On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois, won a decisive victory over his fellow senator John McCain to become the forty-fourth president of the United States. Obama’s nomination by the Democrats had excited the country and captivated the world, and his victory—the election of the first African American president—was an extraordinary moment where hope seemed justified and change seemed a very real possibility.
The election result did not surprise Mitch McConnell. A political realist to his core, McConnell recognized Obama’s superb political talent. During the crucial meeting on TARP in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s conference room in late September, Senator Obama had spoken for the Democrats. “Obama had masterfully shown how well he understood the issue—delivering what sounded like third draft prose without any notes,” McConnell recalled. “Everyone in the room was spellbound.” He left the room with no doubt that Obama would be elected.1
Every year as Republican leader, McConnell brought his caucus together to plan strategy. On January 9, 2009, the Senate Republicans met in the Library of Congress. “The weather was perfect for the occasion: cold, dreary and rainy,” McConnell recalled. “Nobody was in a good mood.”2
McConnell knew that his caucus was shell-shocked by the election results. The Democrats had won the White House and both houses of Congress; Obama would become president in eleven days with an approval rating close to 80 percent. McConnell knew that the new president would press for a strong progressive agenda and feared the combination of a troubled economy and one-party control would lead to an “explosion of legislative and government control, just like we saw in the New Deal and the Great Society.” He felt the need to rally his troops, and he saw a strategy for doing it.
McConnell told his colleagues, first and foremost, to have patience; no majority was permanent. The American people, exhausted by eight years of the Bush presidency and two wars, had voted for change, he said, but America was still a right-of-center country. Using one of his favorite lines, McConnell told his colleagues, “We hadn’t suddenly become France.” There were, he pointed out, still one hundred million Republicans looking to them for leadership.
He intended to provide it. A few days after the election, McConnell had told the columnist George Will, “Governing is hazardous business for presidential parties.”3 Now, he sketched a strategy of opposition. The Republicans would pick fights they could win to show that Obama was not invulnerable. They would obstruct and oppose him on virtually everything, to undercut his basic promise of ushering in a new era of postpartisan cooperation.4 The Republican senators left the meeting feeling energized, with a new sense of purpose and unity.5
Missing from the Republican senators’ retreat was any discussion of the economic crisis that was devastating the nation. In October, the TARP legislation rescued the banking system when it could have collapsed. By January, the economic crisis that began on Wall Street had spread to every Main Street across the country; Americans had lost 16 percent of their net worth in the past twelve months, far more than in any year of the Great Depression. With the value of their houses and stocks sharply reduced, American workers and families were cutting back on demand. Banks, traumatized by the Lehman shock and the rapidly sinking economy, hoarded their assets, and credit dried up. Major companies like Boeing, Caterpillar, Pfizer, and Corning had responded to the deteriorating climate with major layoffs.6 As Obama prepared to start his presidency, America lost 750,000 jobs in one month. As Tim Geithner, about to become Obama’s treasury secretary, recalled, “This vicious cycle of financial and economic contraction was gaining momentum, and no one was sure how it would end.”7 When the president-elect held a conference call with his transition team to discuss what he should seek to accomplish in his first term, Geithner spoke first: “Your accomplishment will be to prevent the second Great Depression.”8
Democratic and Republican economists agreed that a massive economic stimulus by the federal government was the only thing that could combat the drastic loss of private demand. McConnell had rightfully taken pride in his calm, strong leadership on TARP and regarded the Senate’s action as one of its finest moments. He had spoken forcefully about the need for national unity in response to an economic emergency. But that was ninety days earlier, before the election and when the president was a Republican. Now, as the crisis continued to rage, McConnell condemned the proposed spending. Even after Obama agreed to make tax cuts part of the stimulus, McConnell pressed his caucus to be united in opposition. If three Republican senators—Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, along with Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania—had not resisted McConnell’s pressure, the economic recovery that began in 2009 would have been delayed for years. A second Great Depression would have been quite likely.9
This was a singular moment in Senate history. Mitch McConnell was starting his third year as minority leader, but now, for the first time, he was the opposition leader. He began immediately to transform a Senate struggling unsuccessfully to rise above the polarization of American politics into a bitterly partisan, paralyzed Senate where no effort would be made to overcome the divisions. The Senate always had its share of obstructionists, but the institution’s leaders saw it as their responsibility to overcome them so that the business of the country could get done. A Senate leader was not supposed to function as a party chairman but rather to temper his partisanship because of his obligation to the Senate and the country. A Senate leader was supposed to work across the aisle and work respectfully with the president, regardless of whether the president was a Democrat or a Republican.
