“His Partisanship Ultimately Overwhelmed His Patriotism-- If That Even Ever Existed”
On February 20— my birthday and Mitch McConnell’s birthday— Statista happened to publish a new survey showing how Americans view longtime GOP Senate leader McConnell. It was pretty dismal. In fact, McConnell is the most disliked of any partisan leader in the country.
A week later, YouGov published an interactive graphic showing McConnell’s favorability with registered voters over time, starting in 2017. The reason his numbers are so low is because Republican voters dislike him (58.6%) nearly as much as Democratic voters (69.6%) do— and because independent voters (74.6%) really detest him.
Last year, The Hill noted that McConnell is “America’s least popular senator by a wide margin,” based on a Morning Consult Poll showing him with a 28% approval rating, nowhere near the unfavorable ratings of the only other senators with ratings below 50%:
Yet he has been an extremely powerful force in DC politics for decades. Yesterday, Politico asked “scores of top political thinkers and congressional insiders” Hero or Villain? Predictably, Democratic insiders were disparaging and GOP insiders lauded him. What emerged is not pretty— a small, vicious man willing to put party above country in such a way as to endanger the very foundations of the country he pretends to care about.
Jim Manley, Harry Reid’s former spokesman talked about the beginning of the Obama presidency, reminding Politico readers how McConnell “intended to put raw political power over the good of the country, and do all he could, in his own words, to make Barack Obama ‘a one-term president.’ And the way that he did that was using the filibuster to grind the Senate to a halt. Use of the filibuster exploded under McConnell and over the next eight years, all but the most routine pieces of legislation were subject to a Republican filibuster. What was once a rarely used procedure became his weapon of choice to try and destroy the president. Don’t get me started about Merrick Garland. Senator McConnell made up a rule so he could deny Obama the chance to have an up-or-down vote on his choice for the Supreme Court. Senator McConnell should be remembered as the leader who is largely responsible for breaking the Senate— probably beyond repair.”
Geoffrey Kabaservice is the director of political studies at the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C., as well as the author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party. “When McConnell first ran for political office,” recalled Kabaservice, “he presented himself as a Republican in the moderate model: a pragmatist whose interest in building a big-tent party found expression in pro-civil rights, pro-labor, and even pro-choice stances. But McConnell didn’t merely shift rightward once he reached the Senate in 1985. His determination to put party (and his own power) over country undermined the Senate’s bipartisanship and institutional effectiveness, which fed the partisanship and polarization that ultimately destroyed the GOP as a responsible, governing-minded party. McConnell never had any illusions about Donald Trump or the dangers that his populism presented to America’s domestic stability and responsibility for upholding the post-World War II global order. But McConnell’s infamous 2010 statement that, ‘The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,’ marked the win-at-all-costs mentality that eventually paved the way for Trump’s domination of the GOP. McConnell’s decision not to convict Trump after Jan. 6 was merely one more instance in which he knew better but went along anyway. The Republican Party will miss McConnell’s awesome leadership effectiveness and the largely unseen ways in which he was willing to sacrifice his popularity in order to keep populist passions from breaking his conference apart. But his refusal to use his power for the greater good will stand as an object lesson in how putting party above country ultimately damages both.”
Joanne Freeman is a Yale history professor: “We live in an era that has brutally exposed the fragility of political (and even personal) norms that fundamentally shape our coming together as a people and a nation joined by a constitutional pact, and installed in their stead an utter lack of good-faith politicking. McConnell taught that lesson repeatedly, persistently, even joyfully, stabbing at democracy and enabling authoritarianism in the process. That has been his impact. That will be his legacy.”
