The Senate was designed to moderate the U.S. body politic. McConnell internalized that function early in his career and came to embody it as a senator.
The Senate was designed to moderate the U.S. body politic. McConnell internalized that function early in his career and came to embody it as a senator.
I first met Mitch McConnell when I was invited to interview with him for a speechwriting job in late 2006. When I walked into his ornate Capitol office, I was immediately struck by how relaxed and unhurried he seemed despite myriad high-stakes political and legislative issues swirling around him at the moment. He asked me one, maybe two, questions, including a lighthearted jibe at my résumé — “Columbia School of Journalism, not exactly a bastion of conservatism . . .” — then politely indicated the meeting was over. I was hired.
When I reluctantly left McConnell’s office more than a decade later, having enjoyed an enviable seat for some of the era’s most consequential political battles and a boss I had come to greatly admire, I knew I was leaving a politician at the top of his game. But the party was clearly changing. And while McConnell’s announcement this week that he won’t seek another term as his party’s leader in the Senate after an unprecedented 18-year run wasn’t a surprise to those who know him, it does mean that U.S. politics will soon lose the one reliable, stabilizing political force it has had for nearly 20 years.
That McConnell has played this role from atop the U.S. Senate is no accident. The Senate was designed to moderate the U.S. body politic. McConnell internalized that function early in his career and came to embody it as a senator. One of his great legacies will be his successful campaign to resist pressure from presidents of both parties to relax the Senate’s supermajority threshold for passing legislation of significance. Temperamentally conditioned to take the long view of most things, he has always appreciated better than most that majorities come and go and that supermajorities are a key to ensuring stability in our laws.
That function has also been at play in McConnell’s steadfast leadership on Ukraine. Even as other so-called defense hawks in Congress have caviled on the importance of strongly backing Ukraine in its fight against Russia, McConnell has been a fierce and tireless advocate for it. When it comes to America’s role in the world, he is unconflicted about the necessity of American global hegemony. In his view, America’s adversaries need to see that we stand strongly with our allies, and subordinating that support to domestic priorities is a false choice.
In his 2015 memoir The Long Game, McConnell largely credits one of his own Kentucky predecessors, Senator John Sherman Cooper, for helping form his own independent streak. Citing Cooper’s strong public support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 at a time when many Kentuckians strongly opposed it, McConnell writes that when he asked Cooper how he balanced the two, Cooper responded without hesitation that he “not only represent[s] Kentucky, [he] represent[s] the nation, and there are times you follow, and times when you lead.”
One doesn’t have to look hard to find the moments when McConnell took Cooper’s counsel to heart. Whether it’s his battle in support of Ukraine, his famous opposition to a president of his own party in opposing congressional limits to political speech, his unpopular opposition to a flag-burning amendment on free-speech grounds early in his career, or his single-handed blockade of Barack Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court ahead of the 2016 presidential election, McConnell has seemed almost energized by taking on lonely, thankless battles.
A voracious reader of history who inscribes every book he reads with the date and location of where and when he finished it, McConnell has a tactile feel for his own place in American history. He is entirely self-aware when exercising the powers of his office, once explaining his famous decision not to hold hearings or even contemplate a vote on Obama’s nominee to replace Scalia by saying, simply, “because I could.” At the time, the decision sent all of official Washington into paroxysms of rage and frustration. McConnell, intuitively knowing the limits and extent of the power of his position, and taking the long view as usual, was serenely confident in the decision and hardly seemed to notice.
The dawn of Donald Trump as the Republican standard-bearer carried its own challenges to be sure. McConnell navigated them deftly, guiding passage of the largest tax-reform package in a generation and reshaping the federal judiciary for what will likely be two. This latter achievement, his proudest, reflects again McConnell’s ability to see beyond the attention-grabbing skirmishes of the moment to the ways in which he could use the power at his disposal to effectively and durably effect conservative change. As a former colleague and top McConnell aide put it this week, McConnell not only never wasted time taking victory laps for his accomplishments, he had moved on to the next one before those around him even noticed.
For a proponent of the so-called long game, McConnell has not wasted a moment of his nearly two decades as his party’s leader in the Senate, and I am confident he will not simply mark the time once he leaves the top job later this year. He may be changing offices, but to the dismay of his many hard-won critics on left and right, Mitch McConnell is not done making history.