[By August 2016] the Central Intelligence Agency had discovered evidence that Russia had interfered in the presidential campaign, apparently with the aim of disrupting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, and had possibly made contact with representatives of the Trump campaign. The agency approached congressional leaders to discuss the findings. According to Denis McDonough, Obama’s chief of staff at the time, Harry Reid urged the Obama administration to go public with the information. But the administration, chary of appearing to politicize intelligence, refused to do so unless both congressional Republican leaders consented. In early September, McConnell and Reid along with Ryan and Pelosi were briefed at the White House and asked by Obama to issue a joint statement to state election officials.
Ryan and his chief of staff at the time wrote and circulated a statement. “We thought it was really a good sign that the speaker took the pen and drafted the statement,” McDonough told me. “What happened then was, everybody signed off except Senator McConnell.” McConnell has said his concerns had to do with wording regarding election infrastructure. McDonough says there were other substantial disagreements but declined to elaborate on what they were. Ryan says he took McConnell’s side in the dispute. The process of drafting the statement was drawn out for several weeks, “to the consternation and frustration of everybody — to include the speaker of the House,” McDonough says. “At the time, the speaker evinced to me considerable frustration.”
On Sept. 28, all four congressional leaders released a letter warning state election officials of potential interference from foreign actors, which avoided specific mention of Russia’s role. Both Ryan and McConnell have said they were not asked to mention Russia. Several Obama administration officials, however, including McDonough and James R. Clapper Jr., Obama’s director of national intelligence, have retrospectively blamed McConnell, and sometimes Ryan, for “watering down,” as McDonough put it in an NBC interview, the warning. “To their everlasting shame, the leaders — McConnell, Ryan — refused” to make more information public, James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, said in an interview at the 92nd Street Y in December. “I think they’re going to have a hard time explaining that to history.”
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On Oct. 7, 2016, the Department of Homeland Security and Clapper’s office put out a joint statement, acknowledging for the first time that the intelligence community was “confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of emails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations.” But within hours, the news was swamped by the publication by The Washington Post of a video of Trump on the set of “Access Hollywood,” in which he bragged about sexually assaulting women. After the tape was released, Ryan released a statement saying he was “sickened” by Trump’s comments, canceled a campaign appearance with him and told his fellow Republican House candidates on a conference call that he would no longer defend Trump.
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McConnell put out a statement saying “these comments are repugnant, and unacceptable in any circumstance” and calling on Trump to apologize, but he did nothing to separate his party’s Senate candidates from Trump. Early in the campaign, The Times reported, he had planned for a worst-case scenario in which McConnell and his Senate candidates, colleagues recalled him saying at the time, would “drop him like a hot rock.” But in the last weeks of the campaign, he had come to think that severing red-state candidates from the party’s nominee could hurt them on Election Day.
He sat up that night at the National Republican Senatorial Committee headquarters, watching the news, awaiting confirmation of what he imagined would be his fate: the end of a brief tenure in the majority-leader perch he had worked so long to reach. “I thought we were going to lose the Senate,” McConnell told me. “By 11 o’clock, we’d held the Senate. And I thought, No chance Trump’s going to get it. No chance. And by 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning — my God.”
But however unexpected Trump’s victory might have been to McConnell at the time, he has retrospectively — and plausibly — claimed credit for it. He was quick to point out that Trump won nearly as many registered Republicans as Mitt Romney did in 2012, and one exit poll showed that “the single biggest issue bringing them home,” he said, was the Supreme Court seat he had held open. “It was a real masterstroke, in my opinion, to keep that seat open in 2016,” Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, told me. “I doubt Donald Trump would have won if that seat was not open.”
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When the Republicans’ seven-year crusade to dismantle Obamacare effectively ran aground in the Senate the following July, it was McConnell whom Trump blamed for the bill’s failure. After McConnell, speaking at a Rotary Club event in Kentucky, chided Trump for his inexperience and high hopes — “I think he had excessive expectations about how quickly things happen in the democratic process,” McConnell said — Trump called him in a rage, then took to Twitter: “Can you believe that Mitch McConnell, who has screamed Repeal & Replace for 7 years, couldn’t get it done.” A reporter asked Trump that day if McConnell should step down. “If he doesn’t get repeal and replace done,” the president replied, “and if he doesn’t get taxes done, meaning cuts and reform, and if he doesn’t get a very easy one to get done, infrastructure, if he doesn’t get that done, then you can ask me that question.”
