☕️ CLIPPED ☙ Saturday, November 14, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Congress’s doctor resigns over toenails, missing pills, and gagged sailors; Miller locks out the lobbyists and unleashes Kennedy; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Your weekend edition roundup includes: Congress’s doctor of 17 years quits after a Pentagon IG report exposes Navy sailors trimming members’ toenails, 3 a.m. pill runs, 163 missing sleeping pills, and House lawyers gagging witnesses; how a 1928 emergency became Congress’s nearly free concierge clinic; and Stephen Miller’s new memos lock lobbyists out of the White House and take Kennedy off the choke chain, while the Means-Wiles feud gets weird. Plus much more.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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If you’ve ever had your long-time doctor resign suddenly and been randomly assigned to a new doctor with an unpronounceable name you’d never heard of, Congress is getting a small taste of the experience. Yesterday, CBS reported, “Navy admiral resigns as top doctor for Congress amid misconduct allegations.” The swamp just drained another quarter inch. Congress’ doctor is out; please hold for the next available provider.

In 1928, three congressmen collapsed in a single month, and one died in his office after two hours with no doctor. A terrified Congress declared it a crisis. A resolution ordering the Navy to post a physician at the Capitol at all times was introduced and passed unanimously the same day. It remains Congress’s fastest action ever on health care. It only had to cover 435 people.

The Navy dispatched Dr. George Calver, who became so beloved that Congress passed a law forbidding the Navy to transfer him. He stayed 38 years and hung “Commandments of Health” around the Capitol urging members to “relax completely.” It is the only commandment Congress has ever kept.

A century later, Calver’s practice has become the Office of the Attending Physician: five physicians, two pharmacists, eleven corpsmen, and a private pharmacy, serving members, staff, and Supreme Court justices. Until 1992, it was free. Then the House bank scandal shamed members into paying, get this, a $520 annual fee. A 2022 fee form bumped it up to $650. Your copay has inflated faster. Your annual deductible is probably ten to twenty times what Congress pays for an entire year of unlimited healthcare and prescriptions.

So it’s basically free, with just enough of a fee that Congressmen can claim they pay for the services.

Now picture your last checkup. You arrive at least fifteen minutes early, as instructed, to fill out a clipboard asking for everything you typed into their website yesterday. A nurse weighs you with your shoes on, out of spite. The doctor spends six minutes typing with her back to you, then refers you to a specialist whose first booking is sometime in spring. Your toenails remain your own problem. (After 60, just reaching them becomes a high-risk gymnastic event.)

You’ve probably never even considered asking your doctor for a manicure. It probably sounds ridiculous to even use toenails as an example. But just wait.

Yesterday, the Inspector General released a heavily redacted and highly embarrassing report about the Congressional Clinic. The optics were so awful that it promptly caused Rear Admiral Dr. Brian Monahan to resign from his top job running the clinic for the last 17 years and to refuse to answer any questions.

This is going to be very awkward for the new Blue Congress to explain to its Democratic Socialists.

🔥 You see, unlike your own, Congress’s toenails were an unpleasant but critical Naval duty, like fighting Yemeni pirates or de-mining the Strait of Hormuz. One seaman told Navy Times that working in the Congressional clinic included duties “no one else wants to do,” like “cutting a congressman’s toenails or bringing their medication to their private residence at 3 a.m.”

According to the IG’s report, highly trained sailors also stood medical watch at congressional birthday parties, in case someone inhaled a candle or stroked out when a balloon popped.

Whenever tempted to feel sorry for your own lot in life, just imagine the plight of bright-eyed young Navy sailors who enlisted for excitement and danger but got assigned to the Congressional clinic’s pedicure station instead. The Navy’s recruiting poster promises, “See the World!” Nobody thought it meant the world inside a congressman’s stiletto heels.

The sailors’ schedules would earn a private employer a congressional hearing for slave-labor abuses. The complaints about conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln pale in comparison. They are required to work 70-to-80-hour weeks, stay on duty until 4 a.m. when votes run late, and come back at 6 a.m. Leave is “denied and discouraged,” lest you leave “shipmates out to dry.” (A Navy joke.) One corpsman who wanted out was threatened with reassignment to the Middle East. Taxpayers, meanwhile, chipped in $3.4 million so far this year to reimburse the Navy for staffing the clinic with sailors whose salaries are paid by taxpayers.

