At the Federalist Society’s chichi gala in mid-November, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told a well-dressed and well-read crowd of jurists that he had sealed the fate of Merrick Garland from an unnamed island in the Caribbean.
On a Valentine’s Day jaunt with his wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, McConnell picked up his iPhone to the news of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia’s death earlier that morning. He immediately went back to his hotel room, flipped on the TV and considered his options.
McConnell asked himself: If a Republican president were to send a Supreme Court nominee to a Democrat-controlled Senate eight months before a presidential election, would the Democrats kill it? If McConnell was imagining his old foe Sen. Harry Reid in the role of leader, the thought experiment can’t have lasted long.
“I decided I needed to lay down a marker,” he told the Federalists, his low and lozenged voice echoing through Union Station’s Great Hall. So he made a quick call to allies and in barely an hour issued a public statement to the effect that no SCOTUS nominee would be considered before the electorate could weigh in.
He admitted, matter-of-factly, that he acted swiftly to prevent his caucus from going wobbly and misspeaking in the week before they were set to reconvene in Washington. And he added, in a candor bordering on guilelessness, that “luckily,” over the next few days he was able to find historical precedents that supported his argument, including similar vows made by Sens. Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer near the end of the administrations of Presidents George H.W. and George W. Bush, respectively.
In conversations with a number of political operatives and policy pros who have worked with, for, or around McConnell, this pragmatism — others call it instrumentalism, or worse — is a recurring theme, employed as much by those who came to praise McConnell and by those who came to bury him.
For years, the standard McConnell apologist line from observers on the right has been that his unrepentant opportunism has been key to eking out incremental conservative wins in a system rigged against them.
“I think McConnell is tremendously underrated. The right wing claims that he’s an establishment sellout, but he knows his caucus well, and always maximizes the conservative outcome relative to the votes he has,” says Avik Roy, who has served as a policy advisor to three Republican presidential campaigns.
Or, as one lobbyist who spent years working for congressional Republicans put it: “Mitch is generally out there hitting singles consistently. He rarely, if ever, strikes out.”
There’s more than a little whiff of pessimism in such appraisals, of course. If you believe conventional conservatives are engaged in what is essentially a rearguard action against populism and statism from both sides of the aisle, then to say McConnell gets what he can when he can is not to say he gets it very much or very often.
And Republicans with mixed or critical views of McConnell see his own limitations as a leader as a key part of the problem.
They cite a familiar dichotomy, framed in different ways: McConnell is a master tactician but lacks a grand strategy; he is a leader with the skill set of a whip, adept at herding his members but only secondarily interested in achieving big policy wins; he can identify consensus and get legislative products over the finish line, but is unable or unwilling to expand the scope of the possible.
Consider McConnell’s legislative record in the 115th Congress, under unified Republican government. He could not get a repeal of the Affordable Care Act over the line, even in diminished or amorphous form. While few conservative policy nobs hated the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that McConnell shepherded through Congress last year, almost none of them loved it. And with Republicans about to lose unified control of the federal government with the incoming class of House freshmen, McConnell has a modest agenda for the lame-duck session.
When Democrats lost the House eight years ago, they used their last few months in office to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” resolve the Bush tax cuts, ratify New START, and damn nearly pass the DREAM Act. This fall, by contrast, there will be no last bite at the Obamacare apple. No attempt at an immigration deal. No Hail Mary on entitlements at the end of Paul Ryan’s long twilight struggle.
Instead we’ll get the farm bill; maybe a shutdown, definitely a continuing resolution or two; and perhaps a few dollars lobbed at the president’s notional wall. There’s a chance there will be some sort of criminal-justice reform bill, but if there is it will be at McConnell’s forbearance, not his urging.
Why?
“McConnell will never be a transformative leader,” argues James Wallner, a scholar of legislative politics and senior fellow at the R Street Institute who worked at the Senate steering committee under Sens. Sessions, Lee, and Toomey.
