The collapse came in the middle of the night, on October 11, 2000. Three hundred million gallons of coal slurry, the viscous mix of mud, coal waste, and chemicals left as a by-product from purifying coal, broke through the inadequate buffer that separated the sixty-eight-acre holding pond of the Martin County Coal Corporation’s Big Branch Refuse Impoundment from the surrounding mine. The dark sludge poured through two miles of mine tunnels—a miner had left the area just moments earlier—before oozing out of a mountainside opening into the hilly landscape of far eastern Kentucky. It found its way into two tributaries of the Big Sandy River—first Coldwater Creek, and then, after the pressure forced a break in the other side of the impoundment, into Wolf Creek—filling them ever higher until it overran embankments, spreading toward the homes lining the creek bottoms of Inez, the 500-person town that Lyndon Baines Johnson visited in 1964 to promote his War on Poverty, and covering their yards with a vast moat of goop that rose to six feet deep in places. Inez resident Mickey McCoy threw golf-ball-size rocks into the blackened creeks and watched as they refused to sink in the noxious pudding. “It was a slow-moving black smothering,” he says. There was no immediate effort by the company to alert the townspeople sleeping in the spill’s path—Abraham Lincoln “Linc” Chapman didn’t know about the sludge until he encountered it while heading up Coldwater Creek before daybreak to bow-hunt deer. “It was a lot of chaos,” he says. “If you never saw a slurry spill it’s hard to describe it. It was like a lava flow coming down the creek bed.” His nine-year-old daughter was so terrorized by the advancing slop that he would later build another story onto their house, as a refuge from future assaults.
In the sheer scale of contamination, it was a much larger disaster than even the 1989 spill of 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound by the Exxon Valdez. As documented in reports by Washington Monthly and Salon and a documentary film by Robert Salyer, the slurry’s seventy-five-mile course of destruction downstream to the Ohio River killed 1.6 million fish and countless wildlife that got stuck in the muck or drank from it; carried away roads and bridges; and contaminated the water systems of more than 27,000 people (a 2001 study by the Environmental Protection Agency found up to thirty times the typical levels of arsenic and mercury in Inez’s groundwater). The cleanup only exacerbated the damage, as trucks and other heavy equipment rolled onto people’s lawns, ripping up gas lines and knocking over trees. Later “creek bank reconstruction” efforts resulted in widespread tree removal and in many places only exacerbated erosion. “People’s property just gets eaten off and falls,” says Chapman. The only consolation was the miraculous lack of any loss of human life (though many residents reported suffering from rashes and respiratory problems). A 1972 slurry flood following a dam break in Buffalo Creek, across the border in Logan County, West Virginia, had claimed the lives of 125 people; had the Martin Creek spill surged entirely into Coldwater Creek instead of being diverted into Wolf Creek as well, it could have swept away hundreds of townspeople.
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration kicked into gear, with an investigative team led by Tony Oppegard, a senior political appointee. His second in command was Jack Spadaro, a career MSHA engineer. As a twenty-three-year-old new hire at the agency, Spadaro had worked on the Buffalo Creek investigation and was haunted by it still. The team found a trail of clues implicating both Martin County Coal’s owner, the mining giant Massey Energy, and their own agency, most notably a 1994 recommendation by an MSHA engineer, following a slurry spill at the same impoundment earlier that year, that Martin County Coal needed to carry out a host of recommendations before it could resume using the holding pond. Martin County Coal had failed to carry out the recommendations, and MSHA had failed to follow up on them. The rock and earthen wall separating the pond and the adjacent mine was as thin as 15 feet in spots—far below the 150 feet recommended by MSHA, far below the 70 feet Martin County Coal had claimed it to be on a map submitted to MSHA, and far too meager to hold back the pond, which was 80 feet deep at the time of the break. Oppegard and Spadaro’s team of investigators was on its way to preparing to bring eight separate violations against Massey that together could have resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars of fines and laid the foundation for charges of willful and criminal negligence. “It’s a crazy thing to build an impoundment over an active coal mine,” says Oppegard.
As their investigation in deepest Appalachia proceeded, though, another process had been dragging out in sunny Florida. And on December 12, with a 5–4 ruling by the Supreme Court reversing the Florida Supreme Court’s call for a statewide recount of votes, George W. Bush was decreed president of the United States. The senior senator from the state where the coal slurry spill occurred was overcome with glee. “I don’t think I have ever felt better, including my own election victories, than the night of the Supreme Court decision,” McConnell said later. “I felt so deeply that Al Gore was a horrible person and was wrong for the country and ought not to be president of the United States.” As head of the Rules Committee, McConnell would preside over the inauguration, and inaugurating Gore, he said, would have been “enough to make me want to call in sick.” Instead, Bush was sworn in at a $40 million ceremony. And that day, Tony Oppegard got a call in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, from superiors at MSHA telling him that the incoming Bush administration was declining to approve the six-month extension that had been arranged for Oppegard so he could finish the investigation. “It was ‘Don’t come back tomorrow, because you’re out of a job,’ basically,” he says.
Tim Thompson, a district manager from Morgantown, West Virginia, replaced Oppegard. On arriving in Kentucky, Thompson announced that he wanted the investigation scaled back. Spadaro and his colleagues still had thirty people left to interview, but he told them that they only had time for six. “We were told, ‘Boys, you need to close out your investigation,’ ” says Spadaro. “We said, no, we’re not done. He said, ‘You’re done.’ ”
Thompson says the investigation needed to be reined in because it was getting beyond issues of mine safety and into environmental violations better left to the EPA and state environmental officials. “Some of the environmental things were really ugly,” he said. “But the violations they said existed were not violations of the Mine Safety Act.” Spadaro and Oppegard disagreed, saying the violations they were pursuing were very much related to mine safety, given that the holding pond was next to a working coal mine.
There was a new regime at the Mine Safety and Health Administration. And at the top was Elaine Chao, Mitch McConnell’s second wife, whom Bush nominated as secretary of labor upon taking office. Chao had suitable politics for the Bush administration (she was far more conservative than McConnell’s first wife) but had little experience with mining safety. In addition to running the Peace Corps, she had led the United Way and served on the Federal Maritime Commission. Her husband, on the other hand, had for sixteen years represented one of the biggest coal mining states in the country. She turned to him to fill out her office. She hired as her chief of staff Steven Law, who had served six years as McConnell’s chief of staff. She hired as her spokesman McConnell’s former spokesman. Bush nominated as the head of MSHA a former Utah coal operator named David Lauriski; his two deputies were also former coal mining executives. Lauriski in turn hired as one of his aides yet another former McConnell staffer, Andrew Rajec, who started attending many of the meetings of the Martin County investigators.
Thompson pushed to have the case against Massey reduced to just two violations with a fine of $55,000 each, rather than the eight that Spadaro and his fellow investigators believed were justified. One day in April 2002, Thompson got a call from MSHA headquarters outside Washington, D.C., after which, with the investigators watching, he crossed out a section of the draft report that called MSHA to account for its lax oversight.
That was enough for Spadaro. Seeing where things were heading, he tendered his resignation in a letter published in the local papers. “I do not believe that the accident investigation report, as it is being developed, will offer complete and objective analysis of the accident and its causes,” he wrote. As word of Spadaro’s protest spread, Elaine Chao dismissed it by telling a reporter, “It’s time to call off the MSHA food fight over the Martin County Coal Slurry investigation.”
