McConnell sits legs-crossed and expressionless on the platform, dressed down in a pair of pressed jeans, a pink button-down, and red socks. And one tick after the emcee starts to introduce him, a clamor rises up that no human voice could pierce — the MC whoop of ancient blood battles about to commence, drowning out McConnell as he tries to speak. But the fury of the crowd has rattled him.
After a few more speakers, McConnell makes a stealthy exit out the back, avoiding reporters and detractors to speed back to Louisville. But this summer, trouble follows him everywhere — and the aftermath of Fancy Farm will only add to his woes. This is the day of the El Paso massacre, and the archprotector and benefactor of the NRA will soon be besieged with calls to bring the Senate back into session to pass background checks and a red-flag law.
The next morning, to add injury to insult, McConnell will take a tumble and fracture his shoulder on his patio. For so many years, McConnell has seemed maddeningly invincible.
But now, just a few years after achieving his lifelong goal of becoming Senate majority leader, it appears that every political sin the man has committed on his relentless march to power is coming back to haunt him at once. Unlike Trump, however, McConnell, 77, has always been laser-focused on politics. At age 22, when he interned for Sen.
Most senators dream of the White House; all McConnell ever wanted was that gavel, that particular form of power. His first taste of political triumph came at an even younger age. And the way he managed it would set the tone for everything that came later.
I was prepared to ask for their vote using the only tool in my arsenal, the one thing teenagers most desire. McConnell ran a relentless campaign and vanquished his well-liked opponent. As an undergraduate at the University of Louisville, and a law student at the University of Kentucky, McConnell would further hone his skills in winning student-body presidencies.
In the s, he worked as an intern to Kentucky Rep. Gene Snyder, a hardcore segregationist. Young Mitch was gung-ho for civil rights. In , while an undergraduate, McConnell spoke at a university rally, urging students to join Martin Luther King Jr. But for the first time, he also showed how willing he would be to cast aside principles. McConnell was never much good when it came to mixing with folks on the campaign trail, but he had no compunction about asking big donors for money.
With their help, McConnell zeroed in on the vulnerabilities of his opponent, Todd Hollenbach. He blew up some minor ethical lapses into darkly ominous controversies. But it worked. McConnell won by six percentage points, and then proceeded to forget about his pro-labor promises once in office.
It was already becoming clear that, in the political world of Mitch McConnell, convictions and campaign pledges were fungible things, easily tossed aside. Throughout his career, as the Republican Party veered right, and then further right, McConnell moved with it.
Even the young McConnell was a stiffly formal, pokerfaced presence in public. He understands the mechanics of politics. All those polls you see now where he has a low approval rating? In , when McConnell first ran for Senate, he learned the politics of destruction at the hands of a master.
His challenge to Sen. The future founder and CEO of Fox News had already established his well-earned reputation for flaunting the truth and grabbing the opposition by the jugular while working for Nixon and Reagan. For McConnell, he cooked up an ad that would become a classic of the genre.
In fact, as Newsweek reported, Huddleston had made 94 percent of Senate votes. McConnell squeaked into the Senate by the narrowest of victories — 5, votes statewide, a less-than-one-percent margin. He arrived in Washington as the only Republican to unseat a Democrat in the Senate that year. From cynically depriving Merrick Garland of a confirmation vote for a seat on the Supreme Court to turning the Senate into a no-dissent rubber stamp for a Republican president, McConnell symbolizes the vicious partisanship of a dismal decade.
None of this is designed as an argument for the presidential greatness of Barack Obama , no matter how superior he may have been to his Republican predecessor and successor.
Too often, Obama used his forceful intellect as an excuse for dynamic inaction. Instead, Obama kept painting red lines and then allowing Syria to defiantly stomp on them. Maybe nothing could have halted the Syrian refugee crisis that enflamed xenophobic passions in Europe and undermined democracy in former Soviet bloc nations like Hungary and Poland.
It is with careful restraint that I have written more than half a column on the decade without mentioning Donald Trump. Other than lowering taxes for the super-wealthy and gutting government regulation, every principle that once defined the GOP has been repudiated by Trump and his congressional enablers. For the last three years, I have been baffled about why Republicans on Capitol Hill have been so eager to bow and scrape before Trump.