The Pentagon’s IG report also opened Congress’s medicine cabinet. There is no record of the DEA or the Pentagon ever inspecting the pharmacy, as required by federal law. When Walter Reed offered inspections in 2024, the clinic demurely declined. For everyone else, controlled drug counts are required quarterly. The clinic allowed seven in three years. February’s count came up short 163 sleeping pills and uncounted numbers of “pain medications,” and discovered missing paperwork for congressional travel medical bags with zero prescription records. Heavy redactions blacked out all the examples cited in this section.

Presiding over all this was Rear Adm. Brian Monahan, picked in 2009 by Nancy Pelosi and the other congressional leaders. Alert C&C readers may recall him as the Capitol’s high priest of covid. In December 2020, he jabbed Pelosi personally, on camera. His pandemic rulebook reached Version 6, boasting “120 significant changes,” and sorted people into categories including “vaccine indeterminate.” He brought House masks back in July 2021, and holdouts got fined, including Thomas Massie, who called Monahan “part of the deep Congress” after the IG report dropped.

Monahan’s Congressional mask mandate was finally relaxed on February 27, 2022, two days before Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address. (Viruses clearly respect teleprompters, which after all, control the grants.) We mercilessly mocked this at the time.

So the doctor who required Capitol staff to disclose their vaccination status, when investigators came calling, “recused himself.” House lawyers twice forbade the clinic’s sailors to talk to investigators: once in March and again in August. Privacy, it turns out, is a right reserved for the fully elected.

🔥 Gosh. Congress blessed the rest of us with Obamacare. When a new law forced members to use the exchange, the House and the Senate enrolled through DC’s small-business marketplace using applications confirming 45 employees or fewer, and described themselves as “state or local government,” thereby preserving their taxpayer-funded premium contributions. By February, 2014, they’d enrolled 12,359 members, staff and dependents. Using math, we can determine this was a few more than 45.

Members kept their free clinic.

The cleanup started under Trump 2.0 and War Secretary Pete Hegseth. Trump’s Pentagon published the report despite congressional stonewalling. Unsurprisingly, its health-affairs leadership immediately agreed to all five of the report’s recommendations. The Navy has reassigned the sailors and opened its own inquiry, and Monahan is out. A little more swamp has been drained.

When asked about Admiral Monahan, Senate Majority Leader John Thune offered only, “My understanding is he’s resigned.” Nobody knows where the 163 sleeping pills went, but it would explain a lot about what we see on C-SPAN. Despite a diligent search, they’ve not yet located the Congressional toenail clippers.

One wonders what the new DSA members will think of elite, free footcare for Congressmen and Supreme Court justices provided by the Pentagon while the rest of us spend months on hold trying to find available ‘in-network providers.’ I can’t wait to find out.

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We are beginning to see what Kennedy’s Kraken looks like. Yesterday, the Hill reported, “White House staff to need prior approval to meet with lobbyists, under Stephen Miller memo.” New Chief of Staff Stephen Miller launched a memo banning unsanctioned lobbying meetings on White House grounds. He also gave Cabinet members —think Bobby Kennedy— authority to speak without close supervision. Welcome to the new boss, not the same as the old boss.

One of last week’s most damaging political dustups was Calley Means’ podcast with Joe Rogan. Calley is a MAHA darling and is upset about being pushed out of the Administration. He noisily resigned on October 22.

Right after the elections, he told Rogan that the MAHA agenda was stymied by lobbyists and suffocated by Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. He said Wiles sold out the MAHA agenda to industry donors “underneath Trump’s nose.” He also said she told him repeatedly, “We need money for the midterms, Calley.”

Calley called Wiles “the most powerful chief of staff in modern American history,” with a “stranglehold” on health policy. (Wiles has strongly denied all this and called Calley’s remarks “provably false.”) Here’s how CBS covered it on November 8th:

On X, Calley astonishingly compared Susie Wiles to some kind of mafia boss, saying without explanation that she “has the capacity to inflict physical harm.” Presumably he wasn’t suggesting an MMA-style Octagon fight or that he was worried about meeting the 69-year-old grandmother in a dark West Wing hallway.

How much this ugly public disagreement helped Democrats in the Blue Tsunami isn’t clear, but it certainly did not help. Regardless, the same night that Means’ episode was taped —two days after the elections— Wiles ran out of time.

CBS reported, “Her resignation” —HuffPo claimed that Trump fired her— “was tied to Republicans’ midterm defeats, according to three sources.” It added, “It is not clear at this time whether Calley Means’ public remarks factored into the president’s decision to expedite Wiles’ departure.” It is still not clear. But Calley’s comments couldn’t have helped.

There are other reasonable explanations for Wiles’ departure. She was treated for breast cancer this year, for instance, and Chief of Staff is a pretty stressful job. Separately, a midterm shellacking is a great time to shake up the top of the roster. But the timing was suggestive, since she quit (or got fired, or both) the same day as Calley’s interview.

