Mitch McConnell's legacy of destruction
He may have found Trump distasteful, but no one did more to protect him.
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As of this writing, Mitch McConnell is still among the living.
It’s been a month since the 84-year-old senator from Kentucky was taken from his Washington home in an ambulance, and he was finally heard from on Sunday, releasing a statement and photograph that left most questions about his health unanswered.
At this point, it wouldn’t be surprising if McConnell doesn’t return to the Senate before his term ends in January; unlike the rest of us, members of Congress enjoy unlimited paid medical leave to take at their leisure. But even if he recovers, this is a good time to take stock of the legacy McConnell leaves behind as one of the most influential congressional leaders of the modern era.
McConnell was an extremely shrewd and effective backroom operator, especially when he was in the opposition and deployed his considerable skills and creativity to the project of obstruction. In fact, almost everything about how the contemporary Republican Party operates in Congress — its aversion to solving problems, its destruction of the norms that used to allow the institution to operate, its embrace of chaos and dysfunction — can be at least partly attributed to McConnell.
To be generous, there were moments when he displayed glimmers of morality, especially when offering criticisms of Donald Trump’s worst abuses. It’s to his credit that Trump never liked him. But again and again, those moments proved fleeting, and McConnell became Trump’s most important enabler.
Unlike the backbench MAGA cheerleaders whose enthusiasm never waned, McConnell actually had the power to determine whether Trump’s corruption and attack on American democracy would continue — and he always made the wrong choice.
A one-man assault on the system
Political scientists often describe how the last few decades have been characterized by asymmetric polarization: While both parties have moved away from the center ideologically, Republicans have moved farther and faster. But alongside the evolution of its ideas about policy, the GOP underwent a striking shift in its beliefs about how policy should be made.
Mitch McConnell was the architect of that change.
McConnell became minority leader after Republicans lost control of the chamber in 2006, and would stay in charge of his caucus for 18 years, longer than any Republican in the Senate’s history. While he may not have been the first to push against established norms — his longtime Democratic counterpart, Harry Reid, was a bare-knuckle partisan brawler who was not averse to bending the rules — McConnell took things farther than anyone had before.
The first key moment came when Barack Obama was elected in 2008. Though Obama had won a sweeping victory and the country was in the midst of a catastrophic economic crisis, McConnell told his caucus they had a path back to power: Obstruct everything Obama tried to do, regardless of whether Republicans had any substantive objections to it. Only if they forced Obama to fail could they retake power.
If it seemed like the parties were working together, he explained, Obama would get the credit; if all the public saw was gridlock and nasty infighting, the president would get the blame.
“If [Obama] was for it,” said former Ohio Sen. George Voinovich about McConnell’s strategy, “we had to be against it.” Every procedural tactic would be deployed, including turning the filibuster from an occasional tool used to stop major legislation to a weapon fired at almost any legislation the majority party proposed.
At every point, McConnell went farther than congressional leaders had before.
When Republicans took control of the Senate following the 2014 election, he instituted a virtual blockade of Obama’s judicial nominations; while the Senate had confirmed 132 judges in the previous two years, that number fell to just 20 in the final two years of Obama’s term.
Which brings us to the signature episode of McConnell’s tenure: what he did when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in early 2016.
Faced with the possibility that the balance of the court could shift from 5-4 in conservatives’ favor to 5-4 liberal, McConnell had to act fast. So “without consulting his colleagues,” the Washington Post reported in 2017, “McConnell declared that no Supreme Court nominee from then-President Barack Obama would ever be considered.”
It was unprecedented in American history: By simply refusing to hear Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, McConnell effectively changed the size of the court from nine justices to eight. He then gave Republicans a shamelessly disingenuous talking point to repeat in order to justify their power grab — that no justice should ever be appointed in an election year so the voters could weigh in.
Just as everyone knew he would, McConnell reversed himself four years later when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died less than two months before the 2020 election. Though McConnell had held open Scalia’s seat for over a year, he made sure Amy Coney Barrett would be confirmed to fill Ginsburg’s seat in just 39 days. He said later, “one of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.’”
To be that cynical and hypocritical took gall. But it also took an awareness of something McConnell understood when many others didn’t: There is no political cost for procedural radicalism.
To work in Washington is to be keenly aware of the norms, habits, and procedures that make the federal government work. McConnell realized that while behavior that violates those norms and habits might generate outrage within the political world — stern editorials from the Post and the Times, pressing questions on the Sunday shows, Brookings Institution reports about the degradation of democracy — the overwhelming majority of voters either couldn’t care less, or would forget all about it before long.
