What exactly is Mitch McConnell’s vision of public service?
More than any other individual today, the Senate majority leader has undermined the norms and traditions on which American democracy depends. What does he hope to achieve?
In January of 2015, Mitch McConnell’s 30-year career in American politics brought him to the peak of power as Senate majority leader.
As author and historian Robert Caro captures in The Passage of Power, the fourth volume of his epic chronicle of Lyndon B. Johnson’s life and career, the majority leader role comes with so much power and influence that Johnson sought to keep the job even after he was sworn in as vice president.
But unlike most of his predecessors in the role, including Johnson, McConnell has distinguished himself in only one significant way: as the single most destructive individual force in American democracy in the past decade.
Recall how McConnell, then Senate minority leader, greeted the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency: with an assertion to National Journal that “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
McConnell has distinguished himself in only one significant way: as the single most destructive individual force in American democracy in the past decade.
Maintaining that uncooperative and undemocratic pledge, McConnell utilized the filibuster against Obama’s nominees with unprecedented frequency. (Failing to move judicial nominations didn’t just hold up the sitting president’s agenda; it also left federal judgeships vacant and courts across the country struggling to keep up with a high volume of cases, undermining the ability of the judicial branch to fulfill its constitutional role.)
McConnell’s obstructive efforts drove down public approval of the Democratic-led Senate, helping deliver him control of the chamber in 2015. But instead of moderating his tone or approach with his party in power, McConnell doubled down. In his first year as majority leader, the McConnell-led Senate confirmed the fewest number of judges since 1960.
This blanket opposition to President Obama’s nominees culminated, of course, with McConnell’s still-shocking refusal to consider Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Even measured against the record of opposition McConnell had built up since 2009, this breach of precedent and protocol was stunning. Not only was McConnell saying that he would rather risk having Donald Trump make the next lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, but McConnell was willing to undermine the very ability of the Court to function just to achieve a political victory.
That level of disrespect — both to the president of the United States and to centuries of Senate precedent — completely undercut any claim McConnell made that his efforts were in service to “regular order.”
McConnell’s greatest hits continued in the summer of 2016 when, as the New York Times reported, he was among the congressional leaders presented by the C.I.A. with “intelligence not only that the Russians were trying to get Mr. Trump elected but that they had gained computer access to multiple state and local election boards in the United States since 2014.” As the Times reports, rather than issuing a strong, bipartisan statement in response to this obvious threat, McConnell questioned the veracity of the C.I.A. evidence, singlehandedly threatening to politicize the intelligence community’s warnings and leaving millions of voters unaware that an American adversary was seeking to interfere in the most fundamental of democratic processes.
Meanwhile, as his actions were undermining the integrity of our electoral process, McConnell was simultaneously enabling a demagogue to capitalize on the chaos encompassing it. McConnell didn’t just decline to criticize Donald Trump throughout the campaign; he also gave other Republicans cover to weaken their own disavowals of Trump, providing Trump a stamp of establishment approval and, in turn, offering voters a get-out-of-self-doubt-free card for supporting him. The Atlantic quotes one GOP staff member in the House who described McConnell’s “political genius” as, in part, “remaining silent in times of controversy.” A true profile in courage.
As his actions were undermining the integrity of our electoral process, McConnell was simultaneously enabling a demagogue to capitalize on the chaos encompassing it.
Throughout 2017, McConnell has maintained his willingness to cast aside democratic traditions as he deems convenient. Earlier this year, he changed the Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster and confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. More recently, McConnell dispatched with any final pretense of respect for “regular order” by repeatedly trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act with no semblance of open debate, committee hearings, opportunities for amendments, or any other input senators, including many of his own party. (This from the man who’d pledged two years earlier that “We need to get committees working again. … We need to open up … the legislative process in a way that allows more amendments from both sides.”)
Individually, each one of these acts over the past decade reflects a disdain for basic truth and fairness, an indifference to accusations of blatant hypocrisy, and a subservience of public service to political convenience. During Obama’s presidency, they showcase an obsession with undermining a president who, for any number of reasons, McConnell seemed to find illegitimate.
