“That I remain the majority leader in the Senate is the firewall against disaster.” In this sentence, the disaster, is a Democratic majority in the United States Congress and a Democratic president in the White House. The firewall This is Mitch McConnell, Republican senator from Kentucky. It can be argued that Donald Trump has been the person with the most power over the Republican Party in this century. But McConnell has been, and still is, the key to that power, the one that has truly decided what to do and what not to do. With the arrival of Joe Biden to the White House, there is no longer a doubt. Mitch McConnell is the most powerful Republican in the United States. At 78, he prepares to be the last line of defense Conservatism in Washington.
Addison Micthell McConnell Jr. has been the face of Republican power in the halls of Washington for a decade as Nancy Pelosi is from the Democratic power. He is the same age as Joe Biden and a similar career. But while Biden has wanted to be president of the United States for four decades, McConnell had all his ambitions fulfilled when he rose in 2014 to the position of Majority Leader in the Senate, a House with broad constitutional functions, such as the appointment of federal offices. There he has shown that with a good knowledge of the legislative process and of its parliamentary group, an inescapable power can be exercised in the US constitutional framework. McConnell has been the bottleneck that Barack Obama, Donald Trump have had to go through and Nancy Pelosi. He has a remarkable armor for criticism that allows him to incur contradictions while completely ignoring what is said about him.
McConnell is as bland and self-contained as he is efficient. Republicans themselves refer to him as The bolt, because of how introverted he is and how little he shares about his life. He is remarried to Elaine Chao, the current Secretary of Transportation, and has three daughters from a previous marriage. In his autobiography, The long game (Long-Term Play), attributes his toughness and patience in part to having suffered from polio at the age of two, in 1944. It was ten years before the vaccine was discovered. The McConnell boy was partially paralyzed. While the other children were learning to run and jump, getting out of bed was a pain for him, he says. He did rehab with his mother until he was finally able to walk, at the age of four.
His political career began in the seventies, like that of Biden, and entered the Senate in 1985, then considered a moderate and pragmatic Republican. His obsession with procedure earned him a reputation as an institutional, someone willing to defend the independence and power of the Senate institution over ideologies. As leader of the Republican minority, he used the rule of the filibuster (which allows the minority to delay decisions until they sink). Until he reached true power. His rise to the post of Majority Leader in 2014 meant de facto the end of the presidency of Barack Obama and the preparation of the way for the arrival of someone like Donald Trump, perhaps an unexpected consequence of the hyper partisanship he imposed on Capitol Hill.
McConnell’s long-term goal has been to cement Conservative power in Washington beyond what the ballot box may say. In that strategy, “the most lasting contribution” that can be made is to appoint federal judges. The judges, like the members of the Administration, are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate by majority. During the Obama administration, McConnell blocked more than 100 federal judge positions.
His greatest contribution to the long-term cause of conservatism was blocking the appointment of a Supreme Court justice who was appointed by Obama. The nominee, Merrick Garland, was not even received in the Senate to appear. McConnell simply didn’t even put it on the agenda. That vacancy in the Supreme Court was one of the main reasons that led the religious right and the entire Republican Party, scandalized by Trump, to vote for him anyway in 2016. The electoral lever created by McConnell out of nowhere was fundamental to that surprising mobilization.
Suddenly the Republicans they found with all the power. Trump has appointed more than 200 federal judges in his term, a third of this entire judicial level. In some cases, they are highly ideological young people, who will occupy the position for life. In addition, he was able to appoint a conservative magistrate, Neil Gorsuch, to the position that Garland was to fill. McConnell had no problem removing the rule that allowed the minority to block such an appointment without consensus. Trump has appointed two more justices. The last, Amy Coney Barrett, whose confirmation McConnell piloted expressly in less than a month before the election.
“I think it’s the most consequential thing we’ve done in the last four years, and the one that’s going to last the longest,” McConnell acknowledged. The senator and Trump will leave behind a conservative majority in the Supreme Court of 6-3 that will last for years, despite the fact that Republicans have only won the majority of the votes in one election (2004) of the last eight presidential elections.
In the rest, it has exercised harsh control over the legislative process. Trump himself expressed his frustration with McConnell in the first year of his presidency until he understood that he had nothing to do. Trump tried to legislate at the pace of Twitter, but things in these four years have been done at the pace of McConnell. The Majority Leader has consistently refused, for example, to include funding for build your border wall. Trump had to resort to a national emergency to divert Army funds and start construction.
For Democrats it has been even worse. The Democratic leader of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, calls McConnell “the grim reaper” because he sends to the cemetery the hundreds of laws that the lower house has sent him since it is controlled by the Democrats. McConnell wears the nickname with pride. He used it in a Republican event in which he promised to kill any legislation he considers leftist if it kept his power in the Senate, such as the plan against climate change called Green New Deal: Think of me as the grim reaper. None of those things will be approved. “
There is only one nickname that has made this politician in rhino skin crazy: Moscow Mitch (Mitch, the one from Moscow), a name that began to circulate when the Republican blocked two Democratic laws that were intended to strengthen the security of the elections, after the warning that Russia planned to interfere in the 2020 race as he did in 2016. “This is modern McCarthyism,” McConnell said in an interview, very irritated at the idea of being called a traitor after so many years in politics. “I can laugh at things like the park, but call me Moscow Mitch is to go overboard ”. Of course, the Democratic left has not stopped using it.
With Biden’s arrival in the White House, all eyes are on McConnell and his ability to block the new president. Until this Saturday he had not spoken. At the opening of the session last week, McConnell broke with tradition and refused to acknowledge Biden’s victory, arguing that the president has the right to go to court and that nothing happens by waiting. In his truest style, he dressed in procedural normality what is an assault on the seams of American democracy McConnell and Biden have known each other for three decades and have negotiated laws together. It is not clear that they are friends.
“This is a battle for our way of life,” McConnell went on to say during the election campaign. He was not referring to Trump, but to his majority in the Senate. The Republican group has done very well at the polls and McConnell has only lost one seat. But he is pending two seats in Georgia to be decided in a runoff on January 5. It depends on those two seats whether McConnell remains the most powerful Republican in Washington, or becomes irrelevant. In his own words, the disaster.
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