Mitch McConnell Played a Long Game:
New Book Tells Absorbing if One-Sided Story
As Mitch McConnell, former Senate Republican party leader, celebrates delivery of a two-seat majority to the incoming leader, John Thune, it is time to reflect on McConnell’s trials and triumphs, paying special attention to his role in the confirmation of a trio of justices to the Supreme Court.
Two years ago, McConnell became the longest-serving party leader in Senate history, and he continued in office for two more. Yet Republicans controlled the Senate and White House for only six of those twenty-four years, four by the side of an irascible president. Republican splits and factions were so divisive during this period that party leadership in the House of Representatives shifted among four of its members. Throughout, McConnell retained the loyalty of his Senate colleagues even though he usually had little but compromises to dispense.
McConnell nonetheless acted decisively, however, when the Senate considered confirmation of lifetime appointments to the federal judiciary, actions of long-lasting import. By blocking progressives and confirming conservatives, McConnell leaves a legacy stretching deep into the second quarter of the 21st Century
How that happened is told in a just released book written by Michael Tackett, deputy chief of Associated Press’s Washington Bureau and former reporter for the New York Times and the Washington Post. The title conveys its message: The Price of Power: How Mitch McConnell Mastered the Senate, Changed America, and Lost his Party. Unfortunately, none of the phrases come close to telling the truth. In fact, the Republican party leader pays no political or personal price other than to suffer the agonies of aging; far from mastering the upper chamber, he constantly struggles to find compromises members can agree upon; his long-term impact on America has been to slow, not accelerate, the pace of change; and, rather than losing his party, he retires triumphantly, regaining a Republican majority in the Senate and handing responsibility of leadership over to a like-minded Senator whose career he had promoted. But if readers ignore the biases and misinterpretations, they can learn much about the life of the most influential non-presidential Republican officeholder of the past quarter century.
The initial chapters are easily the best, mainly because McConnell gave Tabbert full access to his private papers. McConnell was born a war-time baby in 1942 in Five Points, Alabama, not much more than a wide spot at the intersection of some country roads. His father, an excellent marksman, marched as a frontline scout from La Havre, France to Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, while his mother provided intense, loving care needed to moderate the crippling effects of polio that struck the child at the age of two. It was Mitch’s good fortune that Five Points was within an hour’s drive of a medical center in Warm Springs Georgia, where Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been well-treated for the same affliction. Mitch’s recovery was remarkable, though it left a disability that precluded him from participation in the Vietnam conflict and would affect his step late in life. The struggle may be the source of McConnell’s quiet demeanor, sensitivity to the concerns of colleagues, and self-control in moments of crisis.
Mitch regained his strength so completely he was able to pitch for his baseball team in Augusta, Georgia and later for a community team in Louisville, Kentucky, when his father’s promotion at Dupont necessitated a family move. Although Mitch entered high school in the middle of the year as an outsider, by the time he finished his junior year he had been elected student-body president, principally by winning the backing of the school’s top athletes and cheerleaders. In his opening speech, Mitch told the organization its purpose “is to foster such a loyal, cooperative spirit . . .that . . . students will assume all responsibility outside of the classroom, thereby practicing citizenship in preparation for participation in city, state, and national affairs.”
Practicing what he preached, McConnell was elected student body president at the University of Louisville and head of the student association at University of Kentucky’s law school. Ten years later, he became an elected judge, the only Republican official in a county controlled by Democrats. In 1984, he rode on Ronald Reagan’s coattails into the U. S. Senate at the age of 42. Like Reagan, McConnell supported a strong national defense abroad and limits on government spending. But like Henry Clay, Kentucky’s greatest public figure, he believed in consensus and compromise. The road he traveled was just to the right of the middle.
Once in the Senate, McConnell treaded patiently over the course of twenty-four years through the chamber’s byzantine labyrinth until he was finally elected party leader in 2008—just when the job became borderline worthless in the wake of disastrous elections in the middle of George W. Bush’s second term. Two years later McConnell was over-shadowed by Barack Obama and an overwhelmingly large Democratic majority on Capitol Hill. He battled unsuccessfully against the Affordable Care Act and tax increases on businesses and high-income citizens. However, he had some success at preventing confirmation of progressive judicial nominations by threatening filibusters that could only be terminated by a super-majority of 60 votes. Even that power was stripped from the Republican minority in 2014, when Democrats, exercising what was known as the “nuclear” option, changed cloture rules so that a majority could end filibusters on all but Supreme Court nominations. At the time, McConnell warned Democrats that every action provokes a response, saying it would not be long before they would regret the change.