Is fear of being challenged in a primary or being the target of vicious tweets so powerful that it creates a silence that Mafia bosses might envy?
That Trump is not an aberration, but a prophet of the depths to which American democracy has permanently descended. Candidates like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and, to a lesser degree, Massachusetts Sen.
McConnell was born in the Muscle Shoals region of Alabama in When he was in middle school, his father transferred jobs, and the family relocated to Louisville.
A recent biography of McConnell describes him, already fully recognizable as a high-school freshman, plotting a successful campaign to win the student-body presidency in his junior year.
McConnell has always been a Republican, though not the kind for whom ideology holds any great importance. What he believes in is winning. In , he won public office for the first time, becoming a Jefferson County judge—an important administrative post—in what was then the most expensive race in Louisville political history. McConnell came away convinced that Republicans could prevail so long as they were able to outspend their opponents, a lesson he has carried throughout his career.
At the time, McCain was still beloved by the press corps, and the cause of ridding politics of the corrupting influence of money had both a virtue and a momentum that ensured steady coverage.
Charmless and dour, McConnell was an irresistible villain. The experience cannot have been pleasant, even for him. In addition to facing public scorn, he often had to operate without the support of his party leadership a Republican president, George W. Bush, would eventually sign campaign-finance reform into law.
This forced him to rely on procedural maneuvers to block objectionable legislation. It was then that McConnell developed many of the strategies he would later employ against the Obama administration. In , a time of comparatively civil interparty relations, when Democrats still controlled the White House and Congress, McConnell, trying to stop a reform bill that provided public financing for congressional races and had already passed both houses, discovered from the secretary of the Senate that the rules permitted a filibuster on the motion referring the bill to the House-Senate conference committee that would iron out the differences.
But she advised him against trying, since no one ever had before. McConnell ignored her and succeeded, blocking the reform. Six weeks later, the Republicans captured the House and Senate. When Barack Obama won the presidency, and the Republicans were reduced to a rump minority, McConnell was less rattled than just about any other Republican. He also may have foreseen difficulty for his friend in a White House that he fully intended to frustrate. McConnell called Obama on election night to congratulate him and received a call back two days later, as he stood in the cereal aisle of a Kroger supermarket in Louisville.
Several people close to McConnell suggested that there was a real basis afterward for thinking they might work together. His firm position is that the White House never had any interest in getting input from the minority, and marched off toward its liberal utopia, leaving Republicans no choice but to obstruct.
They went about this by escalating an arms race that had been building in the Senate for the better part of a decade: the increasingly aggressive use of rules and procedures by successive minorities to frustrate the will of the majority.
The very first bill to be considered on the Senate floor in the th Congress, in early January of , before Obama was even inaugurated, was the Public Land Management Act, a sweeping conservation measure with broad bipartisan support that would protect 2 million acres of parks and wilderness in nine states.
The Republicans filibustered, forcing a series of votes and requiring a weekend session to finish. The bill eventually passed, 77— The same tactics were deployed against most other initiatives, and expanded into new realms. Under McConnell, Republicans have also filibustered noncontroversial nominees, many later confirmed unanimously.
They have filibustered even nominees put forward by Republican senators, and required separate votes for district-court judges, who used to be confirmed in groups as a matter of routine. McConnell bet correctly that he would pay no political price for this type of obstruction, because the White House and the media would be preoccupied with other things—things even harder to accomplish as the Senate calendar filled up. On Monday, you file cloture on a motion to proceed for a vote on Wednesday.
Assuming you get it, your opponents are allowed 30 hours of debate post-cloture on the motion to proceed. More difficult was figuring out how to go up against the president himself. From the outset, McConnell believed there would be opportunities for political arbitrage when the White House overreached.
A voracious consumer of polling data, he was persuaded that although Obama and the Democrats had won handily, independent voters were not inclined to support liberal policies. Eight years of one person is just too much. McConnell initially had to struggle for purchase. Somewhat unusually, the campaign was not orchestrated from some smoke-filled room but on the Senate floor itself.
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