For Spadaro, the consequences for speaking out became clear. Back at his regular post running MSHA’s training academy in West Virginia, he became the target of an internal audit for making thirteen cash advances with his agency credit card to entertain students and visiting dignitaries, including a Chinese delegation. He had paid the charges back, but the audit cited $22.60 in processing fees for the advances and suspended him for three days. In 2003, he was called to MSHA headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, and upbraided for letting an MSHA inspector with multiple sclerosis who was teaching classes at the academy live at the academy free of charge. Spadaro noted that his superiors had approved the arrangement, but he was placed on administrative leave anyway. He learned later that while he’d been in Arlington, MSHA officials had gone to his office in West Virginia to confiscate his files and hard drive. They picked apart his family photos to search for incriminating evidence he might have tucked inside the frames. A few months later, he was fired. He challenged his termination and had it reduced to administrative leave, but when the agency then demoted him and ordered him to a post in Pittsburgh, he relented and quit.
Meanwhile, the dispute over the Martin County investigation carried on in Spadaro’s absence. In October 2001, Thompson asked that the remaining investigators sign off on the final report, without giving them a chance to read it. When they protested, Thompson put them on a conference call with Lauriski, the new MSHA chief, who made clear that the orders were coming from the top. The following April, MSHA cited Martin County Coal with just the two violations, and so halfhearted a case had the agency mounted for even those two that one was later overturned by an administrative judge and the other reduced to a mere $5,600.
The company did face $3.5 million in state fines, plus undisclosed restitution costs to homeowners. But the lightness of the repercussions from the main federal oversight agency for coal mines was conspicuous. In 2003, the Department of Labor’s inspector general released a report on the investigation confirming most of Spadaro’s claims about the undermining of the investigation by his superiors—but the impact of the report itself was softened by widespread redactions that left half of the twenty-six pages crossed out.
Why had Elaine Chao’s Department of Labor gone so easy on Martin County Coal and Massey Energy? It would have been easy enough to blame the slurry spill on the Clinton administration, whose MSHA appointees had been so lax in following up on the recommendations following the 1994 spill.
Doing so, though, would’ve meant coming down hard on the coal industry—not just Massey Energy, but other coal companies as well, to the extent that the administration decided to tighten restrictions on the dozens of other slurry impoundments built over coal mines. And Elaine Chao and the rest of the administration were unlikely to take that approach. The coal industry had tripled its contributions in the 2000 campaign, more than four years earlier, and virtually all of this money had gone to Republicans. A coal tycoon whom Massey brought onto its board in 2001, James H. “Buck” Harless, had raised $275,000 for Bush’s campaign, kicked in $5,000 for the Florida recount fight, and topped it off with $100,000 for the inaugural fund.
The financial bond was even stronger with the senator who had played such an influential role in filling the senior levels of Elaine Chao’s administration. Yes, the residents who’d seen their property damaged and water contaminated by the slurry spill were Mitch McConnell’s constituents. But over McConnell’s career, his fifth-biggest source of campaign contributions was Peabody Energy, the largest coal company in the world. And between 1997 and 2000, when McConnell was leading the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the coal industry had given $584,000 to the group, making it one of the group’s most reliable supporters, according to Washington Monthly.
Those contributions to the NRSC hadn’t included any from Massey Energy. That is, not until 2002, with the investigation still proceeding, when Massey gave the NRSC $100,000. McConnell had over the prior decade also been the second-highest recipient in Washington of direct contributions from people tied to Massey, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Spadaro, for one, had no difficulty connecting the dots. “It was Mitch McConnell who fired Jack Spadaro,” he says. “I’ve been around a long time and I swear this was one of the most outrageous things I’ve seen. It was one of the most blatant circumventions of the law and it was all orchestrated by Mitch McConnell’s people.”
It hadn’t always been about the money, at least at first. In December 1973, while newly installed as chairman of the Jefferson County GOP at a time when the shadow of Watergate was lengthening over his party, the thirty-one-year-old McConnell had submitted an op-ed to the Courier-Journal calling for “truly effective campaign finance reform.” His proposal was aggressive: in local Kentucky races, he said, contribution limits should be drastically lowered, from $2,500 to $300; all donors should be disclosed; and candidates should have to abide by a ceiling on overall spending—a restraint that many of the most aggressive of campaign finance reformers have been leery to propose. That wasn’t all. He hailed a city-run campaign trust fund then under consideration and wrote favorably of public financing for both gubernatorial campaigns and presidential campaigns. Under the status quo, he lamented, “Many qualified and ethical persons are either totally priced out of the election marketplace or will not submit themselves to questionable, or downright illicit, practices that may accompany the current electoral process.”
Years later, McConnell dismissed his op-ed as mere posturing, “playing for headlines” to divert readers from Watergate. To the extent his position was at all sincere, he said, he began to reassess it a few months later, while teaching a night class at the University of Louisville. Or as Dyche paraphrased it: “After studying and teaching how political parties operated and elections were won, he began to believe that much of what he had been saying about campaign finance was radically wrong. This epiphany would become an important part of his political philosophy and a focal point of his future career.”
This was a charitable interpretation, that a single class as an adjunct instructor would bring about a transformation in how to judge the ethics of money in politics. McConnell had been around enough campaigns by that point to know “how elections were won.” More credible was a different explanation that McConnell offered for his own evolution, one tied not to his 1974 class but to his first victory as a candidate, in 1977. The race against Hollenbach had been the most expensive race in Louisville’s history. McConnell had spent $355,000 to win it. The lesson to the former reformer was plain: in campaigns, “[e]verything else is in second place” to fund-raising, he told the Courier-Journal after taking office. “Paid television commercials are an indispensable part of winning a modern campaign in an urban area. This is not to say that I like that or am happy about it, or that I think it’s the most informed way to make a decision. It is nevertheless a fact of life.” In the future, he warned any and all opponents, “I will always be well financed, and I’ll be well financed early.”
As grudging as this concession to reality sounded, Mitch McConnell seemed to like fund-raising—or at least liked it enough to excel at it. Joe Whittle, the former state Republican chairman who campaigned alongside McConnell in 1984, still marvels at his lack of reluctance when it came to asking others for money. “Mitch has an uncanny ability to sit down with people and tell them what needs to be done and say, ‘I need your help.’ ” Whittle compared it to his own meager collection during his run for state attorney general. “A small-town lawyer like I was would ask for fifty dollars. He’d ask for five thousand.” If, Whittle says, McConnell called someone up who told him, “I’m a little tight now. I’m going to wait till after the primary,” McConnell refused to settle for that, knowing that the limit for giving after the primary was only half as much. “He’d say, ‘There’s a report coming out and I need to show support,’ ” says Whittle. Dyche recounts a time in McConnell’s endless cold-calling of Republican donors in 1984 when he went to the wrong house and nonetheless finagled $4,000 out of the mistaken hosts, and $2,000 from their relative next door.
Former senator Alan Simpson, a Wyoming Republican who served alongside McConnell for twelve years, says this avidity was one of the most striking characteristics of McConnell. “When you raise the flag and somebody hollers from the back of the room, ‘Does anyone want to go to a fund-raiser and raise some bucks?’ Mitch will be right there,” says Simpson. “It’s a joy to him. He gets a twinkle in his eye and his step quickens. I mean, he loves it.” Forgy, the Reagan campaign chairman in Kentucky, speculates that this strength derives from McConnell’s recognition of his own weakness, the same self-awareness his first campaign consultants noted in him. “He knows that without a definite advantage in money, he’s not going anywhere in politics. If he had to meet voters on a stump in a traditional way, the way politicians used to, without the benefit of ads, he’d be a lost ball in high weeds,” Forgy says. “Politics in small Southern states requires a certain amount of showmanship and he just didn’t have the ability to do that.”
