This is the story of the most catastrophic failure of government in American history.
This failure undermined the rule of law and threatened our constitutional rights. It deepened our divisions, pitting red states against blue states, whites against blacks. It endangered our national security, weakening our alliances and strengthening our adversaries. It produced unprecedented economic hardship, throwing millions of hard-working Americans into poverty and despair. It caused many thousands of Americans to die needlessly before their time. It led directly to the insurrection at the Capitol.
It was the failure of the United States Senate, from January 2017 to February 2021.
Most American history is written about the presidents—Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan—or great events like the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II, and Vietnam. Donald Trump’s aberrational presidency has already been the subject of more than twelve hundred books; at least twelve hundred more will emerge in the years to come. People here, and around the world, will ask how America, the greatest power in the world, elevated to the presidency a celebrity reality TV star with no experience in government, whose tumultuous business record, deeply flawed personality, abuse of women, and hatred of minorities were all plainly visible.
I am quite certain that Trump will be judged harshly. His mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, his refusal to acknowledge the 2020 election results, and his incitement of the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, are likely to make him the most reviled person in our country’s history—even more so than other failed or discredited presidents, criminals, assassins, or traitors. There was never any basis for believing that he would govern competently or that he cared about doing so. Still, Trump accomplished what appears to be his life’s goal: he became the most famous person in the world.
But in the American constitutional system, no one person—not even the president—is supposed to be able to undermine our institutions and jeopardize our democracy. The framers of the Constitution wanted a strong central government because the weakness of the Articles of Confederation showed the limits of what the states could accomplish on their own. But having fought the American Revolution to free the colonies from Great Britain and its monarch, our founders feared the possibility of an overreaching executive who would seek to become a king or an autocrat. They also feared that a president might be corrupt, pursuing personal gain instead of the national interest, and that he could be susceptible to powerful foreign influences.
Consequently, the founders designed a system of checks and balances, the most distinctive feature of which was the Senate. They made it the strongest upper house in the world, with the power to “advise and consent” on executive and judicial nominations, to ratify treaties, and to hold impeachment trials. Robert C. Byrd, the longest-serving senator and its most dedicated historian, who understood the Senate’s potential and hated when it failed to reach that mark, wrote that “the American Senate was the premier spark of brilliance that emerged from the collective intellect of the Constitution’s framers.”1
James Madison, characteristically, cut to the heart of things in a letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1787. He called the Senate “the great anchor of the government. . . . Such an institution may be sometimes necessary as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions.”
The Senate would be assigned many functions, but it had one fundamental responsibility: to be a bulwark against any leader who would abuse the great powers of the presidency in ways that threatened our democracy. Some 230 years later, when just such a president finally reached the White House, the Senate should have been democracy’s strongest line of defense. Instead, a nightmare scenario followed: the Senate, weakened from a long period of accelerating decline, proved utterly incapable of checking Trump’s authoritarian desires. Sometimes the Senate aided and abetted Trump; often it simply stood by and allowed him to rampage unchecked. America had no defense against the novel threat presented by the unholy alliance between Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, in a moment of anger, correctly observed that the founders had not contemplated the combination of “a rogue president and a rogue majority leader.”
The magnitude of the Senate’s failure should be clearly understood. The Senate did not fail because of its arcane rules or because of the abuse of the filibuster. It did not fail because its members lacked the ability to do their jobs. It did not fail because the senators missed the danger signs. The overwhelming majority of the Senate knew that Trump was incompetent, corrupt, and dangerous; indeed, many saw him as a witting or unwitting agent of Vladimir Putin.
No, the Senate failed because its Republican members, led by McConnell, abandoned the late senator John McCain’s guiding principle: “Country first.” When it mattered most, the Republican senators put their personal political interests first, the Republican Party’s interests second, and the country’s interests nowhere. As America faced unprecedented, cascading, intersecting crises, the Republican senators chose to stand with Trump, either actively supporting him or silently acquiescing. Some undoubtedly convinced themselves that Trump would wither away or that they would find an exit ramp. But as George Ball, the State Department official who famously dissented from the escalation of the Vietnam War, observed, “He who rides the tiger cannot choose where he dismounts.”2
The litany of failures on the part of Mitch McConnell’s Senate is striking:
In all these ways, they created the occasion for Trump to invite his supporters to attack the Capitol.
With several notable exceptions, these Senate failures implicate virtually all the Republican senators during the Trump presidency. But in the words of the Sicilian proverb, “A fish rots from the head.” The story of the Senate’s rot is first and foremost the story of Mitch McConnell. He was an unyielding obstructionist during the Obama presidency, culminating in his refusal to hold a vote on Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016. In contrast, McConnell became a relentless battering ram with Trump in the White House. He rode roughshod over one Senate custom, norm, and tradition after another. After Trump shocked the world by winning the presidency, America urgently needed a strong Senate, with a leader in the mold of Democrat Mike Mansfield or Republican Howard Baker, politicians who are rightly remembered as great statesmen and patriots. Instead, America got McConnell, a superb political strategist and tactician who was extraordinarily effective in achieving his partisan objectives, at great cost to the Senate and the country that depended on it.
