Mitch McConnell is a key figure in what should be seen as a judicial revolution. Because of him, conservatives are regularly seeing real gains every summer as the Supreme Court term ends. We’ll see if the revolution has staying power.
That is how he’ll be remembered when the dust settles. I understand too that by announcing this way, he can probably avoid, for the most part, really rigorous questions about whether he endorses Donald Trump for the presidency. In this, he is escaping the humiliations inflicted on Ted Cruz, who had to put up with utterly outrageous accusations about his father and putrid comments about his wife, and then line up behind the leader of his party.
But there is a lot of dust yet to come down. I am joined to those who think this goodbye in eight months is turning sour. McConnell deputized Lankford to negotiate with Chuck Schumer on the immigration portions of a compromise bill that would get border security on one side, and foreign aid for Ukraine and Israel on the other. But McConnell never really took his conference’s side that border funding was paramount, and so at the first instant, he ditched the compromise for a straight-up foreign-aid bill. He ended up not even endorsing the compromise because the politics were so bad, leaving Lankford in the lurch.
He’s now put House Speaker Mike Johnson in an untenable position with his conference. And for what? Now he wants his own party to cave to his position that Ukraine is the most important thing in the world to American taxpayers. He’s probably made a government shutdown more likely by doing so.
His comments on the vote and afterward have betrayed that he really does not believe disagreement with his position is rooted in anything other than political opportunism and the whims of Donald Trump. That’s wrong. It’s a real generational shift in his party. It reflects a larger disaffection of conservatives from the national-security Blob in Washington, increasingly a progressive cat’s-paw. And so his exit highlights how he’s lost a firm handle on how to lead his party.