The ease of relieving supporters of their money extended beyond campaign contributions. On being elected county executive, which was paid about $80,000 in today’s dollars, McConnell set up an arrangement with an undisclosed group of local business leaders who had supported his campaign. They paid a supplement of $25,000—$91,000 in today’s dollars—in exchange for giving some speeches around town. “It had never been done before,” says Hollenbach. “It was all kind of a mystery. Suddenly there was this mysterious group contributing $30,000 in matching funds.” (Some reports put the sum at more than $30,000.) After his high-spending reelection campaign for county executive, McConnell had accepted a free five-day vacation to Cancun paid for by a Louisville television station as part of a promotion for heavy advertisers. The eagerness to accept supplementary income continued when he reached the Senate. Just two years after hammering Huddleston for his cross-country travel to give paid speeches, McConnell earned $10,500 during an eleven-day speaking tour on the West Coast. He reported the income but got unwelcome headlines later when it emerged that he had let corporate sponsors pay for his companion’s travel expenses as well as his own, plus her expenses for an expensive trip to Japan, against Federal Election Commission rules. “Many of us are not millionaires,” he said at the time, explaining his speechifying. “It’s nice to have some options.”
So adept was McConnell at fund-raising that, by his own admission, he spent a lot of his time in his first months in Washington devoted to it, five years before his next race—a level of preparation that at that point was still unusual among senators. By the end of 1985, he had banked more than $700,000 in today’s dollars, “putting more emphasis on reelection than legislation,” as Dyche put it.
Before too long, though, the fund-raising was becoming such an emphasis that it was not so much diverting McConnell from legislating as determining which legislation he cared about. In 1987, he sponsored a proposed constitutional amendment giving Congress the power to limit independent expenditures on campaigns and on candidates’ use of personal funds for their own races. In May 1990, he made his first real reach out of junior-status obscurity when he wrote the Republican counterproposal to a sweeping Democratic campaign finance reform bill that would have instituted partial public financing for Senate and House candidates who agreed to voluntary spending limits. McConnell’s plan rejected public financing and spending limits (both of which he’d spoken favorably of in that 1973 op-ed) and instead called for abolishing political action committees. The PAC clampdown had the benefit of both appearing principled and being self-interested: McConnell was still sore about having gotten less PAC support in 1984 than Huddleston had (though he’d risen in the ranks of PAC beneficiaries once in office).
But the real point of contention was spending limits. It looked for a while as if a compromise that included them was gaining ground among some Republican senators. At a GOP retreat in West Virginia, the rookie senator rose to quash this momentum, arguing that rejecting spending limits was, in the words of one participant, “in the best interest of Republicans.” He rallied enough Republicans to sustain a filibuster against the compromise while, with his own proposal, having given his party cover on the issue. “Thus far he’s devoted himself to coming up with proposals that make compromise impossible,” said Oklahoma senator David Boren, the lead sponsor of the Democratic bill. “I really think he doesn’t want to see a change in the current program, unless it works to the advantage of his own party.”
McConnell had found his legislative calling. He was becoming informed enough on the dry subject to get more senior colleagues to listen to him. (“Like him or not, Mitch McConnell is an expert on campaign finance reform,” veteran New Hampshire Republican Warren Rudman said in 1990.) And he was learning the art of opposing reforms that might hurt his party while at the same time supporting ones that would hurt the other party—or that stood no real chance of becoming law. In 1993, his focus shifted from banning PAC contributions to banning “soft money,” the large sums collected by parties from corporations, unions, and wealthy donors outside the individual contribution limits for candidates, a source of funds that Democrats were becoming adept at exploiting for so-called issue ads that barely skirted prohibitions against the use of such funds to aid specific candidates directly. “Soft money should be banned. All campaign spending should be on the top of the table where voters can see it,” McConnell wrote in a 1993 op-ed.
And he was discovering another tool of gamesmanship: how to gum up the works for partisan advantage. In 1994, as Democrats were trying to make the most of their remaining months before midterm elections that were boding poorly for them, McConnell deduced that the Senate would have to pass three motions, each subject to filibuster before the House and Senate could settle differences between the campaign finance bills passed by each chamber that year. In a kind of eureka moment, McConnell launched successful filibusters of these once-routine motions, thereby eating up much of the Democrats’ precious remaining time on the calendar—and foiling campaign finance reform in the process. It was, he told the Weekly Standard years later, his “proudest legislative accomplishment” to date.
Once it takes hold, the motivating force of money in politics is boundless, reshaping and redirecting everything in its path, not unlike runaway coal slurry.
On arriving in the Senate in 1985, McConnell had been assigned, for the two committee seats allotted to each senator, to serve on the Judiciary and Agriculture panels. Two years later, he had switched from Judiciary to the esteemed Foreign Relations Committee, following in the footsteps of John Sherman Cooper and giving him a perch for his increasingly hawkish, internationalist views. But in 1993, he leapt at the opportunity to leave Foreign Relations for Appropriations, where, with the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, he assumed the chairmanship of the subcommittee on foreign operations.
This change was the best of both worlds—being able to keep a hand in world affairs while also getting to have a hand on the budget. Holding hearings and issuing reports at Foreign Relations was one thing, but deciding which programs or countries got how much of the country’s $20 billion foreign aid budget was something else entirely. And it came with a crucial bonus: those with control over the money tended to raise more money.
Some of the causes championed by the new subcommittee chairman appeared to be the function of a genuine internationalism seeking to protect human rights and oppose communism. Long before Aung San Suu Kyi became a global celebrity, McConnell promoted the plight of suppressed dissidents in Burma. But it was hard not to notice that other small countries that attracted McConnell’s interest happened to be attached to ethnic communities in the United States eager to reward him for his efforts.
In the decade after he took control of the subcommittee, McConnell increased annual aid to the small former Soviet republic of Armenia to $90 million a year, or as much as $25 million more than the Clinton and Bush administrations sought. At the same time, he took a cooler stance toward Azerbaijan, Armenia’s neighbor and historic rival, which has a far smaller immigrant community in the United States. In 1992, he had been one of only four members of Congress who voted to allow aid to Azerbaijan, but after taking over the appropriations subcommittee, he turned against that nation during its territorial disputes with Armenia, which resulted in more than a half-million refugees on the Azeri side of the border. By the late 1990s, Azerbaijan was receiving $12 per capita in U.S. aid, to Armenia’s $180. And in 2004, McConnell touted this skewed arrangement in a speech to an Armenian-American conference in Washington. “Armenia received $75 million last year, and that is considerably more than Azerbaijan, an imbalance I don’t apologize for,” he said. “And we will try to achieve such an imbalance again this year.”
The gratitude of Armenian-Americans—a famously cohesive immigrant community—was abundant. A wealthy Armenian-American bakery magnate, Albert Boyajian, who took McConnell on a tour of Armenia in 1996, hosted an annual fund-raiser in California for his “good friend Mitch.” Armenian-Americans in California alone had given McConnell $125,000 after his first decade on the subcommittee, as the Herald-Leader noted in 2006. Boyajian himself gave $50,000 to Republicans over the prior decade, and was awarded the “Republican Senatorial Medal of Freedom” by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which McConnell led for four years.
Confronted with these dollar figures by the Herald-Leader, McConnell downplayed their influence. “I assume they support myself and others because they like my views,” he said then. But in 1996 he was more candid about his motivations, in remarks he made on the Senate floor. “We have a lot of Jewish-Americans who are interested in Israel, a lot of Armenian-Americans who are interested in Armenia, and a lot of Ukraine-Americans who are interested in Ukraine,” he said. “Boy, when we hear from them, we get real interested.” McConnell was speaking for himself—from his arrival in the Senate, he had built close ties to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and as subcommittee chairman, he had earmarked $225 million per year for Ukraine, for which he was rewarded on fund-raising trips to neighboring Ohio and Illinois, both home to large Ukrainian-American communities.
