper foreign drivers. Republicans are finally addressing that problem, but they also appear remarkably credulous when dealing with autonomous-vehicle developers whose technology could eventually supplant truckers’ jobs altogether.

Vice President Vance said in his speech that “we care about America’s truckers because for generations they have represented something much greater … the very best of this country’s character, people who spend long hours away from their families.”

“In some ways, truckers are the modern cowboys.”

I would submit to Vice President Vance that the administration’s actions thus far have been welcome and helpful for America’s truckers, and they deserve to be commended. But the administration needs to do more. It should continue removing bad actors from the trucking industry, pass Dalilah’s Law, make sure its own bureaucracy doesn’t punish legitimate operators, and be more realistic about what emerging technologies mean for us and for our economy.

The modern cowboys would like to keep on trucking for as long as we can.

​American workers, Biden administration, Commercial drivers license, Foreign nationals, Midterm elections, Mike rogers, Open border policies, Jd vance, Sean duffy, On the road 

The left is determined to divide people into competing groups of oppressors and oppressed — and Christian apologist Frank Turek knows why.

“Marxism is all about the group, whereas Christianity is all about the individual. … That’s the focus of the war on reality right now,” Turek tells Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck.

“They want people to identify everybody by an identity group,” he explains. “‘What identity group are you in?’ And if you are part of that collective, you’re oppressed. And if you’re not, you’re automatically an oppressor.”

“We’re not judging people individually any more,” he says. “We’re judging people by what? Even non-behavioral identity groups that they’re in. ‘Oh, you’re white, Glenn. You’re a bad guy. Oh, you’re a man. You’re a heterosexual. You’re a citizen of the U.S. You’re a Christian, Glenn. You’re an oppressor.’”

“But if you have the opposite qualities, you’re automatically oppressed,” he adds.

“It’s the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” Glenn agrees. “You must destroy that God because that’s the personal God. That’s the first personal, and the only personal, God — the one true God.”

“And so all of this — this is why people hate Jews and why they’re trying to get Christians to say, ‘We don’t need to remember that Jesus was a Jew.’ Because if you can get … yourself away from the Old Testament, now you don’t have the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob any more,” he continues. “And all of that falls apart.”

“You must have that. That’s why there’s this war. Everything boils down to that: the God of the individual,” he adds.

Turek agrees, noting that “it’s also why Marxism dispenses with the individual.”

“They think the state is eternal,” he says.

“Whereas we Christians know the state isn’t eternal,” he continues. “It’s individuals that are eternal, and they’re going to be judged individually.”

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​Christianity, God, Jews, Marxism, State, War, Jesus, Frank turek, Glenn beck, Blazetv show 

Picture a family with three cars. Mom and Dad both drive to work. The kids need rides to school and practice. The cars cost money, gas, repairs, and insurance, but they start when you turn the key. That is the whole point.

Then a salesman shows up with an amazing deal. He has a solar-powered car and a wind-powered car. No gas needed. The fuel is free. Who wouldn’t want that? They buy both, figuring they will save money and finally dump a couple of the old cars.

Regular people do not need politicians picking their power plants for them.

Then reality shows up.

The solar car runs when the sun is out. The wind car runs when the wind is blowing. Dad still leaves at 7:30 on dark winter mornings. Mom still has to pick up a kid at five o’clock when the air is dead calm. Families go where they need to go, not when the weather cooperates.

So they keep all three reliable cars. Now they own five.

Five cars do not fit in the driveway. So they pour more concrete and build a bigger garage. Someone suggests big batteries to store power for the days when the sun and wind quit. That costs a fortune too.

The salesman talked a lot about free fuel. He never mentioned the two extra cars, the bigger garage, the batteries, or the fact that you still need the old cars anyway.

Welcome to America’s electricity policy.

Wind turbines and solar panels really do make electricity without buying fuel. That is the selling point. But electricity has to be there the instant you flip the switch.

Factories cannot sit idle until the wind picks up. Hospitals cannot ask patients to wait for better weather. Families expect the furnace, the refrigerator, and the lights to work every single time.

Because wind and solar depend on the weather, adding them does not allow us to retire the dependable plants.

Natural gas, nuclear, coal, and hydro still have to be on standby when renewables produce little or nothing. We pay for two systems and get one grid’s worth of reliable power.

RELATED: Why are we teaching kids scarcity in an age of abundance?

Al Drago/Getty Images

Then come the wires. Wind and solar sit far from where people live, so they need new transmission lines, substations, and grid upgrades. The Energy Department’s own draft transmission study points to one of the largest build-outs in our history.

