Powerful, Principled
Mitch’s critics will come to miss him
YOU never truly appreciate what you have until it’s lost. Mitch McConnell, longtime leader of the Senate Republican Conference, announced Wednesday he’s resigning from that role in November. McConnell was sworn into the Senate in 1985, ascended to the position he’s vacating in 2007 and intends to serve out the six-year term he earned in 2020.
But his decision marks the end of an era that lasted nearly two tumultuous decades during which McConnell emerged as one of the most powerful men in American politics. When this period’s history is written — or at least when it’s written by honest, perceptive observers — he will be remembered as the most effective conservative in government since Ronald Reagan.
McConnell was often the target of withering attacks from right-wing flamethrowers who blamed him for the body’s failure to push through conservative legislation. Indeed, just hours before McConnell made his decision public, Sen. Josh Hawley called him “a symbol of everything that’s wrong with Washington.” It’s hard to conceive of a more juvenile, civically illiterate assertion.
As Republican leader, McConnell didn’t prioritize his own interests; he subordinated them to those of his colleagues, at whose pleasure he served.
It’s extremely difficult to pass ideological legislation in a system with as many veto points as the American one. The White House, House of Representatives, Senate and filibuster all stand in the way; the only years McConnell enjoyed the advantages of united Republican government were 2017 and 2018. He shepherded through what legislation he could in that short timeframe, but the White House’s lack of focus, the House’s rambunctious caucus and a thin majority in his own chamber prevented that triumvirate from reaching its full potential.
Even while facing down and occasionally being impeded by those headwinds, however, McConnell earned a reputation — now a legacy — as both a singular political talent and American patriot.
In 2016, McConnell was able to persuade his conference to agree to an audacious gambit: keeping the Supreme Court seat Antonin Scalia’s unexpected death opened empty until after that November’s presidential election. If not for McConnell, one of the court’s most imwhen pressive scholars would have been replaced by Merrick Garland. And if Hillary Clinton had won the presidency, Garland would have given way to an even worse nominee. Instead, McConnell, Donald Trump and the replacement McConnell’s Senate confirmed, Neil Gorsuch, secured Scalia’s own legacy.
McConnell went on to confirm two more Supreme Court nominees, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, under exceedingly difficult circumstances during Trump’s presidency. In both instances, McConnell allowed one of his moderate, vulnerable colleagues to defect, but held on to everyone else and won the day.
And what’d he win? Roe v. Wade’s overturning and a solid, constitutionalist court majority for the foreseeable future; that alone should be enough to leave conservatives with clouds in their coffee come Thursday morning.
There’s a reason, after all, Democrats have crowned McConnell with all manner of epic, supposedly derisive monikers, Nuclear Mitch, Midnight Mitch and Darth Vader among them. They fear him.
But for all McConnell’s partisan accomplishments, he’s also remained loyal to certain timeless principles and the Constitution much of the rest of his party has fallen short of such standards.
McConnell opposed the effort to overturn the 2020 election results Jan. 6 and denounced Trump after the Capitol riot. Critics claim his vote against Trump’s conviction in the subsequent impeachment trial is proof of his parochial priorities, and it’s fair to submit he should have voted for conviction even if he couldn’t persuade his colleagues to do the same.
Most of these criticisms lack nuance, though, reflecting a failure to understand American politics or McConnell’s motivations.
McConnell is a practitioner of the art of the possible. That art sometimes lends itself toward damage control, rather than doomed pursuits of perfection. And McConnell has remained a stalwart advocate of American moral and practical leadership on the world stage even as he faces denunciations from within his own party for doing so.
“We must reject the dimmest and most shortsighted views of our obligations,” declared McConnell in a rebuke of the isolationist right shortly before the Senate passed a Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan aid package this month. Most of his Republican colleagues voted the other way.
In 2013, McConnell warned his Democratic counterpart not to invoke the nuclear option to push through President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees. “You’ll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think,” he said.
Many of Mitch McConnell’s critics on both the left and right will grow to regret his departure from leadership, and they’ll regret it a lot sooner than they think.