The dynamic was obvious. And it caused no end of difficulties for both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, since every dollar of foreign aid spent above an administration request for one country or group meant less for another. Fixed earmarks like the one for Ukraine left the administration with less flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances around the world. “He could go to places like Chicago and Cleveland and raise money. It was a big factor—and it was a factor in terms of our zero sum budget,” says J. Brian Atwood, who served as Clinton’s administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The administration had a sizable “peace dividend” to use after the Cold War and had been hoping to direct some of it to development in the Third World, but McConnell again and again would direct it to his favored nations instead. “He took it all out of USAID when he earmarked for these countries,” says Atwood. “He not only created foreign policy issues for us but squeezed out money for other purposes.” Atwood would protest this arrangement at McConnell’s hearings, with “those cold, hard eyes” of McConnell staring down on him, to no avail. “He would smile wryly,” Atwood recalls. “We all knew what the game was about.”
The reach of money—and the pressure to raise it—was so broad that it encompassed even the realm of romance.
McConnell had started dating Elaine Chao in 1991, after being set up with her at a candlelight dinner arranged by an old friend of his, a former public-interest lawyer against the Vietnam War. (McConnell had prevailed over another suitor, President George H. W. Bush’s White House counsel C. Boyden Gray, according to the New York Times.) At the time they were dating, Chao was the director of the Peace Corps, and McConnell’s neighbors in Capitol Hill would see her pull up to pick him up in her official chauffeured town car. (When word of this use of the taxpayer-funded car got back to legislative staffers who handled the Peace Corps budget—on the subcommittee McConnell would later lead—they called the agency and demanded an explanation.)
But McConnell had known Chao and her family for a few years prior—as campaign contributors. When Chao had first met McConnell in 1987, she was serving on the Federal Maritime Commission, a natural posting for the daughter of a Chinese shipping magnate. James Chao had fled from mainland China to Taiwan in 1949, before coming to the United States a decade later, but had in recent years started doing more and more business with the mainland.
Chao had started raising money for Republicans while on the maritime commission, and in 1989 her family and associates’ largesse began to flow to McConnell as well. Just days after the Chinese army killed several hundred protesters amid the Tiananmen Square uprising, McConnell received $10,000 from her family and others tied to her father’s company, Foremost Maritime. A couple of months later, McConnell flew to a Los Angeles fund-raiser with Asian-Americans in the Pacific Leadership Conference, a group that included two people who would later be convicted of laundering political contributions for Democratic candidates. That event netted McConnell $10,750, which brought his total 1989 take from this new source of contributors to $21,750—not all that much less, the New Republic noted in a 2001 article, than the $32,500 he had netted that year from his top backers at the time, tobacco PACs.
The subsequent shift in McConnell’s approach to China was even more marked than his evolution on the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. On arriving in the Senate, his rush to show his conservative bona fides had included allying himself with Jesse Helms, the stridently anticommunist ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee. In McConnell’s first year, he had joined just seven Republicans to sign a fiery letter from Helms demanding that the Reagan administration name more hawks to top foreign policy positions. Helms’s brand of conservatism translated into fierce opposition of the Chinese government, and on the rare occasions when McConnell spoke out about China, he adopted a bellicose tone.
As the contributions started coming in, McConnell’s interest in China grew and his tone softened. He helped win a special provision that the members of the Pacific Leadership Conference were seeking, a fourfold increase in the number of annual visas for Hong Kong residents. He also adopted another goal of many in the Chinese-American business community, the opening of the Chinese economy. And he came around to supporting “most favored nation” status for China, without conditions—a major break with Helms. As the economic ties expanded and the Chinese economy boomed, so did McConnell’s standing with the companies thriving off the growth: in the two years prior to his 1996 reelection, the New Republic reported, he received PAC contributions from 19 of the top 20 contributors of the U.S.-China Business Council. James Chao—as of 1993, his father-in-law—remained generous, raising $34,000 for McConnell in the month in 1994 when he took the helm of the Senate’s Foreign Operations subcommittee. In 1996, the Chao family added $25,000 for the Kentucky Republican Party. (None of this activity kept McConnell from warning about “Red China” in fund-raising letters attacking the Clinton administration for the murky campaign money it received from Asian donors in 1996.)
Back in 1989, in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre, McConnell had declared that he would “never forget the sight of those young people without arms up against tanks and machine guns.” But as the next decade progressed, the ties grew ever closer with the regime that had ordered that crackdown. The Chinese representative to the United Nations was a guest at McConnell and Chao’s wedding. Later that year, the newlyweds went to Beijing with James Chao, and McConnell became only the second Republican senator to meet with Chinese leader Jiang Zemin since the 1989 massacre. Jiang met again with the couple when he came to Washington in 1997. And in 1999, McConnell and Chao hosted the Chinese ambassador at the University of Louisville, where the ambassador railed against the U.S. House of Representatives for having condemned his government’s violent suppression of the Falun Gong religious sect, comments that McConnell made no attempt to distance himself from in his own remarks. Harry Wu, who spent about twenty years in Chinese prisons as a political dissident before landing at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank, told the Herald-Leader what motivated McConnell’s warming relations with Beijing: “No mystery. It’s the money.”
The University of Louisville itself became a focus of the growing McConnell bond with China. In 1991, at the start of his second term and as his relationship with Chao and his ties to Chinese-Americans donors were building, McConnell began setting up what would become the McConnell Center for Political Leadership at his alma mater, essentially a scholarship program for young Kentuckians interested in political science that also hosts occasional lectures and visits by dignitaries. From the start, there was a strong Chinese inflection at the center—scholarship recipients were expected to spend a summer in China, and a disproportionate share of the center’s events involved China, such as the ambassador’s anti–Falun Gong speech.
Given that the focus of such ventures often reflects the interests of the funders, it was natural to wonder whether the center was getting support from some of the same Chinese-American donors who had started donating to McConnell’s campaigns in the same period. But there was no way of knowing. The McConnell Center, for which McConnell raised $2.4 million at the outset and another $1 million or so over the course of the next decade, was not going to disclose its donors, a condition that the University of Louisville faculty affiliated with the center were not happy with, but accepted as an unconditional requirement from McConnell. “We made a little pact with the devil,” says Ron Vogel, the former chairman of the university’s political science department, now a professor at Ryerson University in Toronto. “We had a discussion: Do we want to have a McConnell Center? If we’re going to have one, the money had to be raised for it, and if he’s going to go out and raise the money, he’s not going to want us sniping about it.”
The faculty decided to go along with it, and McConnell got a big boon: the publicity that came from the perennial photo ops he’d take with each year’s ten scholarship recipients and from the events with the visiting dignitaries, all under the aegis of a program named for him. There were occasional conflicts, such as the time in the late 1990s when one of the scholarship recipients became pregnant, to McConnell’s great anger. He proposed a new requirement that recipients not have any children, a suggestion opposed by the faculty, who argued that the program should be supportive of a young woman who decided to carry a child to term, and should not be engaged in administering chastity oaths. Over time, though, the odds of such conflicts diminished as McConnell shifted the center out of the control of the faculty, with leadership of his choosing.
All throughout, McConnell and allied administrators at the university fought to keep the center’s donors secret. When the Courier-Journal sued for disclosure, the case climbed all the way to the state Supreme Court, which in 2008 ruled that future donors would have to be disclosed but that the center’s sixty-two donors to that point could remain hidden. The Courier-Journal had managed to suss out some of the past donors—$833,000 from Toyota (which counted McConnell among its Washington allies during the storm over its massive 2010 recall); $600,000 combined from R. J. Reynolds and Philip Morris; and $250,000 from Yum! Inc., the huge KFC/ Pizza Hut/ Taco Bell franchiser, which stood to benefit from a bill sponsored by McConnell to protect the fast-food industry against lawsuits charging that their offerings cause obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.
Perhaps most notable, though, was the $500,000 gift for the center from a subsidiary of BAE Systems, the giant British-based defense contractor, which in 2010 paid a record $450 million fine to settle an extended bribery investigation by American and British authorities. In 2007, with that investigation already public knowledge, McConnell secured for BAE three earmarks worth $25 million—for purchases that the Pentagon itself had not requested.