Batteries help, but only for a few hours. Most grid batteries can only run for about four hours.

None of this means wind and solar are worthless, but it does mean we should count the whole bill honestly.

The real question is not how cheap the electricity is when the generator is running. It is what it costs to keep reliable power available whenever people need it.

That price includes generation, transmission, grid upgrades, storage, backup capacity, and enough always-on power for calm, cloudy days. It also includes where the hardware comes from. Most of the world’s solar panels are made in China, which is building coal plants to run those factories.

If wind and solar still look cheapest after every cost is counted, let them win on the merits. If nuclear, natural gas, coal, hydro, or something better delivers more value, that should win instead.

Regular people do not need politicians picking their power plants for them. They need honest prices, real competition, and electricity that shows up when the switch is flipped.

Free fuel sounds great. But before we buy the fourth and fifth cars, somebody ought to ask whether we are actually saving money or just paying for more cars, more concrete, and a bigger garage to get to the same places.

​America, Clean energy, Coal, Factories, Insurance, Natural gas, Nuclear, Power grid, Solar, Solar panels, Wind turbines, Politicians, Cole plants, China, Opinion & analysis 

Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder of Oracle, recently offered a reassuring vision of our technological future. Artificial intelligence, he predicted, will soon monitor police body cameras, security cameras, doorbell cameras, and vehicle dashboards. “Citizens will be on their best behavior,” he explained, “because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on.”

One is tempted to ask whether “best behavior” includes declining to construct an electronic surveillance state. Presumably, the algorithm will decide.

The surveillance state does not make good citizens. It makes practiced actors.

Ellison envisions AI supervising police officers as well as ordinary citizens. If an officer does something wrong, the system will detect the problem and report it to the appropriate authorities. Drones may even replace police cars during high-speed pursuits. The drone will follow the suspect while artificial intelligence records the proceedings and analyzes everyone involved.

Ellison, who is an atheist, wants an all-knowing being that is perfectly good and will judge our behavior.

It is difficult not to admire the efficiency. We have finally devised a deity suitable for the modern secular mind: omnipresent, nearly omniscient, and conveniently owned by a corporation, with promises of suitable oversight.

For generations, atheists and secularists have assured us that civilized people can dispense with belief in a God who sees our actions, judges our conduct, and holds us accountable. The notion of divine judgment was dismissed as primitive, oppressive, and psychologically unhealthy.

Enlightened people, we were told, do not need the threat of an all-seeing eye to behave morally.

Now, having removed God from heaven, our technological elites propose installing His replacement on every lamppost.

The secular project promised liberation from divine surveillance. Its culmination may be a camera that never blinks, connected to a machine that never sleeps, operated by authorities who never admit error.

Of course, artificial intelligence is not God. It is not even intelligent in the full human sense. It has no conscience, understands no moral law, and possesses no wisdom. It processes information according to purposes and standards supplied by human beings.

RELATED: The 9/11 generation may be building AI’s 9/11 moment

BlackJack3D/Getty Images

This creates a slight difficulty: If AI is to report “bad behavior,” someone must first tell it what bad behavior is.

Who will do that?

The programmers? Oracle executives? Government agencies? More AI? The same institutions that cannot define a woman may soon be entrusted with defining acceptable behavior for every citizen.

AI can recognize a face, track a vehicle, and perhaps identify a raised voice. It cannot tell us why assault is wrong, why citizens possess rights, or why the government should be restrained in its treatment of them.

The atheist insists that the universe contains no transcendent moral order. Human beings are products of impersonal matter, motion, and chance. Yet he continues speaking of justice, dignity, equality, and human rights as if these were eternal truths rather than temporary preferences produced by an unusual arrangement of atoms.

Having denied a Lawgiver above the state, he inevitably looks to the state to serve as lawgiver.

The God of Scripture sees everything, but His omniscience is joined to perfect knowledge, righteousness, and justice. He knows not merely what we do but why we do it. He judges the heart as well as the outward act.

Most importantly, God is not accountable to a government contractor, a political party, or Oracle’s quarterly earnings report because God is the standard for what is good, righteous, and holy.

RELATED: When government breaks the law, can you even sue?

DNY59/iStock/Getty Images

AI surveillance offers omnipresence without wisdom, judgment without righteousness, and accountability without any objective account of the good. It cannot produce virtue. At most, it can produce outward conformity in people who know they are being watched.

A man who refrains from stealing because theft is wrong possesses a measure of virtue. A man who refrains because six cameras and a drone are recording him possesses a measure of caution. The surveillance state does not make good citizens. It makes practiced actors.