In other words, playing by the rules is for suckers; what matters is power, and winning, and getting what you want.
And win he did: Republicans got those Supreme Court seats, and now they enjoy a 6-3 supermajority that has overturned Roe v. Wade, given Trump the powers of a dictator (and permission to commit crimes while in office), dismantled the Voting Rights Act, and so much more.
Every time another appalling decision comes down, you can almost hear Mitch McConnell smirking.
Trump’s most important enabler
McConnell’s relationship with Donald Trump went through enough ups and downs to fill an entire book, but in the end, it comes down to this: Not only was McConnell there for Trump again and again when it counted, he was the one person who could have forestalled Trump’s disastrous return to the White House. He chose not to, despite having condemned Trump’s actions in fomenting the January 6 insurrection.
Like some other Republicans in the immediate aftermath of that horror, having cowered in fear of their lives from the mob Trump sent their way, McConnell was critical of Trump and dismissed the conspiracy theory of a stolen election. But then he stepped in to ensure that Trump would be able to make his ultimate return.
Had Trump been convicted in his second impeachment, he would have been barred from running for president again. McConnell made sure that wouldn’t happen, first by insisting that the impeachment trial had to be delayed until after the president left office. Given how raw emotions were immediately after the insurrection, it’s entirely possible that Trump would have lost that vote if the impeachment had happened quickly. By putting off the process, McConnell gave Trump’s allies time to put pressure on Republican senators to get behind him again.
Then when the vote finally took place after Joe Biden’s inauguration, McConnell voted to acquit — on the grounds that a president can’t be convicted once he has left office (which is nowhere in the Constitution).
The final vote was 57-43 in favor of conviction, 10 votes short of the two-thirds majority necessary. There is little question that if McConnell had told his caucus to convict Trump — and voted for conviction himself — there would have been more than enough votes, and Trump would never have returned to the White House.
Yet right after the vote, McConnell gave a speech on the Senate floor calling Trump “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day” — this after he made sure he would be acquitted. It was as if a juror walked out of court and said, “The defendant definitely committed the murder. But we decided to let him go anyway.”
It was a microcosm of McConnell’s entire relationship with Trump: He let everyone know that he found Trump personally distasteful, but made sure Trump could get away with anything.
What McConnell’s legacy adds up to
McConnell never minded playing the villain; with a secure Senate seat, he was happy to take incoming fire if he got what he wanted. For many years, he was the most unpopular politician in America, because all Democrats hated him and plenty of tea party Republicans did, too. The latter group were largely mistaken, however; they saw him as a representative of the establishment, but didn’t credit him for how he was dragging government policy to the right.
In 2020, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer wrote that “for months, I searched for the larger principles or sense of purpose that animates McConnell … finally, someone who knows him very well told me, ‘Give up. You can look and look for something more in him, but it isn’t there. I wish I could tell you that there is some secret thing that he really believes in, but he doesn’t.’”
That’s only partly true; it’s more accurate to say that McConnell believed in whatever would maximize his own power and that of his party. His cynicism and even contempt for voters were boundless. No one fought harder to expand the ability of corporations and the ultrawealthy to spend all they want to influence politics; when your TV screen and inbox are filled with negative ads every two years, you can thank Mitch McConnell. Was that because he sincerely preferred a system in which the rich can buy elections, or just that he knew that the more the rich are in control, the better it would be for Republicans?
In the end, it’s hard to know for sure, and what matters is this: The United States government is profoundly worse for Mitch McConnell having had so much sway over it for so long — less efficient, less effective, less humane, and more corrupt.
As they start preparing for the massive reconstruction project that faces them when they take back power, Democrats should learn this important lesson from McConnell: while the public may recoil at certain kinds of substantive radicalism, they will barely notice procedural radicalism.
That’s what they’ll need to exercise if they are to undo the damage that Trump and McConnell have wrought. If they don’t, they’ll find themselves stymied and forced into half-measures — and that would be Mitch McConnell’s final triumph.
That’s it for today
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Of course — buffoon that he is, Trump is seen as a gateway to the return of segregated America and/or a future Christian Nationalist theocracy.
Until I see a video, not a photo, of McConnell walking, talking, and participating in rehab, I won't believe that he's conscious and mentally competent.