Unlike a lot of conservatives gleefully cheering on Mitch McConnell’s announcement that he will step down as Senate Republican Leader in November, after the election, I actually paid a price for vocally opposing McConnell. In 2014, I used my platform at RedState to back Matt Bevin’s race against McConnell. I was one year into my contract at Fox News. Roger Ailes told me to stop bashing McConnell or stop going on Fox. I was sidelined at Fox for the next two years. And McConnell beat Bevin.
I learned Mitch McConnell does not care. He does not care because he was busy putting points on the board.
As conservative agitators, rarely were I and my side in the win column against McConnell. Much of the rage directed at McConnell since noon yesterday and before has a lot to do with that — McConnell kept winning, and he didn’t care.
McConnell did not care about my complaints or your complaints. He did not care about those who vilified him or his own popularity. He did not care that Republicans would attack him on the campaign trail and denounce him on TV. He did not care that Democrats made McConnell the most disliked national politician in America. Real Clear Politics’ political average for McConnell has him with a 21% national approval rating — lower than any other national political figure, including Kamala Harris.
But Mitch McConnell does not care. He is elected by the people of Kentucky who have been returning him to the Senate more than any other senator in the commonwealth’s 232 year history. He cares about Kentucky, not national opinion polls.
Mitch McConnell does not care that Republicans or Democrats dislike him.
McConnell not caring about those things made him dangerously successful at his job. He had to care about a majority of the Republicans in the United States Senate, not you or me.
As an appropriator, he knew how to cobble together deals and build coalitions. He took that skill to the Republican Leader’s office. He often sacrificed things we conservatives wanted to instead make life comfortable for Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, or any number of other liberal to moderate Republicans who sometimes then made deals that conservatives hated.
They kept McConnell in charge and, in turn, McConnell kept the GOP mostly in the majority and, through that, blocked Democrat judges and rapidly confirmed Republican judges.
Mitch McConnell did not care about your or my temper tantrums and demands because he has long understood that a Republican majority, for better or worse, had the power to block the administrative state and build a judiciary that has no term limits or elections for its members. He has cared very deeply about that.
Whether you or I care for McConnell does not matter. You can say any Republican would have done what McConnell did, but you would have to ignore a series of Republican Senate Leaders before McConnell who did not ram through judges at breakneck pace and wage jihad against bureaucratic appointees. McConnell was willing to cut the throats Trent Lott and Bill Frist would never dream of cutting. The populist bros like to mock the Marquess of Queensberry Rules they think everybody is playing by. McConnell pants’d the Marquess and gave him a swirly before the populist bros were out of diapers.
Because Mitch McConnell does not care about what others think, he was happy to be the bad guy and denied Merrick Garland even an examination. McConnell made himself the villain so other Republicans could denounce McConnell, play nice on television, and win re-election.
If you think other Republicans could have or would have done what McConnell did, you display your ignorance of what transpired behind closed doors to keep Jeff Flake of Arizona and Susan Collins of Maine onboard Bret Kavanaugh’s nomination. If you think any other Republican would have or could have done what McConnell did, you have no grasp of the Senate’s operating flow and how McConnell expedited and rammed through Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination in the waning days of Republican Senate control in 2020.
Any Republican President could have picked a Gorsuch, a Kavanaugh, or a Barrett. But neither a Frist nor a Lott would have moved heaven and earth to get them all expeditiously to the bench. McConnell did because he cared about that.
As McConnell winds down his tenure and, undoubtedly, his last term in the United States Senate with his health declining and his age advancing, Joe Biden should learn a lesson or two about stepping aside.
But also, as a long-time critic, I am an admirer from afar of a man I have never actually met or spoken to. He won. He kept on winning. He beat my friends. He and his loyal lieutenants ruthlessly advanced.
And what do we have to show for it?
The end of Roe v. Wade, a 6-3 United States Supreme Court, a Republican appointed majority in six of the Courts of Appeal, near parity in several more, the end of most gun control legislation, blocking the Paris Accord and climate change legislation, the Trump tax cuts, the death of the individual mandate, and an aggressive culling of regulations imposed by the Obama Administration at the end of his term.
You can say McConnell could have advanced conservative positions more. But he advanced an idea that I have frankly arrived at after observing the last two decades of the sh*t show that is Washington and particularly the last eight years.
I’d rather have a center-right United States Senate that has to deal with a Susan Collins or a Lisa Murkowski in the majority than have a progressive Senate run by Chuck Schumer. And McConnell worked very hard to deliver that and, frankly, probably would have preserved it further had Donald Trump not convinced 427,205 Republicans in Georgia not to go vote in runoffs in January of 2021. As much as I would prefer Washington do nothing, Washington is always going to do something. I often disagreed with much of what McConnell was willing to allow Washington to do, but often he was willing to allow advances through backroom deals that accomplished, in other ways, things conservatives wanted.
Conservatives have the luxury of cheering on McConnell’s retirement because they have so much of what McConnell cared about and very little memory of how much worse the Republicans who preceded him in that position were.
In the meantime, Roe is dead, and the legislature filibuster is alive. So, thanks, Mitch. You’ve earned your place in the history books as not just the longest-serving senator from the Commonwealth of Kentucky or the longest-serving Republican Leader in the Senate but also as a giant of the American political landscape.
