It was McConnell’s efficacy as a leader of the Senate conference that irritated both his Democratic and Republican critics.
It was McConnell’s efficacy as a leader of the Senate conference that irritated both his Democratic and Republican critics.
I n comments Mitch McConnell reportedly confided to his friends, the outgoing Republican Senate minority leader revealed that he is fully aware of the caricature his critics have made of him. “Democrats hate me because of the court,” McConnell is quoted in Politico reporter Jonathan Martin’s retelling, “and Republicans hate me because of Trump.”
By assigning the hostility toward him to events that actually occurred, McConnell has been, perhaps, too generous to his detractors. McConnell did wield all the tools at his disposal to confirm as many conservative justices to the federal bench as he possibly could. With rare and consequential exceptions, McConnell did refuse to bend the knee to Donald Trump’s personality cult. If we limit the evaluation of the grievances with McConnell’s leadership to the Trump era alone, his critics might come off as rational, if exceedingly partisan. But if we open the aperture to include the whole of McConnell’s career at the head of his conference, we discover that, not only was he hated well before the Trump years, but also the rationale for that hatred appears ridiculous in retrospect.
Long before Democrats despised McConnell for the acumen he displayed in confirming the justices Republicans liked, they nursed a burning passion for his tendency to slow-walk the confirmations Republicans disliked. Indeed, McConnell’s refusal to offer Democrats even modest concessions on policy once Republicans were in a position to block Barack Obama’s agenda after the 2010 midterms was a source of endless Democratic frustration.
The McConnell-led GOP conference “blocked every serious idea” Democrats put forward, Obama complained in the summer of 2014. The Senate conference put a stop to an imperious cybersecurity bill that would have imposed costly requirements on businesses. It ground progress on sweeping gun-control legislation to a halt. It thwarted passage of a bill that would impose penalties on firms that take advantage of labor and manufacturing incentives overseas. It blocked a $447 billion spending spree cum tax hike retailed as a “jobs bill,” punitive and confiscatory taxes targeting the wealthy, and scores of nominees.
The Senate GOP’s recalcitrance drove McConnell’s Democratic critics up a wall. The GOP was willing “to say no to everything,” Obama complained. They had balked at upwards of 500 bills, and too many nominees to count. The GOP had become “the party of no,” and McConnell America’s “No.1 obstructionist.” If the American voting public disapproved of the GOP’s obstructionism, it was difficult to tell from the election returns. In race after race, Republicans just kept winning.
After the 2014 midterms, with both the House and Senate in GOP hands, McConnell put into action a plan he had outlined during the election cycle to not just block Obama’s excesses but confront him with Republican legislation. With that, the GOP evolved from the “party of no” to the “party of no, but,” establishing clear lines for voters that distinguished Republican governance from the Democratic sort.
It was right around this time — a time when Republicans occupied 247 House seats and 54 Senate seats; controlled 69 of the nation’s 99 legislative chambers; and claimed 33 governors, 25 of whom presided over total control of their state’s government — that GOP voters determined that Republicans didn’t know how to win anymore.
Even before Republicans reassumed control over the House in 2011, McConnell had become a preferred target of “frequent criticism from the likes of Rush Limbaugh and the Tea Party for not doing more, not going further,” a January 2011 commentary from the Atlantic’s Joshua Green read. But it was after Republicans retook total control of Congress that the insurgent Right’s hostility toward McConnell veered into absurdity.
The Senate majority leader was “the most effective Democratic leader in modern times,” Texas senator Ted Cruz proclaimed in 2015. In insurgent outlets such as Breitbart, chronicling McConnell’s many “caves” to Democratic demands became a regular feature. “McConnell is completely throwing in the towel,” Limbaugh mourned in a theme that became increasingly common as the year progressed.
The offenses that prompted these denunciations were the majority leader’s efforts to keep the government funded through continuing resolutions, omnibus bills, and appropriations for individual executive-branch agencies — which is to say, legislation that could pass the Senate as well as the Tea Party–dominated House. McConnell’s aversion to government shutdowns was born of bitter experience, but the conclusions he drew about the counterproductivity of work stoppages in the nation’s capital were not shared by many in his conference. Those stopgap spending bills passed with the support of Democratic votes, leading Republicans to conclude that the Republicans “don’t win anymore” and the only available recourse was to “burn it down.”
Only then did Trump descend the escalator, instrumentalizing this burgeoning nihilism. It all seems rather quaint in hindsight. Republicans today could only imagine the kind of “losing” to which the GOP was prone in the pre-Trump age. Even now, however, insurgent Republicans are committed to the notion that McConnell is a fifth column within the GOP. “Our thoughts are with our Democrat colleagues in the Senate on the retirement of their Co-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (D-Ukraine),” the House Freedom Caucus proposed following the news of the GOP leader’s forthcoming abdication. What this sentiment lacks in comprehensibility, it more than makes up for in passion.
McConnell’s tenure is not above criticism, though much of it can only be rendered with the benefit of hindsight. When the leader backed measures such as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and the Gang of Eight’s immigration-reform bill, he did so with the understanding that those were necessary responses to the political circumstances that prevailed — an understanding that was contemporaneously shared by his colleagues. When McConnell backed nominees for high office that offended the sensibilities of the conservative movement, he did so on the basis of their electability alone. His goal was only ever to effectively steward the Senate, even at the risk of sacrificing ideological consistency.
It was McConnell’s efficacy as a leader of the Senate conference that irritated both his Democratic and Republican critics, though for different reasons. He was a true institutionalist, insofar as the institution always came first — not its members nor any particular movement. In an age in which all matters of policy are subsumed into the one overarching feature of the political landscape — for Trump or against Trump — the leader’s critics might have forgotten the basis of their long-held hostility toward McConnell. But we should not.