Mitch McConnell Has Earned the Right to Go out on His Own Terms

Mitch McConnell will step down as Senate leader in November but intends to remain in the Senate through the end of his current term, which runs through 2026. It’s time. McConnell is the longest-serving party leader in the history of the Senate. He just turned 82 earlier this month, and a series of health incidents in the past year led National Review to editorialize last summer that he should commence planning his exit. Looking over the landscape of our gerontocracy, with presidential contenders who will be 78 and 82 in November, I went further and argued that it’s time to start introducing maximum-age limits on our leaders. But in endorsing McConnell’s decision to go, we can also appreciate the great scale of what he has accomplished.

McConnell’s challenge these days is not just age but longevity. A lifelong Republican dating back to when those were rare in Kentucky, he came to Washington as a legislative aide in the closing weeks of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, joined the Justice Department during the Ford administration, was first elected to the Senate in 1984 at the height of the Reagan years, and has led the Senate Republican caucus since George W. Bush was president. The world, the country, the issues, and the party have changed and changed again many times along the way, and, at a certain point, McConnell stopped changing with them. That is much to his credit in a political climate that has turned too many people into unrecognizable shape-shifters, but it also puts him out of step with the mood of much of his caucus and the people who elect them. Friends come and go in politics, but enemies accumulate; McConnell is past the point at which he could make new friends, while his enemies have piled up.

McConnell is a savvier politician than he gets credit for being. He has been running for office since 1977 without once losing an election, he’s good at holding together a fractious caucus, and he has easily turned back intra-caucus challenges to his leadership. But there’s a reason no Senate leader has ever lasted this long. A reflection of McConnell’s limitations and declining political touch are his many and accumulating failures in getting good Republican candidates nominated for the Senate. It hasn’t been for lack of trying, but in the Trump era, he has often backed people who lost their primaries to worse people — and in the Tea Party era, he often backed people who lost their primaries to better people.

Donald Trump and his acolytes have grown obsessed with blaming McConnell for all of their own failures. That’s a reflection of the fact that McConnell is the one major leader left in the party who was there before Trump, has met him as an equal, and has been willing to speak out against Trump’s stolen-election nonsense. The rationales change, but it’s always McConnell’s fault when Republicans lose an election behind a bad candidate such as Blake Masters or blow Senate seats in Georgia after Trump has convinced the party’s voters to stay home. Of course, that’s not unique to McConnell — Trump loyalists such as Kevin McCarthy and Trump-selected proxies such as Ronna McDaniel have been blamed, too. But by stepping down, McConnell will make it harder to pin the blame somewhere else; so long as he remained, his status as Trump’s favorite foil made it harder for him to get things done.

Just this week, there was speculation about whether McConnell would endorse Trump, whom he detests, for the good of the caucus. Maybe he still will, but announcing his retirement from leadership offers him a convenient excuse to keep his distance from Trump. Given the regular personal insults that Trump dishes out towards McConnell, Trump’s racist attacks on McConnell’s wife as “Coco Chow,” and Trump’s deep-seated need to keep treating McConnell as a scapegoat for Trump’s own errors, it’s not as if McConnell should expect that an endorsement would be reciprocated.

Of course, Trump isn’t the only one. Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and their fans in the commentariat similarly loved to blame “Moscow Mitch” for things they did or failed to do.

Leading a legislative caucus is an exceptionally hard job, particularly in the Senate. Which Republican in memory has done it better? Last September, I summed up McConnell’s virtues:

On the positive side of the ledger, McConnell is a master tactician of Senate inside baseball. When he wants to get something done or prevent the other side from doing it, he knows all the angles. His handling of the judicial-confirmation wars over the past decade has been nothing short of brilliant, and is why he is so floridly hated on the Left. As I noted after the Dobbs decision, without McConnell and his caucus, there is no vacancy for Trump to fill with Neil Gorsuch, no confirmation for Brett Kavanaugh after the accusation, and no vote on Amy Coney Barrett before the election: “All nine of the justices who decided Roe were confirmed by a Democratic Senate. Seven of the nine justices who decided Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992 were originally confirmed to the Court by a Democratic Senate (William Rehnquist was elevated to chief justice by a Republican Senate in 1986). The current Court, by contrast, contains five justices confirmed by a Republican Senate (Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett). Four of those five were in today’s majority, and the fifth concurred in the judgment. That made all the difference.” It is not just McConnell’s appearance that gets him compared with a turtle: He has the slow and steady virtues of the tortoise in Aesop’s fable, winning races that require patience and stalling. Despite his advanced age (he’s 80), time has taken less out of McConnell than out of many of his contemporaries in national politics.

