The Amoralists; Mitch McConnell, Part Three; Unprincipled Power

No person has done more in living memory to undermine the functioning of the US government than the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell.

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McConnell doesn’t give a fig about the Senate, or about democracy. He cares only about winning. On the eve of the 2010 midterm elections he famously declared that his top priority was for Barack Obama “to be a one-term president".

Between 2009 and 2013, McConnell’s Senate Republicans blocked 79 Obama nominees. In the entire history of the United States until that point, only 68 presidential nominees had been blocked.

This unprecedented use of the filibuster finally led Senate Democrats in 2013 to change the rules on some presidential nominees (but not the supreme court), to require simple majorities.

In response, McConnell fumed that “breaking the rules to change the rules is un-American”. If so, McConnell is about as un-American as they come. Once back in control of the Senate he [in 2916] buried Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland for the supreme court by refusing even to hold hearings.

Then, in 2017, McConnell and his Republicans changed the rules again, ending the use of the filibuster even for supreme court nominees and clearing the way for Senate confirmation of Trump’s Neil Gorsuch.

Step by step, McConnell has sacrificed the Senate as an institution to partisan political victories.

There is a vast difference between winning at politics by playing according to the norms of our democracy, and winning by subverting those norms.

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[McConnell] … is the epitome of unprincipled power. History will not treat him kindly. (Reich 1-3).

Under McConnell’s leadership, as the Washington Post’s Paul Kane wrote recently, the chamber that calls itself the world’s greatest deliberative body has become, “by almost every measure,” the “least deliberative in the modern era.” In 2019, it voted on legislation only a hundred and eight times. In 1999, by contrast, the Senate had three hundred and fifty such votes, and helped pass a hundred and seventy new laws. At the end of 2019, more than two hundred and seventy-five bills, passed by the House of Representatives with bipartisan support, were sitting dormant on McConnell’s desk. Among them are bills mandating background checks on gun purchasers and lowering the cost of prescription drugs—ideas that are overwhelmingly popular with the public. But McConnell, currently the top recipient of Senate campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, has denounced efforts to lower drug costs as “socialist price controls.”

Longtime lawmakers in both parties say that the Senate is broken. In February, seventy former senators signed a bipartisan letter decrying the institution for not “fulfilling its constitutional duties.” Dick Durbin, of Illinois, who has been in the Senate for twenty-four years and is now the second-in-command in the Democratic leadership, told me that, under McConnell, “the Senate has deteriorated to the point where there is no debate whatsoever—he’s dismantled the Senate brick by brick.” McConnell was the Minority Leader from 2006 to 2014. After Barack Obama was elected in 2008, McConnell used the filibuster to block a record number of bills and nominations supported by the Administration. As Majority Leader, he has control over the chamber’s schedule, and he keeps bills and nominations he opposes from even coming up for consideration. “He’s the traffic cop, and you can’t get through the intersection without him,” Durbin said.

Norman Ornstein, a political scientist specializing in congressional matters at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, told me that he has known every Senate Majority Leader in the past fifty years, and that McConnell “will go down in history as one of the most significant people in destroying the fundamentals of our constitutional democracy.” He continued, “There isn’t anyone remotely close. There’s nobody as corrupt, in terms of violating the norms of government.”

The most famous example of McConnell’s obstructionism was his audacious refusal to allow a hearing on Merrick Garland, whom Obama nominated for the Supreme Court, in 2016. When Justice Antonin Scalia unexpectedly died, vacating the seat, there were three hundred and forty-two days left in Obama’s second term. But McConnell argued that “the American people” should decide who should fill the seat in the next election, ignoring the fact that the American people had elected Obama. As a young lawyer, McConnell had argued in an academic journal that politics should play no part in Supreme Court picks; the only thing that mattered was if the nominee was professionally qualified. In 2016, though, he said it made no difference how qualified Garland, a highly respected moderate judge, was. Before then, the Senate had never declined to consider a nominee simply because it was an election year. On the contrary, the Senate had previously confirmed seventeen Supreme Court nominees during election years and rejected two. Nevertheless, McConnell prevailed.

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McConnell has pointed to his obstruction of Garland with pride, saying, “The most important decision I’ve made in my political career was the decision not to do something.” Many believe that, in 2016, the open Court seat motivated evangelical voters to overlook their doubts about Trump, providing the crucial bloc that won him the Presidency.

