Start with the courts, as any appraisal of McConnell must. Certainly, President Donald Trump deserves enormous credit for making outstanding judicial nominations. But it was McConnell, with his farsighted leadership in the Senate, who laid the groundwork for the conservative transformation of the federal judiciary.
In 2014, after Democrats invoked the so-called nuclear option — eliminating the filibuster for all but Supreme Court judicial nominations — McConnell and the GOP won back control of the Senate in the 2014 midterms, then blocked President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to replace the late Antonin Scalia in 2016. He faced down enormous pressure, and in so doing saved the court’s conservative majority.
Then, when Trump took office and nominated Neil M. Gorsuch — a judge of unquestioned qualifications and temperament — Democrats decided to filibuster his nomination. It was a grave miscalculation, and McConnell capitalized, convincing his Republican colleagues that they had no choice but to extend the Democrats’ precedent and eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations. “I argued to my people if this guy can’t get 60 votes then nobody a Republican president nominates is going to get 60 votes,” McConnell told me at the time. “That’s what allowed me to get people who were reluctant and complaining about using the nuclear option four years earlier to do it.”
If Democrats had not overplayed their hand, and had McConnell not skillfully exploited their error, Gorsuch would never have been confirmed — and neither would Brett M. Kavanaugh or Amy Coney Barrett. Conservatives owe the Supreme Court’s 6-3 majority, and all the consequential decisions it has produced, to McConnell.
While the Supreme Court hears only about 80 cases a year, the federal appeals courts have final say on about 60,000. McConnell’s Republican majority confirmed more than 200 judges to the lower courts during Trump’s term — including 54 circuit-court judges, the most confirmed in a president’s first term in four decades. As President Biden’s former chief of staff Ron Klain complained, those judges “will be deciding the scope of our civil liberties and the shape of civil rights laws in the year 2050 — and beyond.” Amen to that.
McConnell handled policy fights with the same virtuoso acumen. After Trump’s election, McConnell ushered through the first comprehensive tax reform in three decades, and helped repeal the wet blanket of Obama-era regulations that were smothering our economy, helping unleash the prosperity that has many Americans wanting to return Trump to the Oval Office today. Every Trump legislative accomplishment — from passing criminal justice reform, to opportunity zones to rebuild our inner cities, opioid and sex-trafficking legislation, and the Right to Try law — has McConnell’s fingerprints on them.
McConnell broke with Trump when he needed to, however. He refused Trump’s repeated demands to eliminate the legislative filibuster at a time when Republicans controlled the White House, Senate and House — wisely declaring “I will not vandalize this core tradition for short-term gain. … There are no permanent victories in politics. No Republican has any trouble imagining the laundry list of socialist policies that 51 Senate Democrats would happily inflict on Middle America in a filibuster-free Senate.”
And when Joe Biden won in 2020, McConnell resisted Trump’s push to overturn the election results and brought the Senate back into session after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot to certify the electoral college vote — calling it “the most important vote I have ever cast.” He then wisely voted against impeaching Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 riot because he believed the Senate could not convict a president who had already left office. He did the right thing in both cases, even if he pleased no one.
When Biden took office, McConnell blocked many of the president’s most egregious legislative initiatives, including his partisan For the People Act — a breathtaking 800-page federal assault on states’ authority to conduct their own elections, and most of Biden’s multitrillion-dollar Build Back Better social spending plan. But McConnell also pursued bipartisanship, helping to pass an infrastructure bill — which showed that Republicans and Democrats could come together, and in so doing helped to preserve the filibuster.
His legislative skills have been exceeded only by his political skills. In the 2022 midterms, when Trump backed a disastrous slate of Senate candidates, and then failed to tap his then $92 million war chest to help them, it fell to McConnell to rescue the GOP from electoral disaster. McConnell-aligned super-PACs invested a whopping $240 million in key races — including $32.2 million in Ohio to save J.D. Vance’s struggling campaign, and $37.4 million to help Ted Budd win in North Carolina. Without those efforts, Republicans would not be within striking range of taking back the Senate this November.
Most important, McConnell emerged as the critical voice in Washington, and the Republican Party, in support of Reaganite leadership on the world stage. He secured Senate ratification for the expansion of NATO to include Finland and Sweden, and is pushing back on GOP isolationist opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine in its brave fight against Russian aggression — a fight he will continue to lead before stepping down.
This only scratches the surface of achievements than span nearly four decades, and his work is not yet finished. But when it is, Mitch McConnell will be remembered as a giant of the Senate and a hero of the conservative movement.
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