“Don’t get me wrong. He’s very good at what he does. He approaches his job like a factory foreman. He sees the senate as a factory that produces widgets. And the way you produce a widget is to control the means of production. Which means you have to win elections. Then you get seats and you get gavels. So the electoral side of things takes precedence over the policy, because it is a means to an end.”
Indeed, even among some McConnell boosters, there is concern over what’s seen as his meddling in Republican primaries. To various degrees he worked against then-candidates Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Ben Sasse, and it is plausible to think his intervention in the primary to replace Jeff Sessions in Alabama on behalf of establishmentarian Luther Strange (and in opposition to conservative favorite Mo Brooks) inadvertently led to Roy Moore, who was accused of deviant sexual interest in minors, winning the nomination instead, and Republicans losing the seat.
But don’t expect McConnell to apologize. In the Obama era, McGuire says, he saw candidates such as Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock, Christine O’Donnell, and Sharron Angle lose winnable races, two of them in states McConnell believes should always have two Republican senators. Facing both his stiffest primary and general election opponents in 2014, McConnell declined to take money from the National Republican Senate Committee, keeping it in races he believed to be more competitive. And in 2015, his allies created the super PAC Republican Leadership Fund as a kind of provisional wing of the NRSC. He sees its unique influence, and 2018 victories in North Dakota, Missouri, and Indiana, as vindicating his involvement.
“There is absolutely no question that Sen. McConnell’s involvement in primaries is a good thing for the party,” Brian McGuire, McConnell’s chief of staff until 2017, tells me.
McConnell likes to joke — if you do this stuff for a living, you’ve heard this joke 85 times — that being majority leader is like being the groundskeeper at a graveyard: everybody’s under you but nobody’s listening.
But in fact, McConnell unquestionably has the respect and support of his caucus — he was just reelected as leader unanimously, cf. Nancy Pelosi — even if not their warm and fuzzy affection. He has few close pals among his colleagues (an exception is his lifelong friendship with Tennessee’s Sen. Lamar Alexander), but his lack of effectual enemies over the years is nevertheless remarkable, given that he recently surpassed Bob Dole as the longest serving Senate GOP Leader at 12 years and counting.
Former staffers attribute this to McConnell’s emphasis on protecting his members above all else. He’s known to be acutely aware of the political exigencies and vulnerabilities of every Republican senator, and willing to go to great — critics say counterproductive — lengths to insulate them from dangerous votes.
Colleagues say he shares credit, rarely holding solo press conferences or photo ops, but also readily absorbs blame — he took withering incoming fire from Democratic partisans on Garland, and his own president on healthcare repeal — without buckling.
Indeed, he possesses by all accounts a preternatural, chelonian ,evenness of temper. Though he is known to dislike certain of his colleagues, he never stoops to loose talk in public about them.
“I worked for him for a decade and never heard him raise his voice,” McGuire says. “He’s got complete control over his emotions.”
This Vulcanism can frustrate critics on the right, who’d like to see him take things more personally. It can also confound the press, who find it impossible to believe McConnell’s impassive stare doesn’t mask some deeper Shakespearean angst or mustache-twirling malevolence. While the Republicans were in the minority, the daily query from the Capitol Hill press was whether McConnell’s relationship with Reid was “strained.”
“It’s not a meaningful question to him,” McGuire says. “The press is preoccupied with personality conflicts. McConnell is utterly uninterested in those kinds of dynamics.”
A McClatchy story during the run-up to the midterm elections centered almost ruefully on the fact that McConnell hadn’t appeared as a major target of Democratic attack ads, because he failed to rile up focus groups the way Pelosi did.
And, of course, there’s “Cocaine Mitch.”
