Late final month, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky introduced that he would go away his place as Republican chief after the November elections. He’ll depart because the longest-serving occasion chief within the Senate’s historical past. He’s additionally the longest-serving senator in Kentucky historical past.
There’s no query that McConnell is without doubt one of the most consequential politicians of his technology. This isn’t a praise. McConnell isn’t consequential for what he completed as a legislator or legislative chief — he’s no Robert F. Wagner or Everett Dirksen. He’s consequential for what he’s accomplished to degrade and diminish American democracy.
McConnell, because the journalist Alec MacGillis famous in “The Cynic: The Political Schooling of Mitch McConnell,” was by no means pushed by ideology. He was a average, pro-choice Republican earlier than he grew to become a hard-right, conservative one. “What has motivated McConnell has not been a selected imaginative and prescient for the federal government or the nation, however the sport of politics and profession development in its personal proper,” MacGillis wrote in 2014.
It’s a politics of the desire to energy, by which the one factor that issues is partisan victory. “Sooner or later alongside the way in which,” MacGillis wrote, “Mitch McConnell determined that his personal longevity in Washington trumped all — that he would even be prepared to feed the general public’s disillusionment with its elected leaders if it might enhance his and his occasion’s odds of success on the polls.”
McConnell’s quest for energy, irrespective of the fee, explains how he grew to become a fierce opponent of marketing campaign finance reform, doing every part he may to assist flood American politics with the unaccountable cash of nameless billionaires and different rich pursuits.
That very same quest for energy is what introduced us his now notorious declaration that “the only most necessary factor we need to obtain is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” which he operationalized by weaponizing the filibuster to successfully finish majority rule within the Senate. The foundations have been modified a long time earlier than his ascent to the management of the Republican convention in 2007, however it was McConnell who established the de facto 60-vote threshold for laws that retains most gadgets from reaching the ground, a lot much less getting a vote.
The routine use of the filibuster to gum up the works is a McConnell innovation. And whereas he’s typically described as an institutionalist, with the respect that suggests for the Senate as a working physique, the primary impact of McConnell’s technique of obstruction has been to erode Congress’s capacity to control the nation. You may even say that Donald Trump’s promise, throughout his 2016 marketing campaign, to personally seize management of the federal authorities (“I alone can repair it”) fed straight on the dysfunction produced by McConnell’s dedication to congressional gridlock.
As dangerous as that’s, nonetheless, it’s only the start of McConnell’s accountability for Trump. His choice to disclaim a listening to to Barack Obama’s third Supreme Court docket nominee, Merrick Garland, turned the 2016 presidential election right into a contest for ideological management of the court docket. The prospect of a strong, right-wing majority on the court docket unified the Republican coalition behind Trump. It helped him consolidate cautious conservative voters, together with evangelicals, and pushed skeptical Republican lawmakers to fall in line behind the demagogic actuality tv star. There’s a actual sense by which Trump owes his victory over Hillary Clinton to that vacant seat on the Supreme Court docket.
In fact, McConnell was all the time fast to share his distaste for Trump’s language, conduct and general countenance. He was, in any case, a person of Washington: a staid determine of the everlasting Republican institution, an everyday presence on Sunday panel reveals and at occasions just like the White Home Correspondents Dinner. However McConnell was nothing if not enterprise first, and Trump was a automobile for realizing his partisan and political targets.
The Senate Republican chief would defend Trump from Democratic scrutiny throughout his first impeachment trial. He would stand by Trump all through the 2020 presidential race, at the same time as the previous president mismanaged a lethal pandemic. And whereas McConnell would condemn Trump for the occasions of Jan. 6, 2021 — he mentioned the previous president was “morally accountable” and had engaged in a “disgraceful dereliction of obligation” — he refused to carry Trump accountable. As Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin reported in “This Will Not Move: Trump, Biden and the Battle for America’s Future,” McConnell justified himself by telling two associates, “The Democrats are going to care for the son of a bitch for us.” He voted “not responsible” within the subsequent impeachment trial.
Given the chance to point out actual management, McConnell withered within the face not of stress, however of the potential for stress: the prospect that he may need to elucidate himself to different Republicans. “I didn’t get to be chief by voting with 5 folks within the convention,” McConnell mentioned, discussing his choice to vote to acquit Trump. Maybe, if he had really acted as a pacesetter, greater than a handful of Republicans would have voted to convict Trump, and the previous president wouldn’t be poised to win workplace a second time.
Mitch McConnell devoted his life to the acquisition of energy. One imagines that energy grants freedom. It does, however solely to an extent, for we’re additionally sure by the habits of thoughts we type and domesticate in our quest to acquire energy. The Mitch McConnell with the power of character to confront Trump within the wake of his crime towards the American republic is nearly definitely not the Mitch McConnell with the ability to take action. The McConnell with the ability to take action was, and is, a coward.
For this reason essentially the most becoming coda to McConnell’s profession was not the speech he gave saying his choice to step down as Republican chief, however the assertion he made the next week. “It’s abundantly clear that former President Trump has earned the requisite help of Republican voters to be our nominee for president of the USA,” McConnell introduced, following Trump’s victory on Tremendous Tuesday. “It ought to come as no shock that as nominee, he could have my help.”
McConnell is correct — his help for Trump got here as no shock. When he goes for good in 2027, McConnell is not going to go away the Senate as a statesman. He’ll go away it as handmaiden to a would-be despot.