It was just what some of the university’s faculty members had warned about at the outset. “We didn’t want this to become a mechanism for influence peddling outside normal channels for political accountability,” says one professor. “We were concerned about who would be funding it and that the department would be implicated in postures we wouldn’t even know about because we wouldn’t know who the funders were.” Vogel, the former political science department chairman, was more fatalistic: “What money supporting these things has ever been clean?”
One day in 1995, McConnell was huddling in the Senate with one of his few confidants, Robert Bennett of Utah, when he told him he was about to flip on a hot-button issue. Back in 1990, McConnell had joined most of his fellow Republicans in voting for an amendment to ban flag-burning—and had then proceeded to attack Harvey Sloane in that fall’s campaign over his party’s opposition to the amendment. But with Bennett’s fellow Utah Republican, Orrin Hatch, mounting a new push for an amendment five years later, McConnell was ready to join only three other Republicans in opposing it—Bennett and two liberal New Englanders, John Chafee and James Jeffords. As Bennett recalls, “He said, ‘You know, I voted for it and just as I walked off the floor I realized I made a mistake. And I’m not going to vote to weaken the First Amendment ever again.’ ”
If one needed further proof of how central money in politics had become for McConnell, this flip-flop was it: he was willing to surrender a perennial crowd-pleasing issue to strengthen his case for arguing against limits on campaign financing. Up until this point, McConnell had relied on expedient arguments to make his case against new regulations, pointing out to his fellow Republicans how this or that new rule would hurt their party or help the other party. He was no less blunt in justifying his opposition to campaign finance restrictions to the reformers and editorialists who chided him for it, arguing that Kentucky Republicans had no choice but to rake in as much money as they could if they wanted to compete in a state with so many more registered Democrats and with its two major newspapers, the Courier-Journal and Herald-Leader, leaning left. Money, he said, was the great leveler.
But this justification was growing thinner. Kentucky still had more registered Democrats than Republicans, but it was trending toward the latter, especially in federal elections—1996 would be the last time a Democratic presidential candidate carried the state. Eventually the state would be down to a single Democratic congressman out of six. McConnell’s case for fighting restrictions would be far stronger if it could be lashed to a constitutional principle, namely the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech. In Buckley v. Valeo, its landmark decision on campaign finance, the Supreme Court had ruled that the First Amendment barred limits on political spending, while leaving some room for the government to regulate direct contributions to candidates. This ruling, in 1976, had not kept McConnell from maintaining his support for various levels of restrictions for more than a decade—including that constitutional amendment he proposed in 1987 to circumvent Buckley’s interpretation of the First Amendment. Two decades later, though, he saw the power of the First Amendment claim in Buckley. To make his resistance to stricter regulations credible, he knew it would help to be seen as standing on that principle. There was no better way to stake a claim to principle than to hew to it even when it went against one of his party’s political planks: the prohibition of flag-burning.
It was shrewd. McConnell got great symbolic weight out of surrendering a political gambit—an amendment to ban flag-burning—that was never going to be more than symbolic itself. It was cost-free, with a huge payoff (and to make sure it was cost-free, McConnell cosponsored a separate, fig-leaf bill calling for the protection of the flag). “He switched to the First Amendment,” says Joan Claybrook, who often faced off against McConnell on campaign finance reform in her long tenure as president of Public Citizen. “It was pure politics—whatever rationale sold, he would use. I don’t think he believed it for a minute.” Even those far more sympathetic to McConnell suspect that his free speech invocations had more than a little expedience in them: “He believes in freedom of speech, but as a pragmatic politician he also believes in the power of political spending,” says Richard Lugar, the former Republican senator from Indiana who was one of McConnell’s closest associates. “Pragmatically, he’s come to the conclusion that raising money is tremendously important for his own success.”
An added bonus in McConnell’s newfound consistency in standing up for the First Amendment was that it provided cover for his continued inconsistency on the particulars of campaign finance law. Just as he had abandoned his support for spending limits and in its place proposed banning soft money, the unlimited contributions that flowed to parties from corporations, unions, and wealthy individuals, as the decade went on McConnell started taking up the defense of soft money, calling it preferable to undisclosed spending by outside groups. “Soft money is just a euphemism for free speech,” he said. The shift could be explained, again, by changing circumstances: back when McConnell had proposed soft money clampdowns in 1993, it appeared Democrats had the edge with soft money. (Claybrook still recalls bringing along a chart to show McConnell at hearings, to persuade him out of his conviction that Democrats were benefiting more from soft money than Republicans.)
But after the soft money scandals of the 1996 election, which involved illegal foreign money and the use of the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House, the reformers’ attention turned to reining in those funds—and who should rise in opposition but McConnell. By that point, the truth of Claybrook’s claim about the Republicans benefiting no less from soft money than Democrats had become harder to deny. (“If we stop this thing, we can control the institution for the next twenty years,” McConnell reportedly told Republican colleagues in 1997, referring to the effort to ban soft money.) And McConnell had himself become a crucial cog in the party machinery that relied so much on soft money, by having become, in 1997, the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. As efforts to limit soft money gained momentum late in the decade—led by the bipartisan duo of Arizona Republican John McCain and Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold—the first line of resistance to them was the author of an op-ed from just a few years earlier arguing for that very reform.
From his new perch as chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, McConnell would parry endlessly with the advocates of greater restrictions on soft money who would appear before him at hearings and who, almost in spite of themselves, came to respect his grasp of the subject. “He did not seem to be reading off of a script like everybody else is,” says Joshua Rosenkranz, a lawyer who, as then-president of the Brennan Center for Justice, came before the committee arguing for restrictions on outside spending on elections in the final weeks before Election Day. “It was one of the more intellectual exchanges I’ve had on Capitol Hill in a world where intellectual exchanges are quite rare.” It was striking watching the dour senator come alive on this issue, Rosenkranz says. “There is passion there—it is real and palpable,” he says. “Whether it’s passion driven by a philosophy of what the Constitution should permit in a free society or passion driven by a desire to enable his side to win elections, I just don’t know.”
McConnell took his cause everywhere. He started enlisting conservative talk radio, notably Rush Limbaugh’s show, to talk up his cause. He became a regular on the networks and cable TV—in 1999, he made ninety-nine appearances on national television. In addition to rallying conservative think tanks and editorialists behind his cause, he reached out to the American Civil Liberties Union, realizing that having that liberal group on his side would only buttress his claim to be fighting spending restrictions on constitutional and not partisan grounds. The ACLU, which at the time viewed contribution limits as a restriction on free speech (it has since rethought that stance), acquiesced. “McConnell wanted to make use of our opposition, and we did not mind,” says Laura Murphy, head of the ACLU’s Washington legislative office. “He developed a healthy respect for our organization and our principled stand.” McConnell also crossed the aisle within the Senate, framing his anti-reform arguments in ways he knew might connect with some Democrats. He showed up at the office of Bob Kerrey, the Nebraska Democrat, to try to get him to drop his support for limited public campaign financing. McConnell knew Kerrey fancied himself an entitlement reformer, so that’s how he pitched this case: “He came and made a case that public finance is creating a new entitlement,” Kerrey recalls. “I had spent a lot of time on entitlements, so he almost persuaded me to be with him.”
On the flip side, McConnell punished fellow Republicans pushing for new campaign finance restrictions. In 1998, he withheld funding from the National Republican Senatorial Committee for the campaign of Linda Smith, a Washington congresswoman who was challenging Democratic senator Patty Murray. Smith was a staunch conservative who had fought to cut government spending and limit abortions, but she also favored getting special interest money out of politics. Dale Foreman, then the chairman of the Washington State Republican Party, recalls meeting with McConnell in his Senate office to find out what sort of support the NRSC would provide to unseat Murray and hearing the unvarnished warning: if Linda Smith got the nomination, her support for campaign finance reform would keep the NRSC out of the race. “He was very lukewarm on her candidacy,” says Foreman. “It was very clear that he did not want Linda Smith to be the nominee for the state of Washington and if she was, he was not in favor of using national money to support her candidacy.” McConnell held true to his word. Smith was left to fend for herself, and Murray won reelection easily.