The abuse continued intermittently throughout the Senate’s August recess, in which McConnell also criticized Trump’s statements in the wake of the Charlottesville white supremacist rally. “There are no good neo-Nazis,” McConnell said in a statement. Finally, in October, McConnell and Trump sat down over lunch to clear the air. “I was trying to remind him of the significance of some of the things that had been happening,” McConnell told me. “Because he was in a real downer over the loss of Obamacare. And we all were. I understood that. But I think he was concluding, too soon, that it wasn’t going to be a good Congress.”
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McConnell seemed to realize something, too: That his spare communication style was not the best way of dealing with this particular president. He now speaks to Trump several times a week. “I think that one of the things that the leader has done a better job of over time,” Billy Piper, McConnell’s chief of staff until 2011, told me, “is understanding that that’s an important part of a positive relationship with the president: direct and frequent communications, so that the president, you know, is hearing directly what’s going on and how his agenda’s being advanced, as opposed to getting it through third parties or news reports.” He added, “That’s probably not McConnell’s intuitive nature” (Homans 16-21).
… Mr. McConnell, long obsessed with the federal courts, saw opportunity. Even before Mr. Trump was sworn in, Mr. McConnell approached Donald F. McGahn II, the incoming White House counsel, about establishing an assembly line of judicial nominees to fill vacancies caused by Republicans’ refusal to consider Obama administration nominees.
The interests of the Trump administration and Mitch McConnell had aligned. He prioritized appeals court judges, eliminated the 60-vote threshold for Supreme Court nominees and stood by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh despite accusations of sexual misconduct, which the justice denied. He pushed Justice Amy Coney Barrett just days before the 2020 presidential election despite using the approach of the 2016 election to block Judge Merrick B. Garland’s nomination eight months before the voting. The judicial success provided both the president and the Republican leader with a legacy.
But it wasn’t just judges. Mr. McConnell delivered Mr. Trump’s tax cuts, remained stoic during regular presidential outbursts and made short work of the 2020 impeachment, with his most prominent failure in conservative eyes being the inability to overturn the Affordable Care Act.
“Mitch McConnell was indispensable to Donald Trump’s success,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina … said on Fox News. “Mitch McConnell working with Donald Trump did a hell of a job” (Hulse 11-5)
The Senate in the early hours of Friday morning rejected a new, scaled-down Republican plan to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act, derailing the Republicans’ seven-year campaign to dismantle President Barack Obama’s signature health care law and dealing a huge political setback to President Trump.
Senator John McCain of Arizona, who just this week returned to the Senate after receiving a diagnosis of brain cancer, cast the decisive vote to defeat the proposal, joining two other Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, in opposing it.
The 49-to-51 vote was also a humiliating setback for the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who has nurtured his reputation as a master tactician and spent the last three months trying to devise a repeal bill that could win support from members of his caucus.
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Mr. McConnell said he was proud of his vote to start unwinding the Affordable Care Act. “What we tried to accomplish for the American people was the right thing for the country,” Mr. McConnell said. “And our only regret tonight, our only regret, is that we didn’t achieve what we had hoped to accomplish” (Pear and Kaplan 1-2).
Passage of the tax bill was similarly unconventional. The 490-page bill was unveiled only hours before a middle-of-the-night vote early Saturday, without the typical debate expected for such a sweeping package that will affect nearly all Americans. It was approved to applause from Republicans in the chamber, but the Democratic side was empty, senators long gone.
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Democrats … [noted] the bill was still being changed as late as Friday evening, with scribbled notes in the margins. McConnell dismissed their complaints as the language of defeat.
“You complain about process when you’re losing,” he said.
Rather than micromanage the drafting of the tax bill, McConnell and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) deputized a posse of four GOP senators shortly after last November’s election to work with the other senators in considering the contours of the legislation. The process produced a measure with broader ownership from Republicans than the failed Obamacare overhaul.
“The healthcare experience was a learning experience for all of us,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who was part of the quartet, and said senators have been talking about tax ideas for years. “This was different” (Mascaro 1).
It was supposed to be a gift-wrapped present to taxpayers and the economy. But in hindsight, it looks more like a costly lump of coal.
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"Our focus is on helping the folks who work in the mailrooms and the machine shops of America," he [Trump] told supporters in the fall of 2017. "The plumbers, the carpenters, the cops, the teachers, the truck drivers, the pipe-fitters, the people that like me best."