It is impossible to imagine Howard Baker or Bob Dole opposing an economic stimulus as America teetered on the edge of a second Great Depression. Baker or Dole would have told his caucus, “We’ll have plenty of issues on which to differ with the president, but right now, we have to work together to save the country.” McConnell had a different agenda; any show of bipartisanship could serve as evidence that Obama was succeeding in his promise to heal the divide in the country and producing results. Therefore, bipartisanship was unacceptable. His goal, which he stated clearly, was for Obama to fail, and he had no concern about the impact that his obstruction would have on actual Americans, including those who lived in his home state of Kentucky.10
For McConnell, the fight over the economic stimulus in 2009 was a minor skirmish compared to the titanic political battle he would wage over health care. Every Democratic president since Harry Truman had been committed to extending health-care coverage to all Americans, but none had succeeded in getting legislation through Congress. Obama, and virtually all Democrats, were appalled that the United States spent twice as much per capita on health care as any other country, while more than forty million Americans had no health insurance. Unjust and inefficient, the “health-care system” exacerbated the growing inequality that afflicted America. Obama believed that the economic crisis had provided the moment for action; his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, would famously say, “It would be a shame to waste a crisis.”
To McConnell, Obama’s ideas about health care represented the classic illustration of an attempt to “Europeanize” America. Because it was “the worst bill that had crossed his desk in his Senate career,” he did not want a single Republican to vote for it. “It had to be very obvious to the voters which party was responsible for this terrible policy,” McConnell contended. “The best thing we could do was ensure that there was no confusion in the public’s mind come the next election that this was in any way a bipartisan proposal. So, the strategy simply stated was to keep everybody together in opposition.”11
Over the next ten months, McConnell repeatedly blasted Obama and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, for trying to ram through health care on a strictly partisan basis. But in his memoir, recounting the challenges he faced in maintaining a unified opposition, McConnell noted that “early on, the administration reached out to members of our conference who were deeply involved in health care issues.”12 Clearly, it was not Obama who was standing in the way of addressing health care on a bipartisan basis; it was McConnell who was committed to keeping the process partisan.
Even more fundamentally, Obama had embraced what was essentially a Republican template for health care. He did not seriously consider a single-payer model championed by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and many other progressives, nor did he endorse having a “public option”: a government-run health plan as an alternative to private insurance. He turned instead to a model endorsed by the conservative Heritage Foundation that had been proposed in 1993 and 1994 by several Republican senators, including Orrin Hatch of Utah and Charles Grassley of Iowa, who were still key players in the Senate in 2009. In fact, Obamacare most resembled the state insurance framework in Massachusetts, which had been championed by its Republican governor, Mitt Romney.13
None of these facts mattered to McConnell; in this war, as in others, truth was an early casualty. He allowed Grassley and two other Republican senators, Mike Enzi and Olympia Snowe, to engage in months of highly visible “Gang of Six” negotiations with three Senate Democrats, Max Baucus, Jeff Bingaman, and Kent Conrad. Many observers expressed frustration that the fate of health-care reform was being negotiated by six senators representing small states that were mostly rural and white.14 (Grassley was from Iowa, and his two fellow Republicans were from Wyoming and Maine; the three Democrats represented Montana, New Mexico, and North Dakota.) In practice, though, the “Gang of Six” were senators who came to the table with a good deal of knowledge about health-care issues. They plunged into talks, meeting more than thirty times over the next four months, often twice a day for several hours. “It was a compatible group composed of senators who were all committed to upholding the integrity of the legislative process,” Snowe observed.15
McConnell allowed these talks to progress, but his basic position remained unchanged. As he described in his memoir, he had one-on-one meetings with Grassley, Enzi, and Snowe “to encourage them to stay with the party” and not to sign on to any compromise that might be acceptable to the Democratic majority. He also met every Wednesday with the entire Republican caucus, “trying to build on the vision that we were all in this together.” Every morning, he was on the Senate floor “pounding away at the bill.” He gave 105 daily speeches in all. If the Republican members of the “Gang of Six” were going to reach agreement with the Democrats, they would be taking a position completely contrary to what their leader was preaching.16
It was hard to envision that happening, and of course it did not. When Congress recessed for August, the senators encountered angry and fearful reactions from many of their constituents. Whipped up by the right-wing media and the blogosphere, many people believed “Obamacare” (as the Republicans jeeringly called the proposed legislation) was “socialized medicine” that would prevent them from seeing their doctors. Talk grew that the legislation contained provisions establishing “death panels” to determine the fate of grandparents and parents. Obama’s optimistic message of hope and change virtually disappeared as the Tea Party came of age as a political force vehemently opposed to any guarantee or new provision of health care to the American people.17
On August 25, Senator Edward Kennedy died after a valiant fight against incurable brain cancer, having served nearly forty-seven years in the US Senate. The loss of a national icon, a beloved senator, the last of the Kennedy brothers, and a tireless champion of health care for all Americans momentarily quieted the partisan rancor. But within days, the health-care wars resumed.