Linda Smith was not the only natural ally to face repercussions for backing campaign finance reform. In the wake of the campaign funding scandals of the 1996 election, the Committee for Economic Development, an alliance of centrist business leaders, started exploring possible reforms to a system that encouraged cronyism and forced them to entertain constant entreaties for campaign money. “We prefer to compete in the marketplace, not the political realm,” says Charles Kolb, the organization’s then president. “People didn’t like the shakedown.” In 1999, the committee put out a report on the issue. When CNN did a segment on it, it introduced the news with a video of a man biting a dog, to convey the unlikeliness of big businesses speaking out against corporate money in politics. “We were going against the conventional wisdom: it was, ‘Wait a minute, there are people in business who don’t like the system?’ ” says Kolb. “We were challenging that, and saying that [the status quo] was a bad thing for the country, a bad thing for the economy, and a bad thing for the business community.”
Not long after the report appeared, several of the committee’s board members got a letter from the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Mitch McConnell, asking them, in Kolb’s words, “How could you of all people be associated with an organization that is in bed with radical environmentalists?” It was so “crudely” written, Kolb says, that the business leaders who received it assumed it had been drafted by an overzealous NRSC staff member, and disregarded it. But soon afterward, a second set of letters arrived on the same letterhead. This time there was no doubt of its provenance: at the bottom of the letters was a handwritten note from McConnell himself saying, essentially, “I hope you will resign from the CED.”
Kolb was taken aback. He had a friendly history with McConnell—he had served as general counsel at the United Way under Elaine Chao’s leadership, had gone with his wife out to dinner with McConnell and Chao, and had contributed to McConnell’s Senate campaign. And he did not understand why McConnell was so protective of the flawed status quo. “There’s a strong conservative case to be made in favor of campaign finance reform,” Kolb says. “I thought conservatives were in favor of the market as opposed to rent-seeking within the system.”
The showdown made its way onto the front page of the New York Times. It drew some sympathetic business leaders and foundations to CED, but also cost it one major member, BellSouth. When Kolb asked an executive from the company why it was stopping its contributions to CED, he said: “Senator McConnell is a very important senator to this company.”
At around the same time, McConnell made an even more direct challenge of the reform camp, on the floor of the Senate, setting off one of the chamber’s more remarkable exchanges in modern history. On October 14, 1999, he dared John McCain to elaborate on his general argument that the money flooding campaigns was corrupting Washington. “For there to be corruption, someone must be corrupt,” McConnell said. “I just ask my friend from Arizona what he has in mind here?”
McCain was easy to rile, but here he declined the bait. “I refuse to . . . say that any individual or person is guilty of corruption in a specific way,” he said. The problem was more diffuse than that, he said. “There is a pernicious effect of money on the legislative process,” he argued. “I am attacking a system. I am attacking a system that has to be fixed. . . . This system makes good people do bad things. . . . All of us are corrupted by it because money buys access and access is influence.”
McConnell kept up the taunting. “How,” he asked, “can it be corruption if no one is corrupt? That is like saying the gang is corrupt but none of the gangsters are. If there is corruption, someone must be corrupt.”
McCain held firm. “That is not right. It is a system. It is a system that has violated the process and has therefore caused the American people to lose confidence and trust in the government.” At one point, he finally turned on McConnell, though without naming him, as he cited as one example of generalized corruption McConnell’s reassurance to other senators about voting against McCain’s antismoking bill a year earlier: “A certain senator stood up and said it was okay for you not to vote for the tobacco bill because the tobacco companies will run ads in our favor.”
Afterward, as McCain’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination was getting off the ground, McCain ran into Charles Kolb at a luncheon. They got to discussing McConnell, and Kolb mentioned the dinner that he and his wife had been to with McConnell and Chao years earlier. After being quiet at first, McConnell had opened up and been perfectly pleasant.
While he was relaying this story, Kolb says, McCain was gritting his teeth. “I haven’t,” McCain said when Kolb finished, “been privileged to see that side of him.”
The rivalry resolved itself in a great victory for McCain. Or at least so it seemed at the time. For all of McConnell’s maneuvering, he was unable to turn back the pro-reform tide that swelled amid the corporate scandals that followed the bursting of the tech-stock bubble, notably the 2001 collapse of Enron. That company had blanketed Capitol Hill with nearly $2 million in contributions over the previous four years. In the spring of 2002, the Senate passed the McCain-Feingold law—formally the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002—and Bush signed it into law. McConnell stood against it until the end, warning in a New York Times op-ed (“In Defense of Soft Money”) that the legislation “will not take any money out of politics. It just takes the parties out of politics,” and in a floor speech of a “brave new world where the voices of parties are quieted, the voices of billionaires are enhanced, the voices of newspapers are enhanced.”
But McConnell’s seemingly lonely resistance had come with an invaluable consolation prize: the lasting gratitude of his fellow Republican senators. He hadn’t exactly been embraced by his colleagues from the outset—he had, after all, lost in his first two bids to run the NRSC. But for the better part of a decade, he had made himself the face of opposition to reforms that he believed, and many others in the GOP Senate caucus agreed, would work to their party’s detriment. Speaking up on behalf of the right to give and spend unlimited sums from corporate donors was not something most politicians were eager to do, but Mitch McConnell had taken up the task. And for that, his colleagues owed him a debt beyond what they’d already incurred from his prodigious fund-raising at the helm of the NRSC. “McConnell was not yet a leader [of the Republican caucus], and here he was protecting a lot of people by taking the heat,” says Scott Harshbarger, who led Common Cause at the time and had previously served as attorney general of Massachusetts. “McConnell instinctively saw an opportunity to be an opposition force—he became the shield.”
Not only that, but McConnell’s stand against campaign finance reform raised a profile otherwise lacking in a legislative focus. Where McConnell was once but one in a crowd of new Republican senators from the South, he was now the notorious adversary of McCain and his admirers in the liberal media. And he relished it—after being branded the “Darth Vader” of money in politics, he once brought a light saber to a press conference. Taking up the fight “was a very smart political move,” says Harshbarger. “Behind it may have been high principle, but at the time, it made his mark, and he had a lot of chits coming out of it. Otherwise, as a person he had no presence that would attract leadership—he was a milquetoast kind of guy. Before he got demonized, it was, ‘Who the hell was Mitch McConnell?’ ”
Best of all, the downside was minimal. As much as McConnell liked to cast his opposition as an unpopular stand for principle, he knew that campaign finance reform was not an issue that excited voters back home. As he liked to say, “It ranks right up there with static cling as one of the great concerns among the American people.” If anything, getting attacked by the New York Times and liberal activists for his opposition to reform was only helping McConnell strengthen his standing with conservative voters in Kentucky who might otherwise be wary of him. When Ellen Miller, a leader of the campaign finance reform movement, organized ads against McConnell in Kentucky attacking him for his opposition to McCain-Feingold, it backfired, recalls Harshbarger: “It got him only bigger margins.”
McConnell did not drop the crusade with the passage of the law. Wasting no time, he led the move to challenge its constitutionality in court, and in 2003, the Supreme Court heard McConnell v. Federal Election Commission. A few months later, a slender 5–4 majority ruled for upholding most of the law. McConnell called it the “worst Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott case”—a declaration that overlooked plenty of historically dubious rulings, such as Korematsu v. United States (1944), justifying the mass internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans without individual cause, and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), upholding a Louisiana law requiring the racial segregation of railway passengers.
