Mitch McConnell’s Choice
By Howard Fineman February 29, 2024
WASHINGTON—I’ve always thought Republican Senate Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who on Wednesday announced his retirement from Senate leadership, took the wrong lesson from the polio he had as a boy growing up in Louisville.
After his mother nursed him back to health, young Mitch had a choice. He could become an open, generous soul, eager to soothe the suffering of others wounded in life as he had been. Or, fearful of being “bullied” – a fate he dreaded as a sports-loving boy with an odd limp – he could become the biggest bully of them all.
He chose the latter, and the country has suffered mightily as a result. And it will suffer infinitely more if the Supreme Court he fashioned helps Donald Trump escape punishment for fomenting a treasonous riot.
I have had the duty of knowing and studying Mitch McConnell since I first heard of him in the late 1970s when I was a reporter for The Courier-Journal of Louisville. For most of the time, our relations were cordial and businesslike. He was devoted to his staff. He used his muscle to create worthy (if self-glorifying) academic programs at the University of Louisville. He could play the role of Kentucky Gentleman, as he did at the Derby, carefully escorting ladies to better views of the track from the skybox. On a personal level his wife, Elaine Chao, is the soul of graciousness. Mitch could sip a bourbon and offer you some, a humane act. He chose to live in a chic, liberal part of town, and liked to dine at its restaurants before he became an object of ridicule in them.
These small signs, plus my love of Kentucky and a naïve belief that there is “that of God” in all of us, led me to think McConnell could someday surprise me, the Senate, and the world with a “profile in courage” act of statesmanship. There was a prickly bravery to his orneriness. Who knows what that might produce. Time and again I hoped; time and again I was disappointed.
Why? Because early in his Senate career, he adopted as guiding goal the destruction of the social-welfare state as erected by the Roosevelts, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson. His bleak sense of realism told him he could not get elected president to do that. Instead, he would do it from the Senate by dismantling the federal judiciary that had sanctioned and enabled the liberal state.
He set about building the financial, educational, and political mechanisms necessary to reverse an entire epoch of social progress: luring in big donors such as the Kochs, helping to build the Federalist Society and its law school chapters, offering presidents and presidential candidates his lists of preferred nominees.
At first, few people understood the scope and ambition of what McConnell was trying to do. By the time they did, it was too late. The Supreme Court, the federal circuits, and the federal courts of original jurisdiction have all been remade in his image and to his conservative liking.
He would do anything he had to do to reach his goal of power. He rose by double-crossing everyone in his way when it suited his climbing purpose. He ran for local office in Jefferson County (Louisville) as a self-described “pro-labor” man, then promptly sold out the unions once he won.
Among Kentucky’s senators and congressmen, one topic you always closed ranks on was tobacco. Unity was essential to maintain an important state cash crop. That didn’t stop McConnell from killing a deal put together by his fellow Kentuckian, Democratic Sen. Wendell Ford, who never forgave Mitch. McConnell also started the tit-for-tat procedural war over judicial votes in the Senate. Democrat Harry Reid got tangled up in it – and partly blamed for it. Reid could match Mitch in soulless intensity, but Mitch was the instigator.
Being a Senate bully might have helped the country when Donald Trump came along. But Mitch folded up like a two-dollar suitcase to keep the power he needed for his judicial crusade. In 2015, McConnell privately recoiled at the unpredictable and philosophically confused New Yorker, saying voters would “drop him like a hot rock” once they got a good look at him. When Trump won the nomination, McConnell fell meekly in line.
Mitch’s most infamous moment of testing came during the second impeachment trial of Trump in the Senate for inciting a deadly riot on Jan. 6, 2021. The senator denounced the riot and Trump’s role in it. After a dramatic pause, he said the word “but.” But it wasn’t up to the Congress, but the courts to decide Trump’s fate.
Courts Mitch McConnell had made.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
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