Mitch McConnell was never the problem
Mitch McConnell was never the problem
And it won't go away when he does (but I'm glad he's going away)
Mitch McConnell, a deeply malevolent bigot who hates democracy and cares only about the consolidation of money and power, announced today that he will step down as leader of the Senate Republican caucus after this November’s elections.
McConnell is infamous for the central role he played in several of the worst political developments in modern American history. From engineering the illegitimate right-wing Supreme Court supermajority that ushered in an era of bans on abortion, in vitro fertilization and (coming soon) birth control to helping Donald Trump evade accountability for inciting an insurrection – and, thus, paving the way for Trump’s potential return to the White House – Mitch McConnell has inflicted incalculable damage on America. He has made people poorer, sicker, and less happy. He is a bad Senator and a bad person. How bad? So bad that even after Donald Trump repeatedly made racist comments about McConnell’s wife, McConnell has stood by Trump.
There is nothing positive that can honestly be said about Mitch McConnell.
But Mitch McConnell has never been the problem. A problem, sure. But the problem? Nah. Even as Senate Majority Leader, he is just one of one hundred Senators. Nothing McConnell has ever done that mattered could have been done without the help of his colleagues, many of whom have enjoyed an undeserved reputation for being “moderate” or “reasonable” Republicans – and enjoyed that reputation in part because McConnell took the heat for their actions.
Mitch McConnell couldn’t have unilaterally reduced the size of the Supreme Court to eight members for as long as a Democrat was in the White House in order to give Donald Trump the chance to solidify a right-wing supermajority on the Court — he needed the help of the most “moderate” Senate Republicans, and he got it. John McCain, Susan Collins,1 Lisa Murkowski, Mark Kirk, Shelley Moore Capito, Thom Tillis, Lamar Alexander, Rob Portman, Chuck Grassley, Kelly Ayotte — they were the Senators responsible for the GOP’s unprecedented power grab. A power grab that inevitably led to abortion bans and immediate consequences.
Susan Collins did that. Lisa Murkowski did that. John McCain did that.
Likewise, McConnell alone couldn’t acquit Trump during his impeachment trial for inciting the January 6 insurrection — Senators Capito, Portman, Rounds, Grassley, Graham, Wicker, Hoeven, Tillis, Blunt, Cramer, all to varying degrees portrayed by the news media as relatively moderate Republicans, let Trump off the hook and thus put him in position to re-take the White House.2
It may seem counter-intuitive to blame the least conservative Senate Republicans for actions driven by McConnell and their more extreme colleagues. It shouldn’t.
This has long been a hobby-horse of mine, so to pre-empt any concern that I’m just offering a contrarian hot take to McConnell’s announcement (and to save myself some writing) I’ll quote at length from this piece I wrote in 2011:3
Plenty of people have taken the blame for Washington's excessive partisanship and refusal to take bold action to deal with crises, both immediate (unemployment) and long-term (global warming). Arch-conservatives from far-right states and districts where Ronald Reagan couldn't win a modern Republican primary have more than earned their reputation for knee-jerk opposition to anything that's even slightly sane. And it's hard to overstate how much responsibility Republican leaders like Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who have made clear their intent to oppose anything President Obama proposes simply because he proposes it, bear for the nation's problems. Even President Obama has, rather bizarrely, taken hits for supposed insufficient bipartisanship.
But there's one group of people who deserve far more blame than they get for Washington gridlock and the continued failure to fix urgent problems: Republicans who represent swing states and districts, particularly those who portray themselves as "moderates." Because they don't tend to make deeply nasty and comically over-the-top comments, you rarely hear that Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Scott Brown (R-MA) are the problem — but they are. The most moderate Republicans, from the least conservative states and congressional districts, are the members of Congress most responsible for gridlock.
Remember the 2000 election, in which — for the purposes of discussion — George W. Bush won 271 electoral votes and Al Gore won 266? Had Gore carried Mississippi, with its seven electoral votes, he would have been president. And yet, quite rightly, nobody says "Mississippi determined the outcome of the 2000 election," because there was never any realistic chance Gore could have won Mississippi. Instead, people credit, or blame, Florida and, to a lesser extent, states like New Hampshire, Missouri, Tennessee, and Arkansas — states where the outcome was close, where Gore could have won.
The same principle applies to congressional gridlock. Members like Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA), and Rep. Steve King (R-IA) deserve the condemnation they receive for their cruelty, divisiveness and stunningly bad policy preferences, but they aren't the people most directly standing in the way of bipartisan action to fix urgent problems — not any more than Mississippi deserves credit for deciding the 2000 presidential election.
