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November 12, 2024 - 8:00pm
At the tender age of 82, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell is throwing in the towel. While he plans to serve out his current term in office, which ends in 2027, someone else will have to pick up the leadership baton during Donald Trump’s upcoming presidential term. A secret ballot tomorrow will decide who gets to continue the Kentucky Senator’s legacy.
In some ways, McConnell’s political career is impressive. He is, after all, the longest-serving Senate party leader in nearly 250 years of American history, and many people on Capitol Hill and in America’s political class have only good things to say about him, including fellow octogenarian Joe Biden.
From another angle, though, McConnell’s legacy appears bleak. He remains unpopular among the American population at large, with a bare majority of his own party’s voters having a somewhat favourable opinion of him. While the proximate cause of his decision to step down can be found in the growing split between the old “Reaganite” wing of the GOP and the newer, “America First” wing, Republican intra-party drama is perhaps the least important factor when considering the arc of McConnell’s falling star.
In truth, together with Congressional luminaries such as Nancy Pelosi and Biden himself, McConnell is part of an exclusive slice of America’s political elite. Like them, he first entered Congress before a majority of today’s Americans were even born. If he succeeds in serving out his current senatorial term, McConnell will end his stay in the US Senate after 42 years of service. There are two ways to interpret such a long term in office: either as a testament to McConnell’s great skills as a politician and a statesman, or as an indictment of an increasingly gerontocratic and dysfunctional political class.
If one takes a step back and considers where America is at present, one of these interpretations becomes far more plausible than the other. When McConnell entered the Senate, the US was united, prosperous, and close to winning the Cold War. Today, the country is ruinously indebted, internally divided, and facing military overstretch and exhaustion abroad. The percentage of the American population with a positive job approval of Congress hovers around 16% — only slightly above the proportion who say they have personally seen, interacted with, or been abducted by a UFO.
There’s already quite a lot of talk about battle lines being drawn between “pro-MAGA” and “anti-MAGA” candidates battling it out in Congress for the honour of becoming the new Senate leader. No doubt there are still those who think that the big problem here is McConnell himself, or his politics. In his absence, it is surely important to find a replacement with the “right” political opinions (whatever those are is an open question), isn’t it?
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SubscribeAs a former Kentuckian I can say that Mitch ran at least his last two campaigns by fear mongering. No Republican challenger would have the heft to beat him – he held too many chits on too many people – and the Democrats put up less than able opponents.
He has stayed at the dance far too long for the good of the country. But I don’t know that in this last decade or so the good of the nation would beat out lining his and his wife’s pockets.
Term limits are long overdue.
I am a foreigner, and an interested observer of American politics.
When Mr. Kyeyune talked about ‘gerontocratic and dysfunctional’ politicians, I immediately thought of Strom Thurmond. By comparison, he makes Senator McConnell look like a spring chicken. He was a bitter opponent of civil rights, and in the process helped to turn the South into a Republican fortress.
So how would American readers compare the careers of Senators Thurmond and McConnell?
Thurmond changed his tune later on, if not, perhaps, his beliefs. He’s in a place with others who continued to succeed in elective office after like racist bent. Senator Byrd of West Virginia was a member of the Ku Klux Klan early on, and was a powerful member of the Democratic Party until his death. Senator Fulbright of Arkansas voted for segregation while simultaneously opposing the Vietnam War.
McConnell isn’t similar except in age. Senator Grassley of Iowa is also in his eighties and like McConnell, continues to be a force. Thurmond was merely old and in office when he died.
Thurmond will always be associated with his opposition to desegregation and the civil rights movement. He went so far as to leave the Democratic ticket in 1948 over this issue and run as an independent which was dubbed the “Dixiecrat” ticket. He later defected to the Republican party when it became clear the former segregationists could still wield some influence and power there. He’s part of the reason the Republicans became the party of perceived racism despite being the party that originally abolished slavery.
McConnell was much less controversial. He was less a firebrand and more a backroom dealer, which is part of the reason he’s not well liked by today’s electorate. He didn’t enter the Senate until the 80s, long after the civil rights movement was over. He was part of the process of converting his home state of Kentucky from a Democratic stronghold to the deep red state it is now. He was a fixture throughout the unipolar moment and will, fairly or unfairly, probably be associated with the failures of the globalist era. He hung onto power far too long. His home state defied him by picking the Libertarian Rand Paul over his hand picked choice in the Republican primaries when Kentucky’s other Republican Senator retired in 2010. That probably should have been the warning sign that the electorate was changing and it was time for him to move on, but he hung on to his Senatorial power and successful placed himself squarely in the way of the agendas of three consecutive Presidents. He was an obstructionist towards Obama, Biden, and much of the populist portions of Donald Trump’s agenda, and that’s probably how he will be remembered, as an obstacle to change, a stubborn old man from a bygone era who clung to power longer than was good for him or anyone else. It’s a shame in some ways because he was a very competent politician who understood the system and exercised great skill in manipulating the Senate and its rules. On the other hand, he put that skill to use in defending a dying worldview and a version of America that no longer exists.
Rand Paul by the way has gone on to become the de facto leader of the libertarian wing of the Republican party, a strong opponent of the neocons, a backer of Donald Trump against the establishment’s attempts to retake the party, an overall thorn in the side of traditional Republicans and a bit of a maverick. He declared himself “Never Nikki” this past election cycle during the primaries and is one of the more popular anti-establishment figures in the party. I would not be shocked to see him get a minor cabinet appointment, assuming he wants one, as a political reward for ensuring the support of his faction of the party.
I think that the OP here is being too hard on Mitch McConnell, who has actually shown himself to be a remarkably competent politician given the unique, and unenviable, challenges of the time in which he lived.
Obviously, the US Senate has problems. It’s an elderly, sclerotic body that’s rarely capable of the sort of decisive action that a legislative chamber needs. And yet, all of this started well before 2007, when McConnell actually became a party leader. Congress as a whole has been losing power since the 1960s, when the Warren Court and the growing bureaucracy succeeded in wresting most of the de facto legislative power away from elected officials. Nor is McConnell responsible for the problems with seniority or the committee system, etc.
If anything, McConnell has made the Senate (and elected legislatures in general) much more powerful, by helping Donald Trump move the federal judiciary to the right, including getting a conservative majority on the Supreme Court. (Obviously Trump himself takes most of the credit here, but he doesn’t deserve to; I’ve written before about how Trump has the attention span of a child and how judicial appointments are one of the few things he succeeded at, largely because more disciplined people like McConnell were steering him in the right direction).
Now that Trump’s Court has overturned Roe v. Wade and the Chevron doctrine, a lot more of America’s important legislative questions will be decided by Congress (and state legislatures) in the first place. While it will take further reforms (to seniority, committees, the filibuster, etc.) to actually get the Senate up to the challenge of governing America, McConnell still played an important role in getting things started, and he can’t be blamed for leaving much of the task to others.