McConnell motivated by power at any cost

Late last month, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky announced that he would leave his position as Republican leader after the November elections. He’ll depart as the longest-serving party leader in the Senate’s history.

There’s no question that McConnell is one of the most consequential politicians of his generation. This isn’t a compliment. McConnell is not consequential for what he accomplished as a legislator or legislative leader — he’s no Robert F. Wagner or Everett Dirksen. He’s consequential for what he’s done to degrade and diminish American democracy.

McConnell, as journalist Alec MacGillis noted in “The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell,” was never driven by ideology. He was a moderate, pro-choice Republican before he became a hardright, conservative one. “What has motivated McConnell has not been a particular vision for the government or the country, but the game of politics and career advancement in its own right,” MacGillis wrote in 2014.

McConnell’s quest for power, no matter the cost, explains how he became a fierce opponent of campaign finance reform, doing everything he could to help flood American politics with the unaccountable money of anonymous billionaires and other wealthy interests.

That same quest for power is what brought us his now infamous declaration that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” which he operationalized by weaponizing the filibuster to effectively end majority rule in the Senate.

The routine use of the filibuster to gum up the works is a McConnell innovation. And while he’s often described as an institutionalist, with the respect that implies for the Senate as a working body, the main effect of his strategy of obstruction has been to erode Congress’ ability to govern the country. You might even say that Donald Trump’s promise, during his 2016 campaign, to personally seize control of the federal government (“I alone can fix it”) fed directly on the dysfunction produced by McConnell’s commitment to congressional gridlock.

Of course, McConnell was always quick to share his distaste for Trump’s language, behavior and overall countenance. He was, after all, a man of Washington: a staid figure of the permanent Republican establishment, a regular presence on Sunday panel shows. But McConnell was nothing if not business first, and Trump was a vehicle for realizing his partisan and political goals.

Given the opportunity to show real leadership, McConnell withered in the face not of pressure, but of the potential for pressure: the chance that he might have to explain himself to other Republicans. “I didn’t get to be leader by voting with five people in the conference,” he said of his decision to vote to acquit Trump. Perhaps if he had acted as a leader, the former president would not be poised to win office a second time.

This is why the most fitting coda to McConnell’s career was this statement after Super Tuesday. “It is abundantly clear that (Trump) has earned the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for president of the United States. It should come as no surprise that as nominee, he will have my support.”

McConnell is right — his support for Trump came as no surprise. When he goes for good in January 2027, he will not leave the Senate as a statesman. He will leave it as handmaiden to a would-be despot.