Snowe and Collins and Brown and a few dozen House members from swing districts, on the other hand — they might reasonably be expected to act in a bipartisan fashion to support reasonable solutions to huge problems. They portray themselves as moderates, they represent middle-of-the-road constituents — and yet they've embraced the radical ideology and party-first mentality they claim to oppose. All indications are that Rep. Broun is simply a fool. There's no reason to believe he knows any better. Olympia Snowe, on the other hand, does know better, or used to, yet she falls in line with her party. That's the very essence of "partisanship."
Meanwhile, the Brouns and the Snowes enjoy a symbiotic relationship: The so-called moderates mainstream the nonsensical policy positions peddled by the far right, and the extremist shrieking of the far right distracts public attention from the crucial role the so-called moderates have played in thwarting progress.
My point is not that people should stop being so mean to Mitch McConnell. Mitch McConnell is truly awful. People should react accordingly, in whatever legal way they have available to them. Anyone who ever has the opportunity to vote against him should do so with gusto. His grandchildren should deny him hugs, his fishmonger should give him less desirable end pieces with awkward tapers that won’t cook evenly. I come not to praise Mitch McConnell, but to (rhetorically) bury his colleagues, and put to rest the misguided notion of the Good Republican. The Republicans who will be running this year in swing states and swing districts — the ones often portrayed by the media and perceived by voters as “moderate” or “reasonable” Republicans — may campaign with a smile instead of McConnell’s trademark scowl, but they are extremists nonetheless, and they share his desire for power at all costs.
***
LAST-MINUTE ADDITION: I finished writing everything above earlier today right before going into a meeting. My plan was to give it a proofread4 when I was done with the meeting and send it out. In the meantime, the Supreme Court announced it will hear Donald Trump’s deeply absurd claim that he is immune from prosecution for his attempts to subvert the 2020 election — and do it on a delayed timeline that means that even if the Court properly recognizes that of course Donald Trump is not immune from prosecution, his trial will likely be pushed back far enough that if he re-takes the White House he will be able to order the Justice Department to stop prosecuting him. It’s a grotesque, completely unjustified action by the Court that is at minimum a gift to Trump and could ultimately be a key inflection point in America’s collapse into autocracy. Mitch McConnell is, deservedly, getting some immediate blame for this, but, again, it couldn’t have happened without the help of every significant Republican politician in America.
Susan Collins, in an extremely Susan Collins move, publicly claimed to support holding hearings for President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee in 2016 but never actually did anything to make that happen. With the balance of power in the Senate coming down to just one or two senators for much of her career, Collins has held extraordinary leverage over the Senate Republican caucus: If she really wanted it to do something, or to stop it from doing something, she could use that leverage by threatening to caucus with Democrats, or to block other legislation Republicans cared about. She has never really done that, preferring instead to publicly proclaim her distaste for things she enables her party to do.
Had these Republicans voted to convict Trump in the impeachment trial, the Senate could then have immediately voted to disqualify him from future office by simple majority vote. That didn’t happen, so here we are. Though, it should be noted, Trump is pretty clearly disqualified via the 14th Amendment, but pretty much everybody expects the Supreme Court to exempt him from that disqualification.
This piece, along with many of the links contained in the excerpt, is no longer online. I’ve updated the links to Internet Archive captures.
By which I mean a very perfunctory skim that would undoubtedly miss at least six typos, and a quick check to make sure the links go where they’re supposed to..
We have a centuries-old remedy for awful congressperson. The vote. Nevermind the awful Americans who voted for these Senators, many just didn't bother to show up. Some "protested" with their vote. Some were uncommitted to our democracy - clearly. But the really cool part of all this? Senator races can't be gerrymandered.
So as awful as Mitch is, as awful as Susan is, as awful as John McCain was, I blame the voters who didn't take this seriously, whether for 4 years, or 40.
The 80s and cocaine? Sure.
But not the preferred drug of the GOP. Their drug has been complicity, McConnell as a main pusher. The problem with being an addict high on complicity, is that it makes you arrogant. Arrogant enough to fool yourself into believing you can control a Tea Party, #45 or the MAGA movement. There is no such thing as introducing just a little bit of autocracy just to take the edge off. That’s an addict talking.
If we’re honest, moderation has had the same status as ethics within the GOP ever since Lincoln was killed and Reconstruction was preceded by our country’s complaisant acceptance of Jim Crow. When the 60’s brought the Republican Southern Strategy, that was their final meeting with the crossroads devil. At that point Ronald Reagan’s work was already done for him.