Each one of these acts over the past decade reflects a disdain for basic truth and fairness, an indifference to accusations of blatant hypocrisy, and a subservience of public service to political convenience.
Taken together, the toll of McConnell’s record is damning. His anti-democratic resume reflects a willingness to cast aside the value of norms, procedures, and precedents that have sustained American democracy . These steps have poisoned the Senate to the point where even some Republicans have lost faith in McConnell’s ability to respect the rules of the chamber or his willingness to speak honestly to them.
In doing so, McConnell has — subtly at first, and under glaring scrutiny more recently — undermined the strength of a constitutional order that depends on the trust and faith of the electorate to function.
This ignominious record begs the question: Why? What exactly does Mitch McConnell hope to achieve? Today, he seems to have few public policy goals, other than his party’s standard repertoire of cutting taxes, repealing Obamacare, and appointing conservative judges. His real interest appears primarily to be impeding Democratic success, even if he does so in a way that hurts his party’s agenda in the future.
One possible goal, of course, is power for power’s sake. The post of majority leader doesn’t just come with the ability to dictate the legislative calendar in the Senate and thus play an outsized role in shaping American governance; it also comes with all the trappings of a powerful office, from a full-time security detail to a beautiful office in the U.S. Capitol.
It doesn’t seem to be money that interests McConnell, who long ago could have left the Senate and earned many multiples of what he makes in government. A comfortable lobbying gig would conveniently spare him the relentless public attacks by a president of his own party and, more recently, the string of political defeats that he brought upon himself by accommodating Trump’s rise to the presidency and forcing votes on unpopular, undemocratic legislation.
What exactly is Mitch McConnell’s vision of public service? What purpose do his profound cynicism and deep hypocrisy serve, other than to further diminish our democratic institutions and destroy public confidence in the ability of government to function? Is it possible that what truly drives the Senate majority leader — one of the most powerful posts in the world — is a series of petty grievances against Democrats?
What exactly is Mitch McConnell’s vision of public service? What purpose do his profound cynicism and deep hypocrisy serve, other than to further diminish our democratic institutions and destroy public confidence in the ability of government to function?
It’s worth clarifying that the argument in this piece is not that Mitch McConnell is the only source of dysfunction in an otherwise well-intentioned political process. Nor is his party solely responsible for the status quo today — it was, after all, Democrats who eliminated of the Senate filibuster for lower court nominees in 2013 under then-majority leader Harry Reid.
Moreover, despite the bad faith with which most evidence suggests McConnell has long operated, Democrats should still seek work with him wherever possible to protect the Senate — the place of the “eloquent advocates, distinguished generals, wise magistrates, and statesmen of note” described by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1831 — and restore at least a little functionality to our democratic process. (As Andrew Sullivan wrote recently, fixing our politics will require “mutual forgiveness” because “no tribal conflict has ever been unwound without magnanimity.”)
The argument against McConnell isn’t a partisan one, but rather an individual one. Among the many guilty parties responsible for the race to the bottom that characterizes our politics today, Mitch McConnell as an individual has played a remarkably outsized role. On top of that, he’s managed to do so while, until recently, maintaining a public facade of a Senate institutionalist and, as Adam Jentleson has written, the false reputation of a “political super-genius.” (It’s all part of what Jentleson calls the “Myth of McConnell.”)
Among the many guilty parties responsible for the race to the bottom that characterizes our politics today, Mitch McConnell as an individual has played a remarkably outsized role.
It is, of course, impossible to know what drives Mitch McConnell. For someone who professes to cherish the traditions of the Senate and the concept of “regular order” as much as he does, the Senate majority leader has a deeply cynical way of showing it.
But regardless of his intentions, his actions have had real and profound effects. Last November, Americans learned that our country was far more vulnerable to a demagogic president than we’d thought or hoped. Yet as McConnell’s career shows, despite strong traditions and institutions that have helped sustain American democracy — and that, somehow, seem to be holding today — we were vulnerable to undemocratic threats long before Donald Trump descended into the presidential campaign.
It’s remarkable what one individual, operating quietly at the right place within the system at the right point in time, can accomplish. Today, that subtle threat may be just as dangerous as the more obvious one in the White House.
