McConnell Makes His Case: ‘We Must Be Doing Something Right’

W hen you’ve been around as long as Mitch McConnell, few things are new, and some are almost exactly the same.

So it is that McConnell once again is opposing a Democrat in the White House pursuing a transformational agenda at the same time he is targeted by a populist Right that considers him too establishmentarian.

Ten years ago, of course, the president was Barack Obama, and the powerful populist force was the Tea Party; this time, Joe Biden is president, and the populists are led by Donald Trump who is calling for his head.

After months of getting slammed for his handiwork, the Senate Republican leader defended his record over the last year in a phone interview, part of a mini-victory tour in the media after the defeat of Build Back Better, at least for now.

“I feel pretty good at the end of this year, given where we started with an insurrection and an impeachment trial,” McConnell says. “And now we have a new administration that’s demonstrated to the American people just how hard left they are. We’ve had a couple of elections in which that was a huge factor indicating people don’t like what they’re selling. And I think we’re going to have a good environment going into the fall of ’22.”

How the debate over BBB played out seems to vindicate McConnell’s key tactical judgment of going along with funding for so-called hard infrastructure. He considered it “the most attractive part of the huge six-trillion-dollar package,” with the support of “75 percent of the American people.” He told his members that “it’s possible to put together a bipartisan package, pass it, and think of that as the sugar and the rest of it as spinach and leave them with the spinach and see if they can swallow it.”

A bipartisan group, including Rob Portman on the Republican side and Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on the Democratic side, worked on separating it out, a step McConnell told them he’d consider supporting so long as it didn’t re-open the 2017 tax bill.

He views the passage of the infrastructure package as a victory in its own right. “It associated us with something that the American people like,” he says. “They always want to see us do at least some things on a bipartisan basis, and frankly . . . it was the only thing this administration tried to do this year that I thought had any merit.”

Then, the rest of BBB became harder. “I think,” he says, “the strategy of pulling the popular part out was a big part of defeating it.” Indeed, he adds, “that’s exactly what the progressives in the House were afraid of. They were right about that.”

Is BBB dead forever? He thinks Democrats still “may get Joe [Manchin] with some version of this, but at least this particular monstrosity went down.” The larger issue is that the supporters of BBB “were on an ideological mission to transform the country.”

“These people are genuine radicals,” McConnell adds. “And that’s what today’s Democratic Party is.”

He warns that they “don’t want to play by the rules.” He considers the legislative filibuster “the essence of the Senate,” and says Democrats attacking it want “to break the Senate in order to clear the path, to do things like D.C. statehood, Puerto Rican statehood, and packing the Supreme Court to fundamentally change the structure of the country.”

The next fight will be an attempt to overhaul the filibuster for the sake of an elections bill, but McConnell is “absolutely convinced Senator Sinema is not going to participate in that.” He says he talks to Manchin and Sinema “frequently,” explaining that “they want to operate in the political center, and so they’ve talked to us.”

As for Biden, McConnell says he hears from the president “once in a while,” although “we haven’t had much to talk about this year.” Why has Biden gone so far left? “I think he misread the mandate,” he says, “and took bad advice. Of course, Joe was never a moderate in the Senate. So I wasn’t totally surprised that . . . he ended up not being a moderate president.”

As for his other tactical maneuvers that have been criticized, McConnell says shutting down the government and a crisis over the debt ceiling were “the two things we could have done to blow ourselves up and make us the issue instead of them.” By sidestepping them, he says, “we avoided some of these suicide missions that various members of my party in the past have tried to take us on.”

What’s his reply to the critiques of him from the populist right as too much of an accommodationist? “Well, my response to that,” McConnell says, “is look at the polls. How’s it look out there after a year of this administration? After a year of us not becoming the issue and letting them be [on] full display? We must be doing something right.”

As for the future of the Republican Party, “I think it’s important to take one election at a time,” he says. “And there’s no question who won the election. There’s no question who’s in the White House, who has the majority in the House, who has the majority in the Senate, be it ever so narrow. And it’s pretty clear that at the end of the first year that the governing party did not have a mandate from the American people to do what they’ve been trying to do.

“We’ve had a midterm report card at the end of ’21, and we go into ’22 with a very attractive environment in which to compete in ’22,” he continues. “And the only way we could mess this up would be to nominate people who couldn’t win in November.”

That’s a fight to come. In the meantime, McConnell likes how things have developed over the course of 2021: “It’s a lot different at the end of the year than it was at the beginning.”