By early September, the “Gang of Six” talks were on life support. “They all want to do health care,” Baucus asserted, “but they’ve been told by the Republican party not to participate.” Grassley, a principal target of the Tea Party during the August recess, returned to the conference room saying he could only support an agreement that would attract seventy-five senators—an impossibility. Enzi assured the press in his home state of Wyoming that his efforts were simply to change the bill; he would never support it. Snowe, independent and gutsy, hung in long enough to allow the Finance Committee to report legislation, but ultimately backed away as well.18
It later became known that McConnell had told Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut, the chairman of the Banking Committee, that the two of them might be able to negotiate something on financial reform, but never health care.19 Norman Ornstein, probably the most respected observer of Congress, would write, “What became clear before September when the talks fell apart is that [McConnell] warned Grassley and Enzi their futures in the Senate would be much dimmer if they moved toward a deal with the Democrats that would produce legislation that Barack Obama would sign. They both listened to their leader.”20
Legislating on complex issues for a diverse, contentious country will always be bone-crushingly difficult. If extending health insurance to all Americans were easy, it would have been done long ago. But the essence of successful legislating is good-faith engagement designed to build understanding needed to find common ground and reach compromises that can win broad support. In health care, as with the economic stimulus, McConnell had already decided that a result that could command such support would not be tolerated. Even if the senators in the room were serious, they were participating in what Ornstein termed “a faux negotiation,” the failure of which was foreordained months before.
For Obama, and the overwhelming number of congressional Democrats, passing health-care legislation had become an almost existential priority. If this could not be done on a bipartisan basis, then the Democrats would have to do it alone. Speaker Pelosi had a clear majority in favor of whatever health-care legislation Obama would sign and the benefit of House rules that ensured limited debate. Majority Leader Harry Reid faced a different challenge in the Senate. If the Republicans stayed united in opposition, Reid would have to hold all sixty Democrats together to break any Republican filibuster. The Senate rules and traditions provided for extended debate and numerous opportunities for obstruction that McConnell was skilled in exploiting. Moreover, the Senate Democrats might not hold together as the public anger toward “Obamacare” was not lost on them, particularly those who were up for reelection in conservative states in 2010.21
Reid worked tirelessly to hold together his caucus. Ornstein would observe later, “When Republicans like Hatch and Grassley began to write op-eds and trash the individual mandate, which they had earlier championed, as unconstitutional and abominable, it convinced conservative Democrats in the Senate that every effort to engage Republicans in the reform legislation had been tried and cynically rebuffed.”22
McConnell spearheaded a fierce counterattack. His policy team watched carefully for provisions that were added to the bill to keep conservative Democrats on board. When they found such provisions, they alerted the majority leader’s communications shop, which quickly flooded the media and the blogosphere with unforgettable names. A provision addressing Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu’s concerns became “the Louisiana Purchase”; one for Bill Nelson of Florida became “Gator Aid.” Special treatment was reserved for the last wavering senator, Nebraska’s Ben Nelson, when he agreed to sign on to the legislation only if it contained increased Medicaid reimbursements for Nebraska. Josh Holmes, McConnell’s communications director, dubbed it “the Cornhusker Kickback” and said, “We’re going to make this bill as popular as an internment camp.”23
In fact, it is likely that every major piece of legislation ever enacted has contained within it provisions designed to win over key votes. Mitch McConnell had excelled at inserting such provisions throughout his career, particularly during his long decades on the Appropriations Committee. But this was political war. As McConnell would later recall, “Within hours, the Cornhusker Kickback took on a life of its own and became emblematic of an entire process that had made the American people absolutely disgusted.”24
Even so, on December 24, 2009, the Senate, on a straight party vote of 60–39, passed the Affordable Care Act. Ted Kennedy’s seat had been filled on an interim basis by Paul Kirk, a longtime Kennedy aide, pending the outcome of a special election, which in January returned Scott Brown, the first Republican senator from Massachusetts in more than thirty years. Brown’s election shook American politics; the Massachusetts seat had been regarded as absolutely safe for the Democrats, and now things were much harder for Harry Reid. He needed sixty votes to overcome a Republican filibuster, and he no longer had them. Without sixty votes, Reid would have to resort to the little-understood “reconciliation process,” which would allow the Senate to pass the conference report (the bill reflecting the agreement between the House and Senate versions) with just fifty-one votes, further amplifying the Republican message that budget-busting “socialist” legislation was being rammed through using shady procedures.
