Mitch McConnell’s announcement that he will step down from his leadership post in the fall has sparked a lot of reflections on his reign.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s announcement that he will step down from his leadership post in the fall has sparked a lot of reflections on his reign, both positive and negative.
A common criticism of McConnell during this period was that — at least until the Ukraine debate of the last two years — he often advanced no coherent policy priorities but only legislative tactics. Sometimes people put this in positive terms, describing McConnell as a kind of ideal consigliere who could take the goals of a Republican president, whatever those were, and make them happen. Others have described this in negative terms, as a kind of pure proceduralism that refused to give Senate Republicans any substantive direction, and even discouraged them from taking positions on matters of policy substance as a group.
But although that has generally been McConnell’s tack, I think it’s worth taking note of a kind of substantive commitment that has served as something of an organizing principle of his strategic and tactical judgments. McConnell is not very policy-minded, it’s true. But he has been guided by a distinct ideal of the legislator, and more generally the politician, and this ideal has shaped his sense of the role of the Senate leader, and his occasional substantive crusades too.
This is an ideal very much in evidence in McConnell’s memoir, The Long Game, published in 2016. It’s a book worth reading — my version even has a foreword by Donald Trump, oddly enough. And at the heart of the book is a notion of politics as the art of compromise and of the politician’s craft as a dignified and noble pursuit of incremental legislative accomplishments through coalitional accommodation.
It’s a partisan ideal, in the sense that McConnell thinks the role of the parties is extremely important to the practice of politics. But what stands out most is that it is a personal ideal, in the sense that it describes a kind of human being as much as a set of institutions — a person who knows what he wants to achieve but also knows that he needs to represent a broad coalition, that his goals describe a direction, and that he should be willing to go part of the way in that direction even if he can’t go all the way.
This kind of mindset, McConnell wrote, “requires deep understanding, an ability to listen, great patience, and a willingness to subordinate one’s own idea of perfection for the moment in the interest of achieving long-term goals later on. It means viewing the legislative process as the best means we have for making good decisions collectively.” And it means taking pleasure in the practice of politics, and recognizing in it a kind of civic vocation that expands the realm of the possible.
Obviously, no politician’s memoir should be taken as pure and honest reflection, and needless to say, McConnell has often functioned as far from an idealist in any traditional sense. But I do think there is in this description of his beau ideal of a legislator a hint of how he has operated at key moments.
It was certainly behind McConnell’s longstanding vendetta against progressive campaign-finance-reform proposals. The left’s approach to campaign spending disempowers politicians and the parties and in their place empowers outside activists and the media. McConnell has always viewed it as an assault not only on the First Amendment but on the very possibility of the sort of politician he sought to advance, and to be.
And the same view of the politician’s vocation shaped a lot of McConnell’s work as party leader in the Senate. He has sought to protect his members as politicians — to take account of what was required to win and hold Senate seats and to allow his members to do their jobs. This has often meant protecting them from taking hard votes, both because they have wanted that protection and because being a senator in the era of party primaries demands it. It has meant recruiting Senate candidates capable of winning in their states and then functioning in the Senate, which has required McConnell to push against the instincts of the Republican primary electorate quite a bit in recent years. But it has also meant defending the filibuster even when his party had a narrow majority. All of that has aimed to sustain a space for legislative action and to populate it with people who see its purpose and understand its character.
The same aims have led McConnell to submerge his own substantive views beneath the interests of the larger party coalition and act, in essence, as a tactician in pursuit of other people’s goals. That is a big part of how he has understood his role as leader. And it is why his vehemence on the funding of aid to Ukraine in recent months has been a clear signal that in his own mind he was done being the Republican leader in the Senate. His position on Ukraine has not been the position of the median Senate Republican. And the strategy he has pursued has not been advantageous to the party, or even to the achievement of any compromise measure. It has been his own view, for good and bad. He has acted as a senator, not as party leader (or at least not as he has understood the role of party leader for two decades).
McConnell has been an institutionalist of a particular sort, then: It’s not that he has elevated the interest of the institution — of Congress or the Senate — above all else, but that he has allowed himself to be shaped by the distinct institutional roles he has had, and has defined his own ambitions according to the demands of those roles. His role for the last 17 years has been a partisan role, and so his institutionalism has been a partisan institutionalism. He has been a partisan of the Republican Party and of the Senate, in that order. But he has understood that institutionalism in a very sophisticated, and frequently a very public-spirited, way.
Some of McConnell’s opponents and critics have disagreed with his substantive judgements — about political strategy, legislative strategy, or specific policy issues like campaign finance or Ukraine. That is more than legitimate, and his approach to legislative strategy in particular has raised some serious concerns among serious senators, who believe the Senate needs a more open process despite (if not because of) the political risks. Many of these critics, however, have been able to respect McConnell’s distinct institutionalism and the substantive achievements he has facilitated for Republicans and the country, even as they have disagreed with him. They have said as much since he announced his plans to retire.
But others among his critics in both parties fundamentally reject the kind of institutionalism he has embodied, and the ideal of the politician that he has held up as his model. They’re finding it harder to express any respect for McConnell as he wraps up his career.
Their discourtesy is not incidental but fundamental to their disagreement with him. They do not share his sense of the purpose and potential of legislative work. Their failure of civility, like their many other failures, is ultimately rooted in a failure of civic self-knowledge. Mitch McConnell could teach them a thing or two.