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But McConnell’s predecessor as Majority Leader, the retired Democratic senator Harry Reid, of Nevada, accuses McConnell of destroying norms that fostered comity and consensus, such as the restrained use of filibusters. Although the two leaders had at first managed to be friendly, bonding over their shared support for Washington’s baseball team, the Nationals, they became bitter antagonists during the Obama Administration. “Mitch and the Republicans are doing all they can to make the Senate irrelevant,” Reid told me. …

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McConnell’s opposition to Obama was relentless. In 2010, the Senate Majority Leader famously said, when asked about his goals, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term President.” … (Mayer 20-21).

A few years ago, I was in the middle of an interview with Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., when President Barack Obama called. Then the minority leader, McConnell walked across his spacious office in the United States Capitol to his desk and picked up the phone.

The senator had permitted me to stay in his office as long as I agreed not to write about what was said in the conversation. The exchange was a window into the relationship between the 44th president and his chief Republican antagonist in the Senate.

McConnell stood during the call. I could not hear Obama's end of the conversation, but, in delivering his side, the Kentucky lawmaker was stone-faced and nearly monosyllabic.

McConnell started the call with "Hello." He ended it with "Goodbye." I made a note that at neither end of the call, which lasted a few minutes, did McConnell utter the words "Mr. President." To say that the Republican leader's words, body language and overall demeanor were Arctic cold would be understating.

The Obama-McConnell relationship has long been known as frigid. Now we know a little more why that is. Obama rubs McConnell the wrong way. Big time.

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"A lot of people ask me what President Obama is really like," McConnell writes. "I tell them all the same thing. He's no different in private than in public. He's like the kid in your class who exerts a hell of a lot of effort making sure everyone thinks he's the smartest one in the room. He talks down to people, whether in a meeting among colleagues in the White House or addressing the nation."

Some pages on [in his memoir], the Senate Republican leader observes: "Almost without exception, President Obama begins serious policy discussions by explaining why everyone else is wrong. After he assigns straw men to your views, he enthusiastically attempts to knock them down with a theatrically earnest re-litigation of what you've missed about his brilliance" (Carroll 1-3).

McConnell’s disrespect for Obama mirrored the views of rich conservative corporate donors like the Kochs, who underwrote many of the campaigns that enabled Republicans to capture the majority in the House of Representatives in 2010, and in the Senate four years later. In the 2014 midterm elections alone, the Koch donor network, which has a few hundred members, spent more than a hundred million dollars. In 2014, shortly before Republicans took the Senate, McConnell appeared as an honored guest at one of the Kochs’ semi-annual fund-raising summits. He thanked “Charles and David,” adding, “I don’t know where we would be without you.” Soon after he was sworn in as the Senate Majority Leader, he hired a former lobbyist for Koch Industries as his policy chief. McConnell then took aim at the Kochs’ longtime foe the Environmental Protection Agency, urging governors to disobey new restrictions on greenhouse gases (Mayer 21-22).

For his part, Obama hasn't exactly embraced rapprochement with his chief GOP nemesis in the Senate. How strongly he feels about McConnell's way of dealing with him will have to wait for the presidential memoir. But we have been given hints.

At the 2013 White House Correspondents Association Dinner, Obama outlined the state of affairs with McConnell: "Some folks still don't think I spend enough time with Congress. 'Why don't you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?' they ask. Really? Why don't you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?"

After McConnell and the GOP took over the Senate in the 2014 elections, Obama briefly offered an olive branch – or, more accurately, a shot glass. "Actually, I would enjoy having some Kentucky bourbon with Mitch McConnell," the president declared at a post-election White House news conference.

The "bourbon summit," a potential publicity bonanza for the chosen Kentucky bourbons, never materialized. The cold war between the White House and McConnell stayed cold (Carroll 3).

In 2009–10, President Barack Obama briefly enjoyed an effective 60-vote Democratic majority (including independents) in the Senate during the 111th Congress. During that time period, the Senate passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly known as "Obamacare," on December 24, 2009 by a vote of 60-39 (after invoking cloture by the same 60-39 margin). However, Obama's proposal to create a public health insurance option was removed from the health care legislation because it could not command 60-vote support.