Even so, the measure passed both houses, and President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law on March 25, 2010. Mitch McConnell had lost the legislative fight, but he won the political war. “The narrative of Obama steamrolling over Republicans and enacting an unconstitutional bill that brought America much closer to socialism worked like a charm to stimulate conservative and Republican anger,” Ornstein wrote later.25 That anger would fuel a sweeping Republican victory in the 2010 midterm elections, enabling the party to reclaim the House majority and narrowing the Democrats’ edge in the Senate. While McConnell was still minority leader, he was plainly the most powerful and effective Republican in the country. In early 2011, an Atlantic profile by Joshua Green, titled “Strict Obstructionist,” described McConnell as “the master manipulator and strategist—the unheralded architect of the Republican resurgence.”26
By the end of 2010, the Senate had reached an extraordinary juncture. Against the odds, it had passed three momentous pieces of legislation—the economic stimulus, the Affordable Care Act, and the Dodd-Frank reform of financial regulation—yet it was universally regarded as dysfunctional. Carl Levin of Michigan, a thirty-two-year Senate veteran, was struck by the paradox. “It’s been the most productive Senate since I’ve been here in terms of major accomplishments,” Levin said, “and by far the most frustrating. It’s almost impossible day to day to get almost anything done. Routine bills and nominations get bottled up indefinitely. Everything is stopped by the threat of filibusters—not real filibusters, just the threat of filibusters.”27
In a widely read New Yorker article titled “The Empty Chamber,” George Packer noted “the two lasting achievements of the Senate, financial regulation and health care, required a year and a half of legislative warfare that nearly destroyed the body.”28 Olympia Snowe, the respected Republican moderate from Maine, retired in disgust, saying, “We have been miniaturized.” Indiana’s Evan Bayh, a moderate Democrat, also called it quits.29 Democrats and Republicans called for “regular order,” a return to real legislating,30 but the continued threat of Republican filibusters, and the requirement of sixty votes to get anything done, made that impossible.
McConnell felt no such frustration. As the 2012 elections approached, he was virtually measuring the drapes in the majority leader’s office. The Huffington Post called it “McConnell’s moment,” and he described himself as “prepared, and more than a little eager.”31 As early as October 2010, McConnell had told the National Journal that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”32 Thus, McConnell was stunned by Obama’s reelection and a sweeping victory for the Senate Democrats, who retained every contested seat that they had held and added two more. Bitterly disappointed, McConnell recognized the real possibility that he might never reach his goal of being majority leader. Moreover, polls indicated that he was so unpopular in Kentucky that he might be defeated in his race for a sixth term in 2014. He was facing a tough primary challenge from a Tea Party Republican named Matt Bevin, and then there was the prospect of a fierce contest in the general election. Chagrined that he was apparently the most endangered Republican incumbent, McConnell momentarily gave serious thought to not running again.33
Characteristically, he persevered. McConnell ran a relentless campaign against Bevin and defeated him comfortably. There was not that much room to the right of Mitch McConnell even in a Republican Party increasingly influenced by its Tea Party wing. At the same time, McConnell took the lead in ensuring that Republicans chosen for Senate seats in the other 2014 contests would be strong general election candidates. He helped identify appealing candidates like Thom Tillis, the speaker of the North Carolina house; David Perdue, the CEO of Reebok, to run in Georgia; and Joni Ernst and Tom Cotton, Iraq War veterans, to run in Iowa and Arkansas, respectively. He orchestrated a concerted effort to defeat every Tea Party challenger so that there would be no repeat of what had happened in 2012, when extreme Republican nominees lost Senate seats that could have easily been won in Missouri and Indiana.34
With that accomplished, McConnell turned his focus to his own race and decisively defeated Alison Lundergan Grimes, a promising but inexperienced challenger. He made sure to remind Kentucky’s voters what it meant to have a senator who was a Senate leader, and the argument for staying with McConnell proved compelling. And throughout 2013–2014, McConnell still found time for his day job: being President Obama’s principal nemesis. He thwarted virtually every Obama initiative, blocking consideration of Obama’s judicial and executive nominations and driving Harry Reid to distraction. On election night, Mitch McConnell not only won his own race but also gained a Senate majority. It was a political tour de force.35
McConnell had been a fixture for so long, having completed thirty years in the Senate, that it was sometimes hard to recognize the unlike-lihood of his rise.36 Born in Alabama and raised in a middle-class home in Louisville, Kentucky, he overcame childhood polio to grow up and develop a passion for politics, starting in high school. He got early experience on Capitol Hill as an intern for Kentucky’s Republican senator Marlow Cook in the memorable summer of 1964, when the Senate broke the Southern filibuster to pass the historic Civil Rights Act. Like many young men and women, McConnell found Capitol Hill intoxicating. He became a great admirer of John Sherman Cooper, Kentucky’s other senator, also a Republican, who was a leading champion of civil rights and an opponent of the Vietnam War. Also inspired by Henry Clay, the most famous Kentuckian who ever served in the Senate, McConnell set his sights on becoming a US senator.