Of course, even McConnell, the most powerful Senate leader in history, could not have done what he did without his troops. Throughout the Trump presidency, McConnell had only a very narrow majority with which to work. At any moment, three or four Republicans could have stopped him in his tracks. This happened exactly once, in July 2017, when John McCain, dying of brain cancer, memorably joined Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski in defeating McConnell’s brazen attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act without hearings, committee action, or floor debate. But McConnell was never thwarted again.
Just as McConnell enabled Trump, the other Senate Republicans enabled McConnell. With the exception of Mitt Romney, who cast the only Republican vote to remove Trump from office in the first impeachment trial, all the Republican senators were complicit. The shameless Lindsey Graham, who had been John McCain’s best friend and Donald Trump’s most scathing critic, spun 180 degrees to become Trump’s favorite golf partner and McConnell’s wingman. Less obvious, and simply shameful, Lamar Alexander and Rob Portman, two superb public servants, became virtually invisible at every moment when their voices and their stature would have been useful to call attention to Trump’s abuses of the presidential office.
The reality of this breakdown was widely acknowledged. On February 25, 2020, in the tiny window between the end of Trump’s first impeachment trial and the onset of the pandemic, seventy retired senators, including seventeen Republicans and four independents, joined in a letter published in the Washington Post that stated, “The Senate is failing to perform its Constitutional duties.” One sentence in the letter leaped out: “We have been told by sitting senators that the diminished state of the Senate has left them doubting whether there is any point in continuing to serve.” Others, like New Mexico senator Tom Udall, concurred that “the Senate is broken” but attributed the brokenness to hyperpartisanship, the shrill cable news cycle, the “permanent campaign” in which there is never any time to govern, and the harsh politics of personal destruction, usually credited to the rise of Newt Gingrich in the 1980s and 1990s and intensified by the advent of Twitter and Facebook as major outlets for political discourse. All these factors are real, but they do not add up to the right explanation.
The Senate failed because Mitch McConnell and his Republican caucus repeatedly and deliberately took actions they knew to be wrong and failed to take actions they knew to be right. They averted their eyes as Trump lied about COVID-19, hawked fake cures for the virus, and mocked masks and social distancing—a deluge of misinformation that caused thousands of needless deaths. They opted for silence when Trump invited his supporters to indoor rallies in the midst of the pandemic. They refused to act when Trump attempted to bribe foreign governments with military aid in exchange for campaign assistance. They stood by silently as Trump cast aspersions on the military, the FBI, the State Department, and anyone else who for even the briefest moment pushed back against his authority and omniscience. They allowed Trump’s “big lie” that the election was stolen to poison the thinking of 70 percent of his voters—roughly fifty million Americans. The Senate’s Republican members did not just fail; they betrayed their oaths of office, sacrificing American lives and American democracy.
On January 20, 2021, Joseph R. Biden Jr. became president of the United States. Could Biden, a man of unmatched government experience and unquestioned decency, bring our country back together? Would the Senate work with a president who was one of the most experienced former senators in the history of the chamber? McConnell, who had known Biden for more than thirty-five years, waited five weeks after the election to offer his congratulations. Lindsey Graham, who has an over-the-top opinion about every subject, said in 2019, “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, you’ve got a problem and need to do some self-education, because God never created a better human being than Joe Biden.” His immediate response to Biden’s election was to resume the pursuit of the president-elect’s son, Hunter Biden, for alleged misdeeds in business dealings in Ukraine and China.
I have spent much of my career working in and writing about the Senate. It often seems to me that I have spent too much time thinking about the Senate; it took me months to decide whether to write this book. Ultimately, two things convinced me to do it. The Senate—and the one hundred men and women who serve in it—has the potential to do great good or great harm to our country; it is crucial to understand how things went terribly wrong in recent years and how the institution might move on to a better course. And in an era of alternative facts, it is vital to get the history right. Future students of history and politics need to understand how Mitch McConnell and his Senate betrayed America.
Many political observers, ranging from casual to experienced, believe that the partisan division in the Senate and the behavior of the senators are inevitable, given the deep divisions in our country. I categorically reject that formulation. These people who have the extraordinary privilege of being US senators have the responsibility to work to overcome those divisions, not simply to reflect or exacerbate them. Senators have agency; they can shape the times, not simply be buffeted by them. To take the most obvious example, McConnell’s unrelenting partisanship has shaped our era because he passed up every opportunity to work constructively in good faith, to turn down the heat, and to bring people together. Years before Donald Trump became president, we were living in Mitch McConnell’s America, and, to a greater extent than might have been anticipated, we still are.
America has paid a terrible price for the experiment with Trump, a narcissistic outsider and disrupter, with authoritarian impulses and contempt for our democratic institutions. But it is McConnell, the political stalwart and faux institutionalist, who poisoned and undermined our political system from within, transforming the Senate into a hyperpartisan battle zone, draining it of the trust and pride that made it work in its great days, while using it for his own purposes. The scope of the damage that McConnell has done to our government, our politics, and our country is still not understood. This book is intended to cast light on that damage and to chart a better path forward for the Senate and for America.