House Democrats did not approve of all aspects of the Senate bill, but after 60-vote Senate control was permanently lost in February 2010 due to the election of Scott Brown to fill the seat of the late Ted Kennedy, House Democrats decided to pass the Senate bill intact and it became law. Several House-desired modifications to the Senate bill — those sufficient to pass scrutiny under the Byrd rule — were then made under reconciliation via the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, which was enacted days later following a 56–43 vote in the Senate.

The near-60-vote Senate majority that Democrats held throughout the 111th Congress was also critical to passage of other major Obama initiatives, including the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009 (passed 60–38, three Republicans voting yes) and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (passed 60–39, three Republicans voting yes, one Democrat voting no). However, the House-passed American Clean Energy and Security Act, which would have created a cap-and-trade system and established a national renewable electricity standard to combat climate change, never received a Senate floor vote (Filibuster 4).

As partisan clashing came to a head in the 1990s and 2000’s, senators turned to the filibuster more frequently in an effort to thwart the majority party. According to research by UCLA political scientist Barbara Sinclair, there was an average of one filibuster per Congress during the 1950s.

That number grew steadily since and spiked in 2007 and 2008 (the 110th Congress), when there were 52 filibusters. By the time the 111th Congress adjourned in 2010, the number of filibusters had risen to 137 for the entire two-year term (History 4).

Frustrated by lies put out by Mitch McConnell in 2016 about how the apparent weak economy was Obama’s fault, I wrote this letter to the Florence, Oregon, [my hometown] Siuslaw News.

We have been hearing a lot recently about politicians lying. One lie dwarfs all.

“It’s Obama’s economy,” we hear Republican flaks repeat. “He’s botched it. We will create jobs, grow the economy!” They count on our lack of attention to or memory of important political/economic events of the past decade.

How many of you actually recall the major 2008 GOP-induced economic meltdown and, afterward, how the GOP obstructed the President’s and the Democratic House and Senate’s attempts to stimulate the economy?

The first two years of Obama’s presidency Mitch McConnell repeatedly used the Senate rule that a minimum of 60 votes were required to defeat the filibuster of any bill brought to the Senate floor for a vote. During most of those two years the Senate consisted of 58 Democrats, 40 Republicans, and two independents. Several of those 58 Democratic senators voted consistently with the Republicans. To reach the 60 vote threshold, Democrats had to gain the support of the two independents (one of them Democrat turncoat Joe Lieberman) and at least two or three “moderate” Republicans. The Affordable Care Act (“Obama Care”), the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the “stimulus package”), and the Wall Street Reform Act (which included the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) managed to slip through after Democrats made bill-weakening concessions. Virtually everything else passed by the Democratic Party-controlled House was successfully filibustered. ....

Here are a few of the bills – all of which would have benefited working class Americans -- that McConnell’s minions stopped. Infrastructure building; equal pay for women; an increased minimum wage; stoppage of corporate tax breaks for moving jobs and production facilities out of the country; a rehiring of 400,000 teachers, firefighters, paramedics and police officers; student loan reform; an extension of unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed; legislation to help working people join labor unions; the requirement that millionaires pay a comparable tax rate to middle-class Americans, the repeal of Big Oil tax subsidies.

When the Republicans won control of the House in 2010, President Obama’s hopes for improving the lot of ordinary Americans were dashed. Everything the GOP-controlled House thereafter passed was designed either to profit large corporations and the super wealthy or weaken the support system for destitute Americans. Additionally, GOP House and Senate leaders sought to acquire what they wanted by shutting down once and later threatening to shut down the operations of the government.

For seven and a half years the Republican Party has sabotaged the national economy all the while presuming that it could win national elections by pinning the blame for stunted recovery on Congressional Democrats and our President. Liars (Titus 1).

“If there’s any power in this job, really,” McConnell likes to say, “it’s the power to schedule, to decide what you’re going to do or not do.” The converse of this, McConnell learned even before becoming minority leader in 2007, is also true: The greatest leverage the minority has is the ability to complicate the schedule. Drawing out deliberations can cripple the Senate, which is in session for only 34 weeks or so each year, most of which, in practice, are only four working days.

The bluntest instrument senators in the minority have to wield to this end is the filibuster or, more often, the threat of it. ...