After law school, McConnell joined a Louisville law firm but was quickly bored with traditional legal work. In the aftermath of Watergate, with many experienced Republicans fleeing Washington, McConnell parlayed his political connections and Capitol Hill experience to become the deputy assistant attorney general for legislative affairs in the Ford administration. That job bored him as well, and he left after fifteen months, returning to Louisville to launch his political career.
The first political consultants McConnell hired were astonished by his absolute lack of personal appeal, but he impressed them with his drive: he would do anything needed to win. He waged an unlikely but successful campaign to become judge-executive of Jefferson County—essentially the mayor of the county—and held that position for two terms, until he sought and won the Republican nomination for the US Senate in 1984. The incumbent senator, Walter “Dee” Huddleston, was a well-liked and capable, if uninspiring, two-term Democrat who had received significant attention for having served on the select committee chaired by Frank Church that had investigated abuses by the intelligence agencies in the 1970s.
Lefty Gomez, the eccentric Hall of Fame pitcher for the New York Yankees, once said, “I’d rather be lucky than good.” McConnell proved to be both. Kentucky, a border state, was closely balanced politically, but Ronald Reagan, coasting to reelection against Walter Mondale, won the state handily, by nearly twenty points. Reagan’s coattails pulled McConnell within striking range, and then McConnell’s political consultant, Roger Ailes, concocted one of the most brilliant political ads in history. Huddleston had missed some Senate votes while doing speaking engagements, and the ad showed bloodhounds sniffing around hotel pools looking for Dee Huddleston. On election night, Mitch McConnell was elected by fifty-one hundred votes statewide. On such a slim margin, a remarkable career was started.
McConnell was a mainstream conservative Republican with conventional views; he eased into the Senate with no particular distinction. But midway through his first term, Democratic senators Robert Byrd and David Boren introduced legislation to impose contribution and spending limits on political campaigns. Although McConnell had originally endorsed limits on campaign spending, he realized that he would not be able to win reelection without unlimited access to campaign funds. He became, overnight, the leading opponent to campaign finance restrictions.
McConnell had found his calling. He relished being vilified by liberals and by good-government editorial pages, and he became a regular presence on the Sunday morning talk shows. When his critics labeled him “Darth Vader,” he appeared at a news conference with a toy light saber. His staff identified new parliamentary maneuvers to expand his ability to block legislation, and in September 1994 he successfully filibustered a major campaign finance reform bill sponsored by the Democratic majority leader George Mitchell. “I’ve rarely seen a more determined and skilled tactician,” said Russ Feingold,37 the Wisconsin senator who would later cosponsor the sweeping McCain-Feingold legislation limiting the role of “soft money” in politics, another bill vehemently opposed by Mitch McConnell.
In the process, McConnell earned the gratitude of his Republican colleagues, who shared his views but were not prepared to take the criticism for opposing campaign finance reform. “Few members wanted to risk appearing corrupt, so they were grateful to McConnell for fighting one reform after the next—while claiming it was purely about defending the First Amendment,” the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer noted.38 Armed with money from billionaire conservatives like David and Charles Koch and the DeVos family, McConnell helped take the effort to kill restraints on campaign spending all the way to the Supreme Court. His side won the big prize in 2010, when the Supreme Court, in a 5–4 decision in the Citizens United case, opened the door for corporations, wealthy individuals, and secretive nonprofits to pour unlimited and often untraceable cash into elections.39
The long war for unlimited campaign contributions fueled McConnell’s rise. “McConnell loves money, and abhors any controls on it,” said Fred Wertheiemer, the president of the advocacy organization Democracy 21, who has devoted forty years to fighting for campaign finance reform. “Money is the central theme of his career. And if you want to control Congress, the best way is to control the money.”40 Money brought McConnell into the Senate Republican leadership. Money established his powerful network of donors. Money gave him influence in choosing political candidates and channeling campaign funds to them.