His prophecy was soon fulfilled. Obama had his own disastrous mid-term election, and McConnell finally became Senate majority leader. On February 13, 2016, Antonin Scalia died while traveling abroad. McConnell, arriving in Bermuda with his second wife, Elaine Chao, received an email reporting the news as he walked off an airplane. “Awful. We need to get a statement out,” he emailed back. “The American people should have a voice in the selection of the next Supreme Court Justice.” Until then, no hearings shall be held, no committee votes taken, no motion shall appear on the floor of the Senate chamber, he declared.
McConnell’s legislative brain had grasped the situation in a flash. Any delay would give Donald Trump or some other presidential candidate the chance to urge a course of action for which McConnell was willing to take the blame. If the burden fell directly on his shoulders, Republican Senators running for re-election would not be forced to take a stand: “I was prepared to take the heat for the process in order to protect my members,” he privately told Tabbert.
McConnell was not the first to question Supreme Court confirmations in election years. In 2007, New York Senator Chuck Schumer promised, “I shall recommend to my colleagues that we should not confirm a Supreme Court nominee [until the next election] except in extraordinary circumstances.” Some years earlier, Senator Joe Biden, chair of the Judiciary Committee, made it clear that “it is my view that . . . the Senate Judiciary Committee should seriously consider not scheduling confirmation hearings on the nomination [of a Justice] until after the political season is over.”
Democrats nevertheless expressed fury at the lack of hearings on the nomination of Merrick Garland to fill the court vacancy. Although a few Republican Senators also wanted a vote, McConnell’s control of the senate agenda kept the issue from coming to the floor. Instead, the 2016 election was held, Trump won, and McConnell persuaded the newly elected president to appoint Neil Gorsuch, a respected jurist known for his Scalia-like approach to constitutional law.
A filibuster could still have blocked the appointment, so McConnell extended the nuclear option to Supreme Court nominees, thereby hoisting Democrats on their own petard. A unified Republican coalition, together with a sprinkling of Democrats, voted for confirmation.
Battles over confirmation continued when Justice Anthony Kennedy retired, and Trump nominated as his replacement Brett Kavanaugh, an appeals court judge who had clerked for Kennedy. It was expected to be a simple process of replacing one moderate Republican with another, but it turned into a firestorm when Democrats based their call for his rejection on an accusation by a woman who said she had been sexually harassed at a high school party the nominee had attended. In the absence of any contemporaneous documentation, McConnell managed to hold his fellow senate Republicans together, securing the nomination on a party-line vote.
McConnell pulled off a hat trick when he persuaded Trump to nominate Amy Barrett, an appeals court judge who had taught at Notre Dame, to replace the liberal icon, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died just months before the 2020 election. To Democratic insistence that a precedent had been set forbidding confirmation on the eve of an election, McConnell replied that it “depends on who controls the Senate.” If it is the party of the president, confirmation is appropriate, he said. The logic is more political than substantive, though the same logic would very likely have been relied upon had the shoe been on the other foot. Most important, McConnell convinced every Republican but one that the composition of the court was more important than procedural niceties.
McConnell’s success at shaping the composition of the Supreme Court earns him nothing but scorn from Tabbert, but, as the book nears its end, the author discovers the Kentucky Senator is principled after all. When Trump seeks to overturn the results of the 2020 election and a crowd breaks into the Capitol on January 6, McConnell resists the president in every possible way. His wife, Chao, now the Secretary of Transportation, resigns immediately. McConnell’s staff provides Tabbert with eye-witness material for his fast-paced, gripping account of this dramatic event.
Given McConnell’s stalwart defense of constitutional procedures, it comes as a shock, just a few pages later, to read that he “only wanted power for the sake of power, . . . it was both his means and his end. . . As he accrued power in the Senate, he wielded it mightily, and at times ruthlessly, and in the process brought far-reaching and at times deleterious change not only to the institution he cherished but also to the country.” It’s hard to square that harsh conclusion against the facts the reader has been told.
McConnell’s contributions are large, and a distinguished biography will tell the story when enough time has passed to provide distance from the fractious first decades of the 21st Century. Tabbert’s attempt contains material the future biographer will find useful, but the author lacks his subject’s generosity of spirit.
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Paul E. Peterson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and a professor of government at Harvard University.