But McConnell also slowed down the process in more subtle ways, particularly in his yearlong effort to derail the Affordable Care Act, which made him once again the public face of a particularly unapologetic form of Republican intransigence. “He said, ‘Our strategy is to delay this sucker as long as we possibly can, and the longer we delay it the worse the president looks: Why can’t he get it done? He’s got 60 votes?’ ” Bob Bennett, the late Utah Republican senator and a friend of McConnell’s, said in Alec MacGillis’s 2014 McConnell biography, “The Cynic.” Senate committee Democrats would negotiate policy particulars for months with their Republican colleagues only to see the Republicans’ votes evaporate at the end of the process. McConnell’s staff, meanwhile, battered the bill relentlessly in public, publicizing the sweetheart accommodations Democratic senators were receiving for their votes. By the time Obamacare passed in March 2010, according to a CNN poll, only 39 percent of the country viewed it favorably, and McConnell had mostly run out the clock: There were less than eight months left, by then, until the midterm elections in which Republicans would take the House.

Legislation is one of the Senate’s core responsibilities; the other is confirming executive-branch appointments, such as administration officials and judges. By custom, the Senate had previously approved district-court judge nominations in groups, in the interest of efficiency. Under McConnell’s leadership, Republicans insisted on confirming Obama’s nominations individually, drawing out the process enough that, by the summer of 2010, there were 99 vacancies on the federal bench and 40 “judicial emergencies” had been declared by overburdened courts.

When Senate Republicans are blamed for obstruction, they are quick to point out that Democrats, when they were in the minority during most of George W. Bush’s presidency, filibustered judicial nominees, too — less frequently than McConnell, but often enough that Republicans had considered the “nuclear option”: getting rid of the filibuster for judicial matters, which would allow judges to be confirmed on a simple majority vote. But as McConnell escalated the use of filibusters, it was Harry Reid, then the majority leader, who finally decided to get rid of them for lower-court appointees in 2013.

McConnell was furious. Facing Reid on the Senate floor, he declared that “our friend the majority leader is going to be remembered as the worst leader here ever.” McConnell used other procedural moves to gum up Obama’s subsequent executive nominations, and by August 2014, the backlog stretched to more than 100 appointees. After McConnell became majority leader, following that November’s elections, judicial nominations all but ground to a halt, with McConnell confirming barely a quarter of Obama’s court picks. “I believe that Mitch McConnell has ruined the Senate,” Reid, who retired in 2017, now says. “I do not believe the Senate, for the next generation or two, will be the Senate I was there for. It’s gone. The old Senate is gone” (Homans 15-16).

The McConnell court is now every bit as partisan as one of the panels on my old show, “Crossfire.” Except on “Crossfire,” we didn’t wear robes and pretend we were somehow above the fray. For decades to come, American citizens upset about any erosion of their constitutional rights – civil rights, LGBTQ rights, voting rights, women’s rights, reproductive rights, consumer rights, environmental protections – can thank McConnell.

Legacies are often hard to predict when a politician is still in office. Not this time. When you see bitter, hateful, vengeful hyperpartisanship infecting our national life – from the White House to the Senate to the marble palace of the Supreme Court – you can thank the “Gentleman from Kentucky” (Begala 3).

Works cited:

Begala, Paul. “Mitch McConnell Has Done Grave Damage to All Three Branches of Government.” CNN, October 10, 2018. Net. https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/09/opinions/mitch-mcconnell-has-damaged-all-three-branches-of-government-begala/index.html

Carroll, James R. “The Obama-McConnell Cold War.” U.S. News, June 22, 2016. Net. https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-22/the-obama-mcconnell-relationship-demonstrates-washington-gridlock

“Filibuster in the United States Senate.” Wikipedia. Net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_in_the_United_States_Senate#Barack_Obama

History.Com Editors. “Filibuster.” History, August 21, 2018. Net. https://www.history.com/topics/us-government/history-of-the-filibuster

Homans, Charles. “Mitch McConnell Got Everything He Wanted. But at What Cost?” New York Times, January 22, 2019. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/magazine/mcconnell-senate-trump.html

Mayer, Jane. “How Mitch McConnell Became Trump’s Enabler-in-Chief.” The New Yorker, April 20, 2020. Net. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/how-mitch-mcconnell-became-trumps-enabler-in-chief

Reich, Robert. “Mitch McConnell Is Destroying the Senate – and American Government.” The Guardian, April 6, 2019. Net. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/06/mitch-mcconnell-senate-republicans-donald-trump-judges

Titus, Harold. Letter to the Editor. Siuslaw News, September 10, 2016. Net. http://authorharoldtitus.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2022-01-16T14:53:00-08:00&max-results=7&reverse-paginate=true