McConnell joined the Senate Republican leadership as part of Trent Lott’s team in the late 1990s, and when Lott was forced to resign as majority leader following racially insensitive remarks at Strom Thurmond’s one hundredth birthday celebration, McConnell thought it was his moment to seek the post. But his fellow Senate Republicans, having been embarrassed by Lott, wanted an attractive new face and opted for Bill Frist, who had come to the Senate a decade after McConnell but was an admired heart surgeon who still went to Africa to perform heart and lung surgeries. McConnell swallowed his disappointment, became Frist’s deputy, and bided his time.41 When Frist honored his pledge to serve only two terms in the Senate, McConnell became minority leader in January 2007, having already served twenty-two years in the body. It took eight more years, but after the 2014 election Mitch McConnell realized his long-held dream of becoming Senate majority leader.
For six years as minority leader during Barack Obama’s presidency, McConnell’s relentless obstruction had paralyzed and demoralized the Senate, driving Harry Reid to distraction and constant rage. As relations deteriorated between the two men, McConnell heaped contempt on Reid and pledged to restore the Senate to being the great deliberative body that the framers of the Constitution had, in their wisdom, intended it to be. He promised to rejuvenate the committee process, so that legislation could be developed thoughtfully and taken to the Senate floor where it would be subject to an open amendment process and freewheeling debate. He proclaimed that under his leadership the Senate would not be “the hollow shell of an institution” that he blamed Reid for creating,42 omitting the fact that it had been his obstructionism that had hollowed it out.
The promised turnabout started almost immediately. McConnell, notoriously guarded and controlled in his comments, was unusually expansive, even happy, as he reviewed the accomplishments of the Senate in his first year as leader at the end of 2015. A more open amendment process allowed more vigorous debate, and a series of bipartisan legislative accomplishments had followed, including a new formula to pay doctors treating Medicare patients based on the quality of care they provided, rather than the amount of care; a transportation bill that shored up the highway trust fund and allowed the continued repair of America’s roads; a massive spending bill that funded the government through October 2016; an education reform bill that gave states a larger say on how to improve schools and evaluate teachers; and a security visa waiver that allowed citizens from thirty-eight “friendly” countries easy access to the United States, while requiring stricter visa reviews for residents of or recent visitors to Iran, Iraq, Sudan, and Syria. Bob Corker and Ben Cardin, the chairman and ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, also engineered an ingenious bipartisan compromise to carve out a limited role for Congress in reviewing the nuclear pact with Iran.43
“They’ve really nailed down some festering issues that have been on the agenda for quite a while,” noted Sarah Binder, a leading expert on Congress at the Brookings Institution. “And they’ve done it in this sort of a remarkably bipartisan way.”44
McConnell generously praised the Democrats for their contributions to the legislation, noting that they had been good collaborators.45 He even showed a previously undetected wry sense of humor, describing working constructively with the White House to win Trade Promotion Authority for President Obama as “something of an out of body experience.”46 McConnell was in his element, successfully pursuing his political objectives while doing a more than respectable job of leading a Senate comeback.