Redemption came six years later, in 2010, with another 5–4 ruling by a reconfigured Supreme Court. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission eviscerated restrictions on campaign spending by corporations, unions, and nonprofit groups, ruling that the free speech rights that allowed independent campaign spending by individuals applied to corporations as well. It did not overturn McCain-Feingold, per se—unlimited “soft money” for parties was still barred—but together with a string of other court and regulatory rulings it rendered the law increasingly irrelevant and vulnerable to dismantling by future court decisions.
Following the ruling, spending on elections by outside groups surged to $300 million in 2010, more than quadruple the previous midterm election, and to more than $1 billion in 2012, triple what it had been in 2008. This surge gave McConnell the chance to declare himself vindicated over his earlier warning that McCain-Feingold’s bar on soft money would only shift the big money into “shadowy groups with innocuous-sounding names” outside the purview of the two major political parties, thereby weakening those institutions and empowering deep-pocketed fringe groups or individuals. This claim was valid, but only to a point—the boom in outside spending would not have been as great had the Supreme Court, in a ruling McConnell celebrated, not liberated outside groups to spend so freely on elections.
Moreover, McConnell and his party were not exactly holding back from capitalizing on the new free-for-all he had warned against early in the decade. The largest outside group to rise to prominence after the ruling was American Crossroads, an organization with deep ties to the Republican establishment. Its cofounder was Karl Rove, and its president was Steven Law, the former chief of staff to both McConnell and Elaine Chao, who had subsequently also worked with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In a sense, Crossroads offered an ideal combination to the Republican establishment in Washington—even if it was not allowed to coordinate directly with candidates, with Law at the helm it could be counted on to adopt strategies in line with the party leadership in Washington; at the same time, the group could accept far larger contributions than candidates, the party, or party committees like the NRSC could.
Even better, the contributions to American Crossroads’ sister organization, Crossroads GPS, did not have to be disclosed, as it was classified as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit group, ostensibly more focused on “social welfare” than elections. This designation made Crossroads GPS a more appealing target for publicity-shy donors—while the regular Crossroads group raised $50 million for the 2012 campaign, GPS raised $123 million, $22.5 million of which came from a single anonymous donor. “I wouldn’t want to discount the value of confidentiality to some donors,” said Law in 2010.
The rise in undisclosed contributions raised questions reminiscent of the Watergate era. The Nixon White House had rustled up millions in secret donations from major companies worried they’d get hit with a tax audit or other penalty if they didn’t give. Once again, with Crossroads GPS and similar groups, vast sums were trading hands without the public’s knowledge. But that was only half the problem—while the public didn’t know who was giving what, the people giving and receiving the money most certainly did, and so, presumably, did others in the party network in Washington. This combination of private disclosure and public nondisclosure gave enormous leverage to the fund-raisers: a company or individual approached for funds knew that if they rejected the advance, word might well get back to elected officials in Washington who would have sway over matters of importance to the company or individual; further raising the pressure was the fact that the targeted donor had no way of knowing whether his or her company’s business rivals were or were not giving themselves.
With disclosure, one could at least attempt to connect the dots and hold elected officials accountable. In late 2012, lawmakers on Capitol Hill slipped language into the big “fiscal cliff ” deal that gave biotech giant Amgen another two years before a kidney dialysis drug it makes would be subject to price controls—a tweak that would cost Medicare an estimated $500 million. Reporting on the added language, the New York Times noted that Amgen had close ties with Mitch McConnell, along with other senior lawmakers. Its employees had contributed $73,000 to him since 2007, including at a fund-raising event for him that Amgen helped sponsor while the fiscal cliff deal was being crafted, and its lobbyists included another of McConnell’s former chiefs of staff.
But there was no similar accountability to be done with “social welfare” groups such as Crossroads GPS, since the identity of its donors was secret. Who was to say if Amgen had given heavily to that organization in 2012? Or, to take another example: somehow a budget implementation bill in 2012 wound up including a tax provision that threatened to quash the growing roll-your-own-cigarette industry. Who was to know if tobacco companies had given to Crossroads GPS and thus raised their odds of getting that language added? There was no way of knowing if that happened. Or if it didn’t.
Even as his position on spending limits or PACs or soft money shifted, McConnell had spoken in favor of public disclosure of political giving and spending. It had become his ultimate mantra: stop trying to limit the inevitable flow of money into campaigns, but just make sure it’s all out in the open. “Disclosure is the best disinfectant, and I think the maximum amount of disclosure is exactly what we need,” he said on a Sunday morning show in 1996. Given how much concern he’d continued to express about unaccountable spending outside the party structure, it seemed natural that McConnell would continue to insist on disclosure of those outside dollars.
Even that last plank fell away. In 2010 Senate Democrats introduced the Disclose Act, legislation that would have forced outside groups spending more than $10,000 on campaign-related expenditures to disclose contributors who had donated more than $10,000. It was, says Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, the “last best hope for doing anything to ameliorate Citizens United.” McConnell held together his caucus—even John McCain—for a successful filibuster of the bill. McConnell explained his reversal on disclosure by arguing that the bill favored unions and that the increasingly toxic political atmosphere put a new premium on protecting the privacy of major donors against what he called “liberal thugs.” To one Senate Democrat who had supported the bill, McConnell’s opposition to disclosure after years of speaking in favor of it was remarkable. “It’s startling how flexible some people are in their opinions,” he said. “For him, it’s a matter of political convenience.”
As with his previous shifts, though, this maneuver could also be explained by changing circumstances in the partisan landscape. The biggest spending by outside groups, by far, was being spent on the right, by groups such as Americans for Prosperity, which is backed by the billionaire Koch brothers, and the Crossroads network, which raised more than $70 million for the Republican sweep in 2010, more than any other group. This had prompted an admission of gratitude from McConnell for Crossroads’ assistance: “We had a better day than we otherwise would have in 2010.” As McConnell’s campaign was gearing up in late 2013 for his sixth Senate race, Crossroads—with his former chief of staff, Steven Law, still at the helm—announced it would spend heavily to keep McConnell in power. “It certainly is personal to me,” Law told the Herald-Leader.
With the barrels of anonymously donated money waiting to be unloaded in Kentucky, promise of even greater resources arrived with another Supreme Court ruling in the spring of 2014. In McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, the court was now eliminating the limits on how much donors could give overall in direct contributions to candidates, party committees, and political action committees in a given year. The decision was sweet indeed for McConnell—it was another blow to the underpinnings of McCain-Feingold, and Chief Justice John Roberts’s argument against big money being corrupting echoed McConnell’s challenge of McCain on the Senate floor years earlier.
Best of all, the ruling was expected to bring disproportionately more money into the coffers of Republican candidates, and no one was in a better position than McConnell to reach out to donors who’d be liberated by the lifting of the caps on overall giving. “There’s nobody who gives money to Republicans that he doesn’t know,” says Bruce Lunsford, his 2008 opponent, in only a slight hyperbole. These additional funds would even have the sheen of legitimacy that the outside money would not, as the identities of donors would be disclosed. But for corporations or donors who still wanted to give secretly, there were still the outside groups waiting open-armed.
It was the best of both worlds.
In Inez, the traces of the Martin County Coal slurry spill are still everywhere. The embankment along meandering Coldwater Creek, once lined with cherry and walnut trees, now stands denuded and crumbling. One doesn’t have to dig deep in spots along the creek to turn up the dark goop. Residents who once grew vegetables in their backyards dare not to anymore, for fear of what was left behind. Linc Chapman has lost about half the distance from the creek to his house. The company was supposed to pay to restore the embankment, but nothing came of it. The creek itself runs far emptier of fish than it did before October 11, 2000, so much so that Chapman was gladdened to see a couple of redhorse suckers darting along one day in April. The “creek bed reconstruction expert” from Colorado hired for the cleanup had assured residents that “you’ll have trout swimming in these streams in two years,” to which Chapman had thought at the time: “You are so full of shit.” And indeed, aquatic life is just about “nonexistent” today, he says. “We had a lot of crawfish, freshwater eels, large-mouth bass, small-mouth, rock bass, blue-gill, channel cats, used to have a big run of quillback, they’re like a sucker. They suck in sand and fill it to their gills, and it’s hard to suck slurry through the gills.” All are pretty much gone.