Originating in a bizarre and attenuated attack by a doomed yokel primary candidate in West Virginia (the details are profoundly unimportant), this sobriquet qua epithet remains jarring even in an age of jarring political discourse. But ours is a world in which you’re nothing if you’re not a meme, and Cocaine Mitch is huge with Twitter smart alecks. He has even been embraced by McConnell himself, who according to the New York Times’ Carl Hulse took for a time to using the moniker when answering his phone.
It works in part because in 2018, the archetype of the cartel kingpin isn’t the manic, paranoid Tony Montana brandishing a grenade launcher behind a mountain of white powder. It’s the laser-focus and know-how of a Walter White, the cool-eyed detachment and ruthlessness of a Gustavo Fring. Such characters, while monsters, also stand in stark relief to the ineffectual shrieking and misdemeanor assault that often counts as political discourse these days.
A tweet from right-wing super-troll Comfortably Smug, at the height of both Resistance harassment of Republican officials and the contentious Kavanaugh hearings, captures the contrast:
“Shout-out to commies who think Cocaine Mitch gives a [explitive] about you shouting at him on video for retweets. He’s about to put another conservative on the Supreme Court. Your tears sustain him.”
And that’s what Republicans will get from Cocaine Mitch in the lame duck in lieu of major legislation: Conservative judges. A whole mess of conservative judges.
Some in the MAGA right deride this singular focus, complaining that, as one syndicated writer put it, McConnell is happy to “spend the next two years cheerfully functioning as the Human Resources office for the White House judicial nomination team.”
But McConnell himself has called the record-breaking judge-a-palooza of the last two years “the most important thing I have ever had the opportunity to be a part of,” adding that by comparison “everything else we [in the Senate] do is transitory.”
Perhaps the more sobering reality is McConnell realizes that in 2018, there isn’t much else Congress is willing to do anyway. It has over the decades delegated vast authority to the Executive and the administrative state. It is congenitally incapable, on either side, of overcoming inertia on spending or debt. And its members seem to be motivated entirely by their personal brands and cable news hits.
Maybe McConnell’s modest portfolio is thus what’s at the other end of his reputation during the Obama years as an artiste of obstruction. Without the power to effect meaningful policy, McConnell consecrated himself to impeding Democratic legislation and denying it legitimizing votes, and even created a kind of shadow government inside Obama’s executive by taking dozens of regulatory positions often reserved, as a matter of statutory deference, for friends and boosters of the Senate minority leader, and instead staffing them with highly capable conservative sleeper agents.
Maybe forsaking all else to remake the judiciary is what that strategy looks like in the majority.
Conservative lawyer and columnist Dan McLaughlin sums up this woeful thesis. McConnell, he says, “grasped that Congress is no longer a legislature. It can’t make laws, and it can’t decide what things to spend money on. What it can do is staff the branches of government that still exercise power.”
Back at the Federalist Society dinner, McConnell unapologetically made the case that the “advise and consent” clause in the Constitution means whatever the Senate thinks it means and his advice to those hoping that the judicial confirmation process will get better was “don’t hold your breath.” To be sure, he argued that this sorry state was ushered in by borking, by the Clarence Thomas hearings and the treatment of Miguel Estrada, by the goonish reign of Harry Reid, who had already nixed the 60-vote threshold for lower court nominees in November 2013. But his unmistakable point was that confirming judges is now, and irrevocably will be, an explicitly politicized and political process. He seemed to say there is no going back.
The Federalist Society’s enthusiastic response suggests that they are with him, ride or die. Indeed, with the galvanizing effect of the Kavanaugh confirmation and the successful weathering of the midterm “wave”, McConnell seems to be a rare area of consensus among many disparate GOP factions. That includes the president, who recently called McConnell no less than “the greatest [Senate majority] leader in history.”
“They weren’t on the best terms last August after Obamacare debacle,” McGuire says of McConnell’s relationship with the president, “but they’ve more than recovered,” in large part due to McConnell’s success in brute-forcing nominees through Democratic obstruction.
“McConnell uses the players he’s got.”
Daniel Foster is a contributing editor at National Review.