Even creepier, more overtly disgusting and perhaps even more willing to break apart our country than McConnell, was thankfully less effective GOP hack and disgraced former Speaker, Newt Gingrich. He lauded McConnell as “a towering giant in the U.S. Senate,” but offered accomplishments that are generally seen as negative. Another conservative, Charlie Sykes, wrote that “the defining moment of his long career is likely to be his decision to save Trump from conviction by the Senate in February 2021. After the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, McConnell described Trump as ‘practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day. Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police,’ he declared. ‘They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the Speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the vice president. They did this because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth— because he was angry he’d lost an election.’ For a few days it seemed possible that McConnell himself would vote to convict, and that he might bring along enough of his colleagues to muster the 67 votes that would have made Trump forever ineligible for the presidency. But in the end, McConnell argued that Trump’s guilt was ‘moot,’ because he was no longer in office and was therefore, ‘constitutionally not eligible for conviction.’ If McConnell had pulled the trigger, there would have been intense blowback from the MAGA wing of his party, but Trump would no longer have been able to use the Big Lie to catapult himself back into power. Instead, Trump quickly reasserted his absolute control of the GOP. By the time McConnell announced that he was stepping down, the party had been thoroughly Trumpified, principled conservatives had been exiled and Republicans had accepted Trump’s historical revisionism about the attack on the Capitol. And it is McConnell’s SCOTUS that may ultimately save Trump from accountability through its delays. No matter the outcome of the 2024 election, we will live with the consequences of McConnell’s decision for decades.”
Matt Glassman, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute and a former analyst at the Congressional Research Service, wrote that “McConnell’s defining contribution was his strategic belief that hardball opposition politics would not be punished by voters. This wasn’t obvious in the mid aughts. But McConnell was right, and this ushered in the age of the 60-vote Senate, where the minority routinely filibustered everything, on both the legislative and executive calendars. In turn, this led to the 2013 and 2017 nuking of the filibuster for nominations, as well as the tightening of leadership control of the Senate floor, as cloture was preemptively filed and the amendment-tree filled on every bill, precluding both minority chicanery but also open deliberation. Leader McConnell didn’t invent Senate hardball, but he more than anyone created the Senate of today. Sitting alongside this was McConnell’s basically amoral approach to politics. He has policy beliefs; you could probably well describe him as vaguely a Reagan Republican. But as a leader he was primarily concerned with the preservation of power and the harmony of his members. He excelled at taking the temperature of the caucus, and he never strayed far from them. This served him well as a flexible deal-maker and a party unifier; he was able to hold power and accomplish policy objectives. But it left him unable to operate as a transformative leader, and made him wholly incapable of bold moral leadership, which became increasingly evident during the Trump presidency.”
University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq wrote that McConnell ruptured decades of norms and opening the gates to a new era of norm-breaking “reaped the end of abortion rights, affirmative action and a new constitutional dispensation in which the religious claim public monies while repudiating regulations designed to protect third parties. Democratic politics through judicial means can well be criticized because its entrenchment effects are more durable, its instrument more cloyingly elitist, its motions more nakedly hypocritical, or its bend tendentiously and unerringly to the right. But it is still an instance of democratic politics, of a sort, in action. Just ask McConnell.”
Conservative writer Mona Charen noted that “McConnell gradually accommodated himself to the crazy in the party. His natural instincts would sometimes slip out, as when he said: ‘Loony lies and conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican Party and our country.’ But then he would campaign hard for two Georgia senators who appeared with Marjorie Taylor Greene and endorsed the Big Lie about the 2020 election being stolen. Cancer is apparently OK if the Republican majority in the Senate is at stake. McConnell achieved a lot in his career, but sadly, his most consequential act was a dereliction— his failure to convict Trump in the second impeachment and disqualify him from serving in any office. If he had voted to convict and attempted to bring along nine other Republican senators, he could have spared the nation its current crisis. His partisanship ultimately overwhelmed his patriotism— a sad epitaph.”
On Thursday, The Nation published an essay by John Nichols that pretty much expresses how America feels about McConnell’s announcement: Good Riddance to Mitch McConnell, an Enemy of Democracy, who can be summed up in 3 bulletpoints:
He stole Supreme Court seats and stacked the courts with reactionaries
He thwarted accountability for Trump
He left a trail of partisan destruction in his wake
“If awards are being handed out for political longevity, give him one,” acknowledged Nichols. “But McConnell’s record of partisan conniving and moral compromising merits no applause… It is fair to say that McConnell’s judicial machinations will be his longest-lasting legacy. Decades from now, Justices Gorsuch and Barrett, whose tenures McConnell made possible, will be undermining civil liberties and upending protections for economic, social, and racial justice. But there is a powerful case that McConnell’s most miserable dereliction of duty came when he defended a Republican president he didn’t even like— and who didn’t like him… McConnell swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. For reasons of partisanship and personal political advancement, he abandoned that oath. Nothing more needs to be said of him.”
