Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been in Congress since 1984 and served with four Republican presidents: Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. He believes the past two years were “the best two years right of center in the 34 years that I’ve been here.”
Republicans weren’t “in a totally dominant position, but even with a very narrow majority we fundamentally moved the country right of center in every way that we could for two solid years,” McConnell says.
The 2016 election gave the GOP control of the presidency, Senate, and House. This has happened only 20 times in the past 100 years, and Republicans usually failed to respond aggressively.
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This time, they moved quickly “to take advantage of this rare opportunity when all the pieces are in place,” McConnell told me. They confirmed 84 federal judges, nearly all conservatives, including two Supreme Court justices. They passed the biggest tax reform bill in decades and a defense buildup. And they unleashed a wave of deregulation.
McConnell didn’t expect so much success, but felt the aims of the GOP majority were easy to explain.
“If you feel that America should have a strong national defense, in spite of what the president frequently says that seems contrary to that, look at what we’ve done, the biggest year-over-year defense buildup since the Bush years, when we were in middle of a couple wars,” McConnell says.
President Reagan “would have been proud of that,” McConnell says. Indeed, what Republicans accomplished in Reagan’s first two years was almost as impressive as what was done in Trump’s. But on tax reform, what Republicans achieved in 2017 was better than the measure passed in Reagan’s second term. This, too, was unexpected. The Reagan bill in 1986 was bipartisan — it passed 96-3 — while “we were able to kind of do it our way” 31 years later.
No Democrat in the Senate or the House voted for the tax bill. They were held back by their strategy of blanket resistance to Trump. In effect, they played into GOP hands. Republican-style tax reform wasn’t weakened by compromise with Democrats.
“This is much better,” McConnell says, especially because “those opportunities are not going to be available to us in divided government” in the new Congress.
“That’s why I look back with a lot of pride to this particular two years because I think we took full advantage of having one of those periods that have only come about a fifth of the time over the last 100 years to have all three power centers,” he says.
Without all three, the Conservative Review Act is irrelevant, for example. It allows regulations issued late in the life of an administration to be nullified. It had been invoked only once. “Clinton issued ergonomic rules on the way out the door,” and “we undid it.” That was in 2001.
McConnell hadn’t forgotten it. Republicans have now invoked it 16 times. Among other things, they made regulations affecting small banks and credit unions less onerous.
The most glamorous breakthrough has been in the confirmation of conservative judges. The White House came up with a list of possible judges, and Steve Bannon, then a Trump adviser, suggested the president promise to pick nominees for the federal judiciary from that group. And Trump has been doing just that with these lifetime appointments.
“This is long-lasting stuff,” McConnell says. “This is not going to go away the next time the political winds shift and they come in and start centralizing everything all over again.” By “they,” he means Democrats.
And while Democrats captured the House in the midterm election, the Senate alone confirms judges by a simple majority vote. Republicans, who were down to 50 senators when John McCain died, have a 53-47 majority thanks to midterm election victories.
But Republicans will still be in what McConnell calls the “personnel business” in Washington. “We’re just going to keep confirming judges,” he says. “Over and over and over again for two more years.”
Republicans have never elected more than 55 senators in the past 100 years. They’ve never achieved Senate dominance. Democrats have — in the days of the New Deal, the Great Society, and during President Barack Obama’s first two years in office.
McConnell is not given to boasting. He merely says he’s “really proud” of what Republicans “squeezed” out of their slim majority. He should be.
Fred Barnes was a founder and executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
