A Few Thoughts on Mitch McConnell

The senator announced he's stepping down from his leadership position after 17 years.

Last week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that he’ll be stepping down, after 17 years, as Republican leader of the Senate. The 82-year-old, who’s dealt with multiple health issues over the last few months, will be leaving the position in November, but will finish out the remainder of his Senate term that will end in 2027.

Lots of Democrats and MAGA Republicans alike celebrated the announcement, but for very different reasons.

For Democrats, it was McConnell’s effectiveness that left a mark. He stood in the way of much of President Obama’s progressive agenda, designed a lot of Republican victories, and was the primary engineer of the current conservative makeup of the Supreme Court (and the broader conservative judiciary).

To the MAGA crowd, McConnell represents the old GOP establishment. He’s a Reagan Republican, an institutionalist, and a serious legislator who’s far less interested in serving up populist red meat on cable-news programs than pursuing public policy and recruiting quality Republican candidates. But the biggest strike against McConnell was that, despite handing Donald Trump the biggest political wins of his presidency, he didn’t demonstrate complete and utter servitude to the man. And in today’s Republican Party, that alone is grounds for expulsion.

Personally, I have mixed views on McConnell. I certainly appreciate a lot of what he’s done for the conservative movement. I think he’s been on the right side of most domestic and foreign policy issues, he was instrumental in gaining a lot of Republican seats under Obama, and he of course deserves immense credit for advancing the conservative legal movement. The biggest stain on McConnell’s legacy, in my and many others’ view, was his decision not to support Donald Trump’s second impeachment conviction following the January 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol.

My guess is that McConnell regrets that decision. Heck, I think it probably haunts him most days.

After all, he’s seen his party only further deteriorate over the last three years, watching helplessly as more and more of his fellow Republicans embrace idolic demagoguery and grievance, while distancing themselves from conservative principles, coherent policies, and even passable legislation.

McConnell has witnessed one conscientious conservative after another purged from office for standing up for the Constitution, while party leaders in good MAGA-standing threaten to use the power of government to punish political opponents.

He’s watched Republicans increasingly romanticize authoritarian rule, not just at the expense of our allies abroad (as they fight for their very survival against ruthless foreign invaders), but at the proposed cost of their own freedoms and rights as Americans.

McConnell has looked on as Republicans continue to lose winnable elections hand over fist (including the Senate majority twice), in deference to the ego of a criminally indicted, defeated politician who tried to overturn the last presidential election to stay in power.

And he’s watching right now as Donald Trump, who sat back and did nothing for hours while his supporters carried out violence at the Capitol in his name (an act that compelled McConnell’s wife to resign from the administration), is on the eve of securing his party’s presidential nomination for the third consecutive time… while a cash-strapped RNC spends millions in campaign funds to pay Trump’s personal legal bills.

Truth be told, McConnell could have dealt a fatal blow to this insanity three years ago. He could have almost single-handedly changed the trajectory of a floundering Republican Party, and placed it on a path to recovery, just by delivering a wholly appropriate impeachment conviction that would have disqualified Trump from ever running for federal office again.

It would have been the ethically and institutionally correct thing to do. It would have been the patriotic thing to do. As McConnell himself said at the time in regard to January 6, “If this isn’t impeachable, I don’t know what is.”

It wouldn’t have even been difficult. All it would have taken was a little courage and leadership. The numbers were reportedly there. Five days after the attack, McConnell told advisors that at least 17 Senate Republicans were prepared to convict the former president. That was the magic number required to meet the two-thirds vote in the Senate.

But as days and weeks went by, McConnell gradually lost his nerve. The Republican base wasn’t ready to abandon Trump. Neither were numerous media-conservatives who were already rewriting the history of what happened that day. Concerned with a political backlash within the party, McConnell folded. At a time when true leadership was needed, he signaled (despite rhetorically condemning Trump) that he would vote to exonerate. The coalition he’d previously accounted for fell apart, with at least nine other senators following McConnell’s example and reversing course. Only seven stuck with their decision to convict the former president.

I guess it’s possible that McConnell had convinced himself that Trump’s political career was effectively over after January 6, but I think he’s too smart to have ever assumed that. He’s had a front-row ticket to his party’s unconditional surrender to one man, and he had to know another political run was likely in the cards. Even if it wasn’t, the facts of what had already happened remained.

Evoking that surrender, The Dispatch’s John McCormack recently argued that February 13, 2021, the day Trump was acquitted in the U.S. Senate, was “the closest the former president ever actually came to being denied the 2024 GOP nomination.”

I’d like to believe otherwise, but McCormack may well be right… and McConnell, three years later, would probably agree with him.

The historic mistake McConnell made has resulted in terrible damage to the party, and it could potentially have huge national and international ramifications in the future. That’s something, for all his political achievements, the senator will have to live with.