Has Mitch McConnell Gone Soft?

While I remember presidential elections before then, the first Senate election I remember truly following, where I knew the candidates in every major race and I knew the stakes beyond just the presidential election that year was 2000.  I was a teenager at the time, and I had a copy of a Newsweek map that had listed the key races in Washington, Virginia, Minnesota, Missouri, & Michigan that year that were about to decide the majority.  For me, then, 2000 also serves an unusual flashpoint-politicians that were already in DC have basically been politicians I've remembered "all my life" when it comes to politics, names that have always existed.  As we talked about this past week with Dianne Feinstein, there are not that many figures that can boast such a position, and some of them like Joe Biden & Nancy Pelosi are either on their last term or nearing it.  One of the figures I have most followed since then, and who seems to be as much a part of DC political culture as traffic jams in Dupont Circle, is Mitch McConnell, who has been having a bizarre reappraisal on social media that I want to set straight.

I'm old enough to remember when Mitch McConnell wasn't even in Senate leadership, or at least wasn't in the top two positions.  In 2000, he had just gotten off of a largely unsuccessful tenure as NRSC Chair, not losing the majority (though it wouldn't survive the next Congress), but watching as his colleagues John Ashcroft, Rod Grams, & Slade Gorton all went down in flames.  McConnell would rise up as a result of Trent Lott's statements coming out of Strom Thurmond's retirement party (where he was accused of making racist remarks endorsing Thurmond's segregationist presidential bid) and Bill Frist being one of the few politicians who stuck to their term limit pledge in 2006, leaving McConnell an opening to take over the minority leader spot, which would eventually become the majority leader's spot in 2015.

McConnell has a reputation as a ruthless, shrewd politician, and part of that is well-earned.  He's famously devoted to winning seats on the federal judiciary, slow-walking the nominees presented by President Obama in his final two years in office (including not holding hearings for Merrick Garland, which profoundly changed the way that the Senate worked, likely forever) and putting three conservative Supreme Court justices into office during the presidency of Donald Trump.  His knowledge of the body was juxtaposed against the leaders the Democrats had put up during his tenure, men like Harry Reid & Chuck Schumer who were far more interested in actual legislating than McConnell (aside from his judicial record, McConnell is more famous for obstruction than actually passing any laws on his watch).

McConnell, however, is also not a master politician in terms of his electoral prowess.  During his tenure as Republican leader, he's only held the majority for six years of of an 18-year run (2015-21).  In 2006, 2010, 2020, & 2022, he lost winnable majorities.  This is due in part to his not being able to control the NRSC.  In his time as Republican leader, national punchlines like Christine O'Donnell, Todd Akin, Herschell Walker, & Mehmet Oz cost the Republicans seats they should've won, and extended majorities for Democrats.  McConnell is unique on Capitol Hill in that, when he's going to go down in history, he'll never number amongst the people who played their majorities like a Stradivarius (like Nancy Pelosi) nor will he come across as someone who couldn't control his caucus (like John Boehner, and I would imagine, Kevin McCarthy).  He is someone whose sole mission was winning a conservative Supreme Court majority that would outlive him, which he did.

Social media reappraisals of McConnell, accusing him of "going soft" during the Biden Era should do well to remember this, that McConnell won the game he cares about most.  McConnell didn't know when he started his 2020 campaign that Ruth Bader Ginsburg would die, and as a result his Supreme Court majority was strong but not unbeatable.  It's probable that if she'd died in 2019 that he might've considered retiring in a blaze of glory.  It's not so much that McConnell has gone soft, it's that in his 16 years as leader, there have been only two things McConnell has cared about: winning a lasting conservative majority on the Supreme Court and holding together a Republican Senate majority.  The first, Donald Trump gave him...

...and the second, he took away.  It's not hard to see that McConnell, for as much as he found Trump useful, clearly hates the guy.  Honestly, if you told me that between Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, & Mitt Romney, only one of them actually voted for Trump in 2020, I 1) wouldn't be remotely surprised and 2) would assume it was the senior senator from Maine despite her being the most "moderate" of the quartet.  McConnell is someone who frequently defies norms, but does so in a quiet way that Trump and his acolytes seem incapable of doing.  Trump repeatedly attacks McConnell's wife with racist epithets (even though she was in his cabinet), and publicly criticized McConnell in a way that definitely hurt them both electorally.

But it was two days in January of 2021 that weakened McConnell's stomach, and since then we've noticed at least a subtle change in how hard he goes after Democrats.   The obvious day was January 6th, which McConnell clearly saw as a step beyond what he thought possible when Trump sent a violent mob to the Capitol, and seemed to delight in it.  McConnell didn't have the guts to impeach Trump, but he also didn't whip the vote either, allowing conservative Republicans like Bill Cassidy & Pat Toomey to "vote their conscience" without any punishment that might've been incurred if McConnell had actually felt that what they were hurting the party.

But it might well have been January 5th where McConnell truly found Trump unable to be forgiven.  Coming out of the 2020 election, it looked like McConnell had done the impossible-he had managed to install Amy Coney Barrett in the Supreme Court, thus getting his once-in-a-century Supreme Court supermajority, and kept his Senate majority.  Democrats had badly fumbled on election day, picking up seats in Arizona & Colorado, but failing to do so in North Carolina, Iowa, & Maine, thus meaning that Republicans just needed to win one of the Georgia seats, a state that until then was blood red, to keep the majority and basically stop Biden from reshaping the judiciary on his end for much of his presidency.  But Trump's refusal to concede gave Democrats an opening, and they pulled off one of the great upsets of the past decade, electing Raphael Warnock & Jon Ossoff to the Senate and getting Biden a trifecta that allowed for a huge amount of legislation (and over 100 federal judges).  Two years later, Trump's insistence on horrendous candidates (which McConnell himself publicly admonished, a rare breach for him) cost them further, and took away another chance for McConnell to run the Senate majority.

All of this is to say, it's clear that in the Biden Era, McConnell's attitude has shifted more to someone running out the clock on his career than to someone with a lot of fight in him; this man would be unrecognizable a few years ago.  McConnell obviously likes Joe Biden on a personal level, their decades of friendship in the Senate counting for more than I would've guessed in 2021.  This is driven by the reality that, barring an Act of God, Biden's never going to be able to disrupt McConnell's majority on the Supreme Court, at least during McConnell's lifetime.  It also helps that compared to people like Trump, Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Kevin McCarthy, & Marjorie Taylor Greene (the other Republican leaders) McConnell is somehow the most palatable of the bunch.  He's the only one who offered support to Nancy Pelosi right away after her husband was attacked, he's the only one that has no issue with pointing out Joe Biden was elected in 2020 without lying or adding an asterisk.  This doesn't mean he's a good man (he's not) and it doesn't mean that he's a "RINO" (he's still one of the most conservative figures in American politics)...but it does mean that he's clearly taking his last lap around the track before calling it quits at the end of his term (or honestly, possibly sooner).  Public opinion on McConnell doesn't need a change, he's still someone who destroyed the American judiciary, but...I'll admit he's no longer the worst Republican in congressional leadership.