Nor does recording everything solve the oldest political problem: Who watches the watchers? AI will report citizens to “the appropriate person,” Ellison tells us. This formulation is meant to be comforting, though history offers few reasons to assume that the person receiving unlimited information about the population will remain permanently appropriate.

The atheist rejected God because he did not want an authority above man. He is now constructing an artificial authority beneath man — but controlled by a small number of particularly powerful men. That is simply a transfer of divine attributes to institutions conspicuously lacking divine character.

We were told that when God disappeared, mankind would come of age. Instead, mankind immediately began shopping for cameras.

The choice is not between accountability and freedom from accountability. Every society will hold its members answerable to some standard. The real question is whether that standard rests upon a moral law higher than rulers or upon whatever rules the rulers program into their machines.

A God who judges governments as well as citizens is a barrier to tyranny. An AI system operated by the government is an instrument of it.

Our secular technologists have discovered that a society cannot survive unless people believe their actions are seen and judged. They have merely concluded that God’s principal defect was that He could not be purchased from Oracle.

​Ai, Anthropic, Athiests, Cameras, Christianity, Drones, God, Justice, Police, Religion, Scripture, Silicon valley, Surveillance state, Virtue, Opinion & analysis 

Democrats are raging at Joe Manchin, the former Democrat U.S. senator, after he endorsed Susan Collins, the incumbent Republican in the race for one of two Senate seats in Maine.

Manchin had represented West Virginia but was heavily criticized by Democrats for his moderate voting patterns. He left the Democratic Party in 2024 and became an independent.

‘Susan is always in there, always in the trenches.’

Rather than endorse the progressive candidate of his former party, Manchin told voters 73-year-old Collins needed to stay in the Senate.

“You lose the Susan Collinses of the Senate, you’re losing the soul of the Senate — basically, a person you can talk to, who wants to do the right thing all of the time,” he said on CNBC Monday.

“Now, everybody says, ‘Oh, she doesn’t do this, doesn’t speak up.’ Susan is always in there, always in the trenches,” he added.

Collins released a statement about his endorsement.

“Joe is a dear friend and trusted colleague with whom I have always worked closely to solve problems and deliver results for the people of Maine and America,” she said.

“From helping end government shutdowns and negotiating the Electoral Count Act to delivering COVID relief and historic investments in our nation’s infrastructure, we have shown what is possible when Republicans and Democrats work together to find common ground and get things done. I am honored to have his support,” she added.

Keeping Collins in the Senate is pivotal for Republicans’ hopes to maintain their control of at least one house of Congress.

RELATED: Graham Platner officially WITHDRAWS from pivotal Senate race

While Collins’ progressive challenger, Troy Jackson, is not a democratic socialist, he has been endorsed by the organization.

Manchin has previously said he could not support a socialist for office.

“How could you support some of the crazy stuff they’re for? Have you seen their platform?” Manchin said to CBS’ Margaret Brennan in an interview last month.

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​Joe manchin, Susal collins, Maine, Us senate, Politics 

Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky returned to the Senate on Monday after a long absence due to his health issues.

The former leader of the Senate had been absent from Congress for three months before the newest session began Monday.

The slim Republican majority in the Senate meant his vote was pivotal toward passing any legislation opposed by the Democrats in the minority.

McConnell said in a statement that his recovery had been “a long and often frustrating process,” according to Axios.

“Today, I’ll cast my first Senate vote since I took a bad fall back in June,” he added. “I’m really looking forward to being back on the Senate floor and seeing my colleagues.”

He added that his recovery had been stymied by the “lingering effects” of his bout with polio in childhood.

The slim Republican majority in the Senate meant his vote was pivotal toward passing any legislation opposed by the Democrats in the minority.

“I’m still not quite back to 100%, but I’ve assured Leader Thune that, as I continue with physical therapy on the advice of my doctors,” McConnell added, “I will do my best to be present for tough votes when our Conference needs me.”

Reporters posted at McConnell’s residence recorded video as the 84-year-old senator left his residence in a wheelchair on his way to the Senate.

In a brief statement at the Capitol, he said he was determined to vote on a farm bill and to punish Russia.

RELATED: Mitch McConnell’s replacement might be chosen in court first

McConnell is also expected to vote on the nomination of Matthew Byrne to be a district judge in Ohio.

“Elaine and I are very grateful for all the continued well wishes from our fellow Kentuckians, and I’m glad to get back to more of business as usual on their behalf this month,” he added.

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​Mitch mcconnell, Us senate, Congress, Politics