There was no magic to the turnabout. For the first six years of the Obama presidency, McConnell had “come to embody a kind of oppositional politics that critics say has left voters cynical about Washington, the Senate all but dysfunctional, and the Republican Party without a positive agenda or message,” Joshua Green had written in his Atlantic profile of McConnell, a description that had held true through 2014.47 Because McConnell was the cause of the gridlock, once he decided to become a constructive player, the Senate could change overnight. Senate Democrats could gnash their teeth, but McConnell knew he could count on them. By their nature, they wanted government to work and loved to legislate. As Charles Schumer of New York, soon to be the Democratic leader, would say plaintively, “We’re Democrats. We cannot just block everything. We believe in government.”48
At the same time, McConnell remained Obama’s nemesis, an insurmountable adversary on the issues that mattered most to him. He systematically blocked Obama’s federal court nominations, creating a record number of judicial vacancies.49 Having already helped to block Obama’s effort to legislate a cap-and-trade system to fight climate change, McConnell now waged an imaginative and devastatingly effective attack on Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which sought to control emissions through regulatory action. McConnell undoubtedly took great pleasure in working with Republican state attorneys general and with the Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, who had taught Obama constitutional law but was now opposing the Clean Power Plan as “quite literally a power grab” while representing Peabody Energy.50 “As the iconic left-leaning law professor Laurence Tribe put it,” McConnell wrote, “the administration’s effort goes ‘far beyond its lawful authority.’”51
In late November 2015, when 195 nations came to Paris to finalize a global climate change agreement, McConnell issued a stern warning in an op-ed published in the Washington Post. “It would obviously be irresponsible,” he wrote, “for an outgoing president to purport to sign the American people to international commitments based on a domestic energy plan that is likely illegal, that half the states have sued to halt, that Congress has voted to reject, and that his successor could do away with in a few months.”52
Clearly proud of what he had accomplished, McConnell published a memoir in early 2016, aptly titled The Long Game. Every author hopes to get admiring blurbs for his or her book’s dust jacket, but very few could match the endorsements McConnell gathered: George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Walter Isaacson, Jon Meacham, and Doris Kearns Goodwin. Will is a longtime friend of McConnell’s, but the praise from the other great biographers and historians was surprising, given the lightweight nature of the memoir. But McConnell was the most powerful Senate majority leader in memory. His wife, Elaine Chao, was one of America’s most accomplished women: a former secretary of labor, deputy secretary of transportation, director of the Peace Corps, and president of the United Way. Chao was the daughter of Taiwan’s leading shipping magnate, making her and McConnell extremely wealthy. They were one of Washington’s leading power couples. Even liberal historians could find a reason to praise the memoir’s positive features and ignore its deficiencies.
The memoir was indeed refreshingly candid, engaging, and revealing—the best source of what McConnell was in fact thinking at key moments, and what mattered most to him: winning in politics. But there is not a page in it that shows concern about the people of Kentucky. There is no mention about the fate of coal miners as Kentucky’s industry lost ground to western coal and natural gas. Strikingly, McConnell’s memoir dripped contempt for President Obama and mocked Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, even though all of them were still in office, and he presumably had to work with them on countless vital issues.53 The book was often disingenuous, replete with half-truths and outright lies; the most partisan Senate leader in memory would berate Obama for his partisanship, even while acknowledging the president’s efforts to reach out to Republicans.54 Having obstructed the Senate for the first six years of Obama’s presidency, McConnell praised the first year of his own leadership: “Compared to the legislative graveyard of the prior several years, the new Republican-led Senate looked like an Amazon fulfillment center.”55
And then, on February 13, 2016, Justice Antonin Scalia, the leading conservative voice on the Supreme Court, died unexpectedly. His death gave President Obama the opportunity to nominate a justice at a time when the court was evenly divided between liberals and conservatives. No issue mattered more to the right wing of the Republican Party than the Supreme Court. The Senate, which had handled many controversial Supreme Court nominations, expected to face one more.
McConnell had shared an office at the Justice Department with Scalia when they were both young lawyers in the Ford administration. Now he responded with extraordinary, even unseemly, speed. About an hour after the announcement of Justice Scalia’s death, when other political leaders were expressing condolences, McConnell announced that the Senate would not confirm a replacement for Justice Scalia until after the 2016 presidential election. “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court justice,” McConnell intoned. “Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”56
McConnell did not need time to consult with his caucus because he knew that his Senate Republican colleagues would either agree with him or reluctantly swallow their concerns and go along. He could make the decision alone because only he could balance what he might gain—the Supreme Court seat if a Republican president were elected—against what he might lose: the promising Senate comeback that he had hoped to lead.
“The swiftness of McConnell’s statement . . . stunned White House officials who had expected the Kentucky Republican to block their nominee with every tool at his disposal, but didn’t imagine the combative GOP leader would issue an instant, categorical rejection of anyone Obama chose to nominate,” Politico reported.57 Despite McConnell’s statement, there was no precedent for the Senate to refuse to consider a Supreme Court nominee in an election year; it had considered justices nominated by Lyndon Johnson in 1968 and by Ronald Reagan in 1988.
Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the longest-serving senator, blasted McConnell for a blatantly political move when the Senate’s calendar appeared to be open most of the summer: “Cancel one of the vacations, one of the recesses,” Leahy said. “If this was November, then I could see . . . at least making the argument. But it’s February.” Charles Grassley, who chaired the Judiciary Committee, brushed Leahy’s argument aside. “This president, above all others, has made no bones about his goal to use the courts to circumvent Congress and push through his own agenda,” Grassley said. “It only makes sense that we defer to the American people who will elect a new president to select the next Supreme Court Justice.”58
Legal scholars expressed outrage, pointing out that McConnell’s action was unprecedented in American history.59 The debate became more heated when President Obama nominated Merrick Garland, the universally admired chief judge of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to fill Scalia’s seat. Surely, many observers thought, McConnell would not be able to hold his troops together to stonewall an extraordinarily qualified nominee who was known to be moderate in his views.
“The Senate Republicans will sacrifice their majority and their best shot at the White House . . . if they block this nomination,” said one Democratic strategist. Many Democrats predicted that McConnell’s power play would backfire, by energizing the Democratic base, particularly in key Senate races.60 Grassley, eighty-two years old, seeking his seventh term in Iowa, seemed uniquely vulnerable. The Democrats found a seemingly formidable candidate, former lieutenant governor Patty Judge, and turned up the heat in their campaign ads.61
But McConnell saw things through a different lens. Though he did not expect Donald Trump to win the 2016 presidential election, he saw no reason to give Obama the chance to nominate a justice who would create a liberal majority on the court. With his keen focus on the judiciary, McConnell knew that the issue would galvanize more Republican voters than Democrats, helping Trump and Republican candidates for the Senate. While other establishment Republicans, like Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, might agonize publicly about Trump’s bad behavior—particularly his admission that he had groped women—McConnell saw nothing to be gained in criticizing his party’s presidential nominee.
McConnell would deliver one more gift to Trump during the election campaign. Trump’s inexplicable affection for Vladimir Putin as a private citizen could be rationalized as part of his effort to build a major hotel in Moscow. But as Trump moved inexorably toward the Republican presidential nomination, his defense of Putin and his attacks on America’s European allies became more disturbing. Trump also surrounded himself with advisers like Paul Manafort, his campaign chairman, and General Michael Flynn, his senior foreign policy adviser, who had troubling ties with officials close to Putin. The New York Times and Washington Post carried major stories about a meeting at Trump Tower between senior Trump campaign advisers and representatives of Putin’s government.62 By August, the US intelligence community had found clear evidence of a concerted effort by Russia to interfere in the presidential election, supporting Trump and opposing Hillary Clinton, whom Putin despised.
McConnell, as a member of the congressional leadership, received one of the earliest briefings from the intelligence community about these concerns. In September, Obama requested a meeting with the four congressional leaders, outlined his concerns about the intelligence community’s findings, and requested a bipartisan statement expressing anger at the Russian interference in the US presidential election.
Speaker Ryan seemed inclined to join such a statement, but McConnell turned the request down cold and accused Obama of trying to politicize the issue, to benefit Hillary Clinton. He would not provide bipartisan cover for a statement suggesting that Russia was trying to help Trump. McConnell also used the opportunity to attack Obama publicly for his weak policy toward Russia. Two weeks later, he agreed to join a tepid letter to state election officials alerting them to the possibility of foreign interference in the election but not mentioning Russia.63
In the end, McConnell triumphed across the board in 2016. It would be hard to identify many votes that were cast or voters who were mobilized for Hillary Clinton or for Democratic Senate candidates because Mitch McConnell had prevented President Obama from nominating a Supreme Court justice. By contrast, McConnell’s move galvanized many conservative voters to put aside their misgivings about Donald Trump because of the overriding importance of who would nominate the next Supreme Court justice.64 Virtually all the close Senate races swung to the Republicans in the end. Grassley won reelection in a landslide.
McConnell’s unprecedented action was an exercise of raw political power unmatched in American history. It was a moment that crystallized just how polarized our politics had become and how the institutions and guardrails in our system had eroded. Outrageous acts of partisan obstruction had become normal, and the principal architect of obstruction almost always won.
McConnell had been Republican leader for ten years, and he now stood tall in the wreckage of a broken Senate. He had served as minority leader under a Republican president and a Democratic president, and he had served as majority leader under a Democratic president. In January 2017, he would be majority leader under a Republican president, with his party in control of the White House and both houses of Congress. “You have to remember, it was a pretty grim situation at the beginning of this ten-year period,” McConnell recalled. “When I woke up the morning after Election Night 2016, I thought to myself these opportunities don’t come along very often. Let’s see how we can maximize them.”65