As a caucus leader, McConnell does the three essential parts of the job of managing his people: He knows how far they will go, he almost always gets them to stick together once a decision is made, and they know that he has their back — even to a fault, as we have seen repeatedly in his often-unrequited loyalty to Lisa Murkowski. McConnell is capable of principled stands, as we saw in his impassioned speech on the morning of January 6 in favor of rejecting Donald Trump’s bogus challenge to the election, and in McConnell’s denunciation of Trump following the Capitol riot. But he will not cast lonely votes of principled protest; when his caucus wasn’t willing to impeach Trump over January 6, McConnell used his voice to side with his conscience, but used his vote and his mastery of the rules to side with his caucus.

McConnell is a better Republican leader in the Senate than anyone in at least the past half century, and he brings more to the table than any leader of the House Republicans in that time.

McConnell’s legacy in the courts will long outlive him as his greatest gift to the nation. As our editorial in November noted regarding the change to the judicial filibuster a decade earlier at Reid’s insistence:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned Reid that “you’ll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think.” Rarely has a warning from a political opponent been so richly vindicated by subsequent events.

Democrats, briefly, enjoyed their triumph. The 113th Congress, in 2013-14, confirmed 132 federal judges, 88.6 percent of those nominated, including 23 circuit judges — each the highest figures in many years. In June 2014, Andrew Prokop of Vox wrote, noting the accelerating pace of confirmations, “Six and a half months later, the verdict is in — Democrats regret nothing.”

Gloating was short-lived: Republicans recaptured the Senate in 2014 and the White House in 2016…McConnell used the new power of the majority to dramatically slow the pace of confirmations to just two appellate nominees and 18 district judges, and refused to even hold a hearing on the Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland. Then, once Donald Trump entered the White House, Republicans used Reid’s weapon to confirm 54 circuit judges and 174 district judges in four years.

McConnell’s decision to block Garland during the 2016 election, and to confirm Barrett during the 2020 election, was hardball that required a lot of courage as well as an understanding of the rules and precedents of the Senate. I was unconvinced at first in 2016, but I concluded in 2017 and 2020 after a deep study of the history of Supreme Court nominations that McConnell had history on his side — and that his statements all the way back to February and March of 2016 had reflected that history. And he kept his caucus behind those decisions through a long series of tough votes in spite of a barrage of negative publicity, character assassination of nominees, and protesters who were breaking into hearing rooms and chasing caucus members into elevators and out of restaurants. Senate Republicans emerged victorious not only inside the chamber and the courts but also at the polls. Republicans won one Senate election after another between 2016 and 2020 that emphasized the courts.

For all of that, there have been plenty of ways in which McConnell has frustrated conservatives, and those flaws are more glaringly on display when there’s no strong Republican leader in the White House or the speakership:

The tortoise cannot be the hare. He is rarely a good public spokesman, and is as deeply unpopular with the general public outside his home state as any other caucus leader in recent years. Aside from a few pet issues, such as opposing campaign finance reform, he has no public policy vision; at best, he can carry out the agendas of other people. That requires the Republican Party to be led by a serious policy mind in tune with what its voters want, instead of by John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Donald Trump. Paul Ryan is really the only national Republican leader of the post-Bush era who had a positive policy vision, and Ryan and his agenda had their own flaws. As a matter of electoral tactics, McConnell has a point that running on pure opposition in a midterm year is shrewder than rolling out plans that spook the swing voters, but if the party does that year after year, people start to wonder what it does stand for.

McConnell has also long been the bête noire of small-government conservatives, who spent much of the Tea Party era rightly furious that Mitch would rather cut big-spending deals than hold out for cuts. It is ironic that many of his current critics are the same people who cheered Trump and derided small-government conservatism and Ryan’s concern with debt and entitlements as “Zombie Reaganism,” but McConnell is still part of the swamp when it comes to spending. True, he successfully played a weak hand in 2021-22 in keeping Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on his side against the worst excesses of Joe Biden’s orgy of money-printing and against progressive plans to abolish the filibuster and remake American government on a narrow party-line vote, but McConnell gave away a good deal in order to accomplish that, got played by Manchin in the run-up to the Inflation Reduction Act.

It’s time for a new leader. Judging from how things have gone in the House, that may be a messy process. But we can appreciate what Mitch McConnell has done for his party, its causes, and the nation.