Tom Kean Jr. Took Four Months of Paid Leave for Depression — After Voting Against Paid Leave for Everyone Else
A New Jersey Republican congressman recently emerged from 117 days of unexplained absence, saying he’d been hospitalized for clinical depression. He stood on the House floor and delivered a speech about the illness. “This is not an easy speech for me to give,” he said. “I am a private person by nature… talking about myself has never come naturally, but I believe that I owe an explanation to the people of New Jersey’s 7th District.”
The speech was heartfelt. The diagnosis is real. Depression is a serious illness, and no one should be required to suffer through it without care and time to heal. That much deserves to be said plainly.
What also deserves to be said plainly is this: he has regularly voted against paid sick leave protections for his constituents over his 20 years in the New Jersey Senate. That includes a vote against New Jersey’s landmark Earned Sick Leave Act, which mandates five paid sick days per year for most New Jersey workers, as well as votes against two of the state’s paid family leave laws.
Five days a year. That is what Kean voted against giving New Jersey workers. He took 116.
“He’s been able to rely on things he directly voted against,” said Yarrow Willman-Cole from New Jersey Citizen Action, who organized for the Earned Sick Leave Act.
His congressional salary — $174,000 a year, unchanged since 2009 — continued throughout his absence. During that time, a spokesman said more than once that the congressman was looking forward to getting back to work, but never offered an explanation for his absence or specified a return date. His constituents in New Jersey’s 7th District were represented by no one and told nothing. He missed 140 votes before his return. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee reported that Kean was trading stocks while he was out.
The trading stocks detail is worth sitting with. He couldn’t perform his congressional duties for four months. He was managing his investment portfolio.
What the Numbers Say
Among workers at their jobs for at least one year, the median number of sick leave days they could earn in a given year was six — a far cry from the 116 days Kean was away. Only 58% of workers in the bottom quarter of wages had access to paid sick leave, compared to 94% of those in the top quarter. Just 56% of part-time workers had access.
The people Tom Kean Jr. represents — the waitresses and warehouse workers and home health aides of New Jersey’s 7th District — get six days if they’re lucky. The congressman who voted to make sure they didn’t get more took 116.
Matthew Camarda of NAMI New Jersey noted that barriers to leave — including Medicaid work requirements Kean voted to support — “make it very challenging for millions of Americans in this country who do have mental health conditions like depression to get the care that they need without risking their employment.”
Kean voted for the Medicaid work requirements that make it harder for people with depression to get treatment. He then spent four months getting treatment, fully paid, fully employed, position held, salary intact.
The Accountability Gap
Maura Collinsgru, policy and advocacy director for New Jersey Citizen Action, said having empathy for someone struggling with depression doesn’t negate the need to be accountable. “When representatives need to take time off, there needs to be some process, some accountability; every HR department in America has that. They have the privilege to serve as the voice for hundreds of thousands of constituents, so they have a greater responsibility. The issue here is taking leave with no explanation whatsoever.”
She is right about every word of that. The empathy and the accountability are not in conflict. You can feel genuine sympathy for a man battling depression and simultaneously observe that he voted against the very protections that would have allowed his constituents to do what he did. You can hope he recovered fully and note that the recovery was funded by a salary and a job security that his votes have denied to hundreds of thousands of people he was elected to represent.
Kean said on the House floor: “As the over 48 million of my fellow Americans being treated for this illness have come to discover, there is no timeline for healing, there is no timeline for recovery, only the work of getting better one day at a time.”
He is correct. There is no timeline for healing. The 48 million Americans battling depression alongside him deserve to know that too — and to have the paid leave to act on it. The ones in the bottom quarter of wages. The part-time workers. The service employees. The people working two jobs who cannot afford to miss a day, let alone 116.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said he believed Kean had addressed his absence appropriately and told him, “We’re in your corner, and we are behind you 100%.”
That is the exact support system that Tom Kean Jr. voted to make sure his constituents would never have.
He is seeking a third term. His Democratic challenger, Rebecca Bennett, a former Navy helicopter pilot, wished Kean well after he explained his absence — but criticized him for not standing up to Trump on several issues impacting New Jersey, including attempts to cancel funding for the new Hudson River rail tunnel. That contest is shaping up to be one of the most competitive midterm races in the nation.
It should be.