Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield) has missed a month’s worth of votes on Capitol Hill due to a medical issue, and his office has not said what the issue is or when he’s likely to be back.
Harrison Neely, a spokesperson for Kean, told the New Jersey Globe that the two-term congressman is “dealing with a personal medical issue that prevents him from casting votes this week.”
“He’s expected to be totally fine and back to a full schedule soon,” Neely said.
Kean first began missing votes the week of March 16; when asked about it at the time, his office similarly said that he was addressing a “personal health matter” and would be returning to a regular schedule “soon.”
The congressman proceeded to miss two weeks of votes, after which Congress began a two-week recess; when the House returned for its first vote of April last night, Kean was still missing. Kean has been absent for a total of 23 roll-call votes since March 17, with more likely to come today.
The Globe has asked for further information on the nature of the medical issue, but Kean’s office has declined to provide it.
Kean’s congressional work has not halted in the month he’s been absent; he’s introduced bills on Russian sanctions and rare genetic disorders, announced which community projects he’ll be fighting for in the FY2027 appropriations process, and just last week signed a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on a planned ICE facility in his district.
As the representative from New Jersey’s most competitive House district, Kean has also kept up some campaign basics, announcing this morning that he’d raised more than $1.1 million in the last three months.
It’s not clear, though, what Kean’s day-to-day involvement in his office’s affairs has been. His social media account remains active and posts occasional photos of the congressman, but those photos appear to have been taken before his current health issues began.
Kean is far from the first New Jersey member of Congress in recent years to come down with a medical problem, and his colleagues have handled their own troubles in different ways.
Last year, Rep. Donald Norcross (D-Camden) nearly died from a gallbladder infection that suddenly progressed to sepsis while he was on a flight from Florida to New Jersey. His office announced his hospitalization the day after it happened, and provided regular and detailed updates in the two months that followed on the congressman’s progress towards recovery.
A year before that, however, two New Jersey congressmen died after unexpected hospitalizations, prompting conversations in New Jersey and elsewhere about how transparent staffers should be in the event of medical crises.
Aides for one of those congressmen, Rep. Donald Payne Jr. (D-Newark), provided only cursory information about Payne’s medical issues, and misled reporters about their severity prior to his death in April 2024. The office of Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-Paterson) kept the public more informed about their boss’s hospitalization later that year, but it was still often difficult to get information on Pascrell’s status before his death in August 2024.