"After eight straight years of slow growth and underperformance, America is ready to take off," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said when the tax cut passed two years ago (Horsley 1).
Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, called on Congress on Tuesday to move on from the Mueller report and issued his own verdict from the Senate floor: “Case closed.”
“With an exhaustive investigation complete, would the country finally unify to confront the real challenges before us?” Mr. McConnell said. “Or would we remain consumed by unhinged partisanship, and keep dividing ourselves to the point that Putin and his agents need only stand on the sidelines and watch as their job is done for them?”
“Regrettably,” he continued, “the answer is obvious.”
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… Republican leaders say questions of abuse of power and obstruction of justice are over. Mr. McConnell waved the congressional Democrats off their investigations, arguing that “relitigating a two-and-a-half-year-old election result” and continuing to traffic in “fanciful conspiracy theories” fixated on “delegitimizing the president” would hurt the country (Edmondson 1).
The first impeachment trial of Donald Trump … began in the U.S. Senate on January 16, 2020, and concluded with his acquittal on February 5. After an inquiry between September to November 2019, President Trump was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives on December 18, 2019; the articles of impeachment charged him with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
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… On January 31, a majority of 51 senators (all Republicans) voted against allowing subpoenas to call witnesses or documents …
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Leader Mitch McConnell was quietly planning a possible trial. On October 8, 2019, he led a meeting on the subject, advising the Republican Senators to craft their responses according to their own political needs. McConnell proposed two potential avenues: state opposition to the House process, or refuse to comment due to being potential jurors.
[Later, McConnell declared:] "Everything I do during this I'm coordinating with the White House counsel. There will be no difference between the president's position and our position as to how to handle this ... I'm going to take my cues from the president's lawyers." As part of the "total coordination", McConnell said the president's lawyers could decide if witnesses would be called for the trial. McConnell also said there was "no chance" the Senate would convict Trump and remove him from office, while declaring his wish that all Senate Republicans would acquit Trump of both charges.
… [December 17] McConnell said, "I'm not an impartial juror. This is a political process. There is not anything judicial about it. Impeachment is a political decision." The Constitution mandates senators to take an impeachment oath, in which by Senate rules is stated, "I will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws, so help me God."
On December 15, Senate minority leader Chuck Summer, in a letter to McConnell, called for Mick Mulvaney, Robert Blair, John Bolyon and Michael Duffey to testify in the expected Senate trial, and suggested that pre-trial proceedings take place on January 6, 2020. Two days later, McConnell rejected the call for witnesses to testify, saying the Senate's job is only to judge, not to investigate. Schumer quickly replied, citing bipartisan public support for the testimony of witnesses who could fill in gaps caused by Trump preventing his staff from testifying in the House investigation.
On December 17, McConnell opened the Senate session with a half-hour long speech denouncing the impeachment, calling it "the most rushed, least thorough, and most unfair in modern history", and "fundamentally unlike any articles that any prior House of Representatives has ever passed". Schumer replied that he "did not hear a single sentence, a single argument as to why the witnesses I suggested should not give testimony" in the potential Senate trial (First 1-2).
Works cited:
Edmondson, Catie. “‘Case Closed’: McConnell Urges Congress To Move on from Mueller Report.” New York Times, May 7, 2019. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/us/politics/mueller-report-mitch-mcconnell-congress.html
‘First Impeachment Trial of Donald Trump.” Wikipedia. Net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_impeachment_trial_of_Donald_Trump
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
Horsley, Scott. “After 2 Years, Trump Tax Cuts Have Failed To Deliver on GOP's Promises.” NPR, December 20, 2019. Net. https://www.npr.org/2019/12/20/789540931/2-years-later-trump-tax-cuts-have-failed-to-deliver-on-gops-promises
Hulse, Carl. “The Relationship between McConnell and Trump Was Good for Both — Until It Wasn’t.” New York Times, February 19, 2021. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/us/trump-mcconnell-republicans.html
Mascaro, Lisa. “GOP tax bill Is Latest Example of Senate Leader Mitch McConnell Breaking the Norms He Often Espouses.” Los Angeles Times, December 3, 2017. Net. https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-mcconnell-trump-taxplan-20171203-story.html
Pear, Robert and Kaplan, Thomas. “Senate Rejects Slimmed-Down Obamacare Repeal as McCain Votes No.” New York Times, July 27, 2017. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/us/politics/obamacare-partial-repeal-senate-republicans-revolt.html
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