Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has announced that in the fall he is going to step down from his position as GOP leader, presumably before the 2024 presidential election. McConnell announced his decision in the well of the Senate.
The question, of course, is who will replace him. The blowback on his announcement has been extraordinary. On the political Right, people are now shouting about the evils of Mitch McConnell.
McConnell is one of the most effective Machiavellian political operators of my lifetime. I don’t like a lot of what he passed, but to pretend he was not an effective operator is just false.
The reason there is a 6-3 Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court of the United States is: Mitch McConnell. It is not Donald Trump. It’s McConnell because McConnell is the person who actively said we will not allow Merrick Garland to be appointed to the court. And then, of course, Trump got elected.
This isn’t to deprive Trump from much of the credit.
But it was McConnell who made the decision he was going to hold open that seat until after the election. And it was McConnell who made the decision he was going to hold Democrats’ feet to the fire to their own rules. It was Democrats who, in 2013, decided they were going to use the nuclear option to ram through Barack Obama’s judicial nominees.
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And it was McConnell warning them in 2013 that if they did, it would come right back around and hit them.
He was right. In 2013, a younger Mitch McConnell said,
The majority leader promised, he promised over and over again that he wouldn’t break the rules of the Senate in order to change them. If you want to play games and set yet another precedent that you’ll no doubt come to regret, I say to my friends on the other side of the aisle, you’ll regret this. And you may regret it a lot sooner than you think.
So McConnell was incredibly competent at his job, and again, this does go to what jobs are in the Senate, what they are in the House. There has been a mistaken assumption that the Senate majority leader or the House speaker is the person who sets the Republican agenda and that person is a spokesperson for conservatism and that if they don’t hold true to conservative principles in every single thing they do without compromise, then they are somehow betraying the cause.
That is not the job of the House speaker or the Senate majority leader. That is generally the job of a president; it might be the job of the head of the RNC.
But the point of the House majority leader, the House Speaker, the Senate majority leader, or anybody who’s in a position to count votes actually has several jobs.
McConnell’s job, which he was very competent at, was trying to pick people running for the Senate because he controlled how monies were dispersed to various senatorial candidates. McConnell, it turns out, was much better at that than Trump was.
As a point of fact, McConnell led Republicans to a very, very sizable Senate majority. But over the last couple of election cycles, selection of primary candidates that went against what McConnell was recommending did not end well for Republicans. That is job number one for the Senate majority leader.
Job number two is to raise a lot of money, which McConnell did.
And job number three (which is really job number one in order of importance) is to decide the rules and procedures by which legislation moves through the Senate and pick exactly how that legislation gets made. That means counting votes. It means back-scratching. It means ugly politics, the seamy side of politics, the stuff that nobody likes and nobody wants to see.
If you are a popular Senate majority leader with the general public, it is likely because you are bad at the job — because Senate majority leaders are people who do have to make these Machiavellian decisions all the time. That’s how the sausage gets made. And the sausage getting made is really ugly.
But you have a choice. The sausage gets made or it doesn’t get made. And the reason that’s relevant is because when it comes to replacing Mitch McConnell, the question becomes who exactly is going to replace him? Is it going to be somebody who considers himself a philosophical purist, or is it going to be somebody who wants to make the sausage?
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The reality is that philosophical purism ends with minority status in the Senate of the United States, just as it is very likely at this point that philosophical purism in the House may lead to a Republican minority in the House. It turns out that Americans just want the sausage. They don’t want to see how it gets made. They’re not interested in the Machiavellian manipulations. They just want the thing done.
That’s true of any job that we delegate power to in our lives. You don’t care how the plumber fixes the drain; you just care that the drain gets fixed. And if he comes to you and says, “As a principled matter, I am not fixing the drain,” guess what? I didn’t hire you to do that. I hired you to fix the drain.
When it comes to the Senate, we can have arguments. Should you vote for a certain bill? Should you not? But if you neglect the part of the job that is the core of the job — counting votes, manipulations, back-scratching, the ugly part of politics — then what you’re going to end up with is somebody who says pretty words and does not achieve what you need them to achieve and then gets your party booted from majority status in the Senate of the United States.
Purism is a wonderfully easy way of appealing to the public without actually benefiting your party in any serious long-term way. But that’s our job. We’re outside of the government. In the end, it’s also the voters who are going to vote these people in. And it’s the job of people like me to be purists in order to suggest what I think is the principle — and then to explain how far our politicians are straying from the principle.
But it is the job of people like Mitch McConnell to try to get the most of the loaf they can. And McConnell overall got a lot of that loaf, although I’m still very critical of his stances on topics like immigration and the border.
But if McConnell is replaced by somebody who is far less interested in making the sausage or who refuses to make the sausage at all in the name of political purism, then Republicans will just end up without any power.
That’s the reality.