🔥 Also recall that Democrats have been loudly complaining about Trump officials getting cozy with industry and personally profiting. They’ve been calling it a “culture of corruption,” which is deeply ironic, of course. How about the Biden Crime Family, Ukraine, Burisma, Hunter’s painting career, welfare fraud, learing centers, and all the rest? Never mind!

Sadly, some unfortunate Administration blunders have handed the Democrats a few talking points.

For instance, news broke last month of a leaked Signal text allegedly showing Kimberly Guilfoyle pressuring a wealthy Trump donor to pay for her $100,000 American Express bill. She resigned as Ambassador to Greece on October 13th. (Guilfoyle denies any wrongdoing, and the donor never made the alleged payment.) She’s also accused of helping broker deals for Greek businessmen and over-enjoying luxury travel perks. NBC reported that the State Department Inspector General is investigating her.

Maybe the Administration is moving quickly to defuse Democrats’ “culture of corruption” claims.

The White House pooh-pooh’d Calley’s comments about Wiles, but the results speak for themselves: Wiles is out, and Stephen Miller is in. Among other great things, Miller is an anti-lobbyist. This week, Politico reported an anonymous lobbyist who said, “He’s impossible to lobby, no one can do it, not even the people that you would think are closest.”

If Trump’s White House does have a culture of corruption, as Democrats claim, Miller was a strange choice. Maybe that was the point.

So perhaps it’s unsurprising that one of Miller’s first official memos banned White House staff from meeting with lobbyists at the White House without formal pre-approval. In other words, the revolving door has been shut, at least on the White House grounds. More accurately, it was more about sending a message than an outright ban, since, for instance, staff can still meet lobbyists over at Caribou Coffee, an infamous brokering site near the White House since the Obama era.

“No President in history has fought more relentlessly, selflessly or courageously for the American People than President Trump,” Miller wrote in his memo. “Following his example, White House staff are expected to dedicate their time unwaveringly to the working people of the nation.” A nicely put sentiment. Nobody, not even the DSA, can disagree with that.

🔥 This part of the Miller memo was the most well covered. Reining in industry lobbying is a solid start, and is welcome. But maybe the more significant move for medical freedom folks was the memo’s second part: “Each cabinet leader serves as the best leader and communicator for their individual Departments,” Miller wrote, “and this new position of Cabinet Relations will ensure our Cabinet is resourced and bolstered by the White House to deliver swift, critical, and lasting wins.”

That sounds promising, but was not super clear. However, two days ago, Fox quoted anonymous folks who provided more context. One said Wiles had held “a chokehold on nearly all the administration’s communications,” with “a lot of prescriptive directives.” The same official also said Wiles often told people, “I can’t control Trump. But I can control everything else.” She does look kind of scary.

Control of political messaging is necessary, and one can put a positive spin on Susie’s “control” quote, assuming she said it. But it’s a balance. It’s also possible to have too much control. Fox’s source explained that, when Miller wrote that Cabinet members are the best leaders and communicators for their individual Departments, it was “unleashing the Cabinet to be the captains of their own ship.” (Another Naval allegory.)

How this will play out precisely remains to be seen. But it hints at why Secretary Kennedy was so exuberant when Miller was picked for the job. After all, the two men are long-time allies. And do you remember all the press earlier this year about Kennedy being told to pipe down about vaccines before the midterms? As a reminder, here’s a WSJ headline from March:

Bloomberg joked that Kennedy had been put on a “low-risk messaging diet.” All in all, it sure sounded like muzzling. It caused a lot of criticism for the Secretary. Publicly, Kennedy denied being muzzled. However, other reports swore he’d privately admitted that White House political advisers did tell him to tone it down. Maybe he was muzzled about being muzzled.

And maybe the leash was chokingly tight. “It’s more of a recognition that you can’t possibly effectively micromanage this wide of an organization and that sometimes it might be better to trust and invest in a support system that elevates the people closest to the issues,” Fox’s source explained.

Connecting these dots, it seems abundantly clear that some messaging orders came down from Wiles’ office. And either way, Kennedy now seems to be off the choker chain. At least, Kennedy seems to think so. Politico:

It is good news for MAHA. Kennedy needs to use his additional freedom responsibly, so he isn’t put back on the leash. At least it will be entertaining to watch it play out.

What do you think Secretary Kennedy should do first? Let me know in the comments.

Have a great weekend! We’ll resume again on Monday morning, with an all-new roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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