Farther up Coldwater Creek, one can still make out the lines on the trees that are still standing, showing how high the slurry climbed. Chapman also points out the uninhabited areas along the creek where the company dug big unlined pits to bury the sludge, with a thin layer of regular fill from the surrounding hills spread over the top of it. Some of the sludge was later dug back up and moved to proper disposal, but much of it remains. “As long as I live, there’ll still be the impacts of it here,” he says.
Chapman’s family still doesn’t trust the local water—it bathes and washes with it, but drinks only bottled water, as do many of the townspeople, or at least those who can afford it. The reservoir just outside Inez is fed by water from the Tug River, the main stem into which the contaminated Coldwater and Wolf Creeks flow. Chapman and others argued for requiring the company to pay for an independent monitor of the water quality, to no avail. “They were all for monitoring but wanted to do it in-house. Well, that’s as useless as tits on a boar hog,” he says. “If they pulled a sample from the bottom of the reservoir, they’d find a foot of slurry.” No one’s monitoring it now, in-house or otherwise. “It’s one of those things where, after so much time that’s what big companies hope, that it’s out of sight, out of mind,” Chapman says. “When you’ve got the government in your pockets, you get by with what you want to get by with.”
The mine itself sits fallow, with only some reclamation work being done. It’s now owned by Alpha Natural Resources, which in 2011 subsumed Massey Energy following an eventful decade for the company. In 2004, one year after Martin County Coal got only a small fine from MSHA, Massey CEO Don Blankenship spent more than $3 million to help elect a conservative Republican for the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, the state’s highest court, paying for ads that accused the incumbent judge of being soft on child molesters and drug dealers. Once on the court, the new judge provided the decisive vote to overturn a $55 million judgment against Massey—a turn of events so glaring that the U.S. Supreme Court later ruled that the judge should have recused himself.
On April 5, 2010, nearly a decade after the Martin County spill, an explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia killed twenty-nine miners. Investigators later found that Massey had allowed explosive methane and coal dust to build up to the point where it was ignited by a spark from a poorly maintained coal-cutting machine, producing a blast that clogged water sprayers were unable to suppress. Massey had covered up lethal safety violations, tipped off mine supervisors to inspections, and manipulated ventilation equipment and machinery to dupe inspectors.
Through it all, McConnell’s ties to the coal industry have only grown stronger. Requests under the Freedom of Information Act for correspondence between McConnell and the Department of Labor during the eight years the department was run by his wife show repeated entreaties from the senator on behalf of mining companies, including Massey, complaining about excessive enforcement efforts by safety inspectors and new rules on miners’ exposure to diesel particulate matter. One complaint about a $250,000 fine forwarded to federal regulators by McConnell makes its political appeal explicit: “I am a Registered Republican and need your help.”
In late 2002, at the time as he was wrapping up the MSHA investigation in Martin County that would leave Massey unscathed, Tim Thompson had a meeting back at his office in Morgantown with another coal executive, Bob Murray, to discuss safety issues at one of Murray Energy’s mines in Ohio. Murray, an obstreperous former miner, had brought a whole entourage with him in what Thompson saw as a deliberate show of force. As tensions rose in the close-packed room, Murray turned to Thompson and said: “Mitch McConnell calls me one of the five finest men in America, and the last I checked, he was sleeping with your boss,” according to notes of the meeting obtained in 2003 by West Virginia Public Radio. “They,” he added, pointing at two MSHA men whom he’d been dealing with over the safety issues, “are gone.”
Thompson now says that he was not intimidated by Murray’s remark: “I don’t get too scared. I don’t overreact,” he says. “His mine was in Ohio, I was in West Virginia, and McConnell is in neither of those states.” But his MSHA superiors in fact transferred Thompson to another region, away from Murray’s mines, as was one of the other MSHA men at the meeting. Murray offered a suggestive response to the Herald-Leader in 2006 when asked about Thompson’s transfer: “I said he should be removed. But they didn’t do it because I said so.”
Thompson fought the transfer for several years before giving up and retiring. At some point, McConnell’s chief of staff contacted Thompson via a coal industry lawyer and asked for a statement on what happened at the meeting. Worried about any hard feelings with McConnell over the disclosure of Murray’s comments regarding Chao, Thompson complied. “I wrote to say, ‘Mitch McConnell had nothing to say or influence it, that Murray was acting like a renegade.’ ” The reason for the request was plain to Thompson: “My guess was there could’ve been some bad publicity that they tried to nip.”
In 2007, Murray Energy suffered its own large-scale disaster: a collapse at its mine in Crandall Canyon in Utah, which claimed the lives of six miners and three rescuers. Bob Murray has been one of the most valued fund-raisers for Republicans in Washington—since 2007 alone, national Republicans have received more than $1 million from Murray, his family, and his salaried employees, who, documents show, were pressured to attend fund-raisers with visiting Republicans and contribute to the company PAC.
Murray’s financial commitment ratcheted up as the threats to the Appalachian coal industry mounted. The industry was facing growing competition from cheap natural gas acquired through fracking, but Murray declared that its primary threat was the Obama administration’s push to reduce carbon emissions. McConnell took this tack with increasing stridence as well. “The president may as well call his war on coal what it is: a war on jobs in this country, and a plan to ship jobs overseas,” he said in 2013.
That a senator from a coal-producing state should take up this cry is not surprising. Still, it rung hollow. Coal wasn’t as central to Kentucky’s economy as it had once been: by 2013, coal-mining employment had fallen to fewer than 17,000—a third the number of people employed in the state’s far less storied auto-manufacturing sector, which had grown to the third-largest in the country. For another, coal mining in western Kentucky, part of the Illinois Basin, was holding on even as it declined in the east, suggesting that the challenge went beyond new regulations to the geological reality that Appalachian coal was getting more expensive to dig out.
McConnell’s concern for the state’s coal industry had long seemed directed more at the executives who supported his campaign than the workers themselves. In 2006, when yet another mine explosion claimed the lives of five miners in the Kentucky Darby LLC mine in Harlan County, an aide in McConnell’s office spoke with Tony Oppegard, the former MSHA appointee who’d been kicked off the slurry spill investigation. Oppegard was representing some of the widows in the Darby Mine No. 1 disaster, and the aide urged the widows to call if they ever needed anything. Shortly afterward, they did need something: permission to sit in on meetings with MSHA. Oppegard called McConnell for assistance, and never heard back. “That was typical for us,” he said. “When it came to an actual issue we needed help with, they didn’t call back.” Tom Buchanan, who led a group of small contractors in eastern Kentucky that do mine reclamation work, had a similar experience when they tried to set up meetings with McConnell in Washington to discuss the reclamation funding dedicated to the state. “He never did even meet with us,” he says. “Oftentime we would call his office, and he never actually said no—he’d say we have an opening next Wednesday when he knew we were there this Wednesday.”
It’s not about being pro- or anti-coal, says Linc Chapman, back in Martin County. He is a staunch Republican and he himself worked in the mines, as a safety director. He accepts that when it comes to the side effects of coal mining, “you’ve got to have a certain amount of sacrifice to prosper.” He just believes that the truly great disasters need to be avoided—and could be avoided if companies followed basic rules, and government held them to them. “If they did this right it would never have occurred,” he says. “But when you’ve got the government in your pockets, you get by with what you want to get by with. Massey has a lot of political pull, and they let them slide. They didn’t force them to do things right.”
His fellow Inez resident, Mickey McCoy, puts it more bluntly: “Where was McConnell? Where was our representative? Where he’s always been: in the back pocket of King Coal.”