What could ever make Mitch look like a statesman? The people trying to replace him.
It takes a special level of loathsome to make U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell even the tiniest bit sympathetic.
But the MAGA-land crew chomping at his heels, including his wanna-be deposer, Sen. Rick Scott and Sen. Josh RUN! Hawley, now blaming McConnell for the red tsunami that wasn’t in the midterms, make Mitch appear positively statesmanlike.
As they blather over how Mitch spent the money that he raised on which candidates, McConnell fired off a much more cogent analysis of the election results on Tuesday:
“It’s pretty obvious what happened, we under-performed among independent and moderate voters because their impression of many of the people in our party and in leadership roles is that they’re involved in chaos, negativity, excessive attacks, and it frightened independent and moderate Republican voters,” he said.
McConnell may well agree with Scott that we ought to sunset beloved safety net programs like Medicare and Social Security, but he would never be dumb enough to announce it as part of a new way for Republicans, like Scott did. Scott should probably stop talking about Medicare, given that he was CEO of Columbia/HCA about a decade ago, when the company was fined $1.7 billion for Medicare fraud. But Scott and his ilk also hate Mitch for crossing party lines to vote for a very moderate gun reform bill after Uvalde, and Biden’s infrastructure bill, two common sense, good for the country measures.
McConnell’s problem is that unlike Liz Cheney, he’s never done enough to stand up to the chaos and negativity that Donald Trump brought in his wake. He sort of condemned Jan. 6, but protected Trump from impeachment. He stays silent when Trump makes racist taunts about his wife. He supported candidates like J.D. Vance and Don Bolduc. He’s tolerated the MAGAheads and now they’re coming for him.
“This is the biggest challenge he’s ever had,” veteran journalist and professor Al Cross said before Wednesday’s Senate leadership vote. “But when he says he has the votes, I don’t think he’s whistling past the graveyard.”
McConnell will remain in charge of his minority for now to oversee what he created — a campaign finance system that has totally corrupted our politics and an uber-conservative judiciary made by him through audacity and deceit. Even with terrible principles, he’s more principled than those who will come after him. That includes folks like Scott, who also wants to raise income taxes on the poor and middle class, the newly elected J.D. Vance whose loyalty is bought and paid for by Trump and Peter Thiel, and Josh Hawley, who paired raised fists with fleet feet as he exited the Capitol on Jan. 6. On Nov. 12, Hawley solemnly declared on Twitter “The old party is dead. Time to bury it. Build something new.” The response was instantaneous and brutal.
Cross wondered if McConnell might be regretting some of those moves: That McConnell-devised Supreme Court threw out Roe v. Wade, which directly relates to him not being Senate Majority Leader. (The GOP’s minority status also leaves the world without the comedy gold of Kentucky’s other senator as chairman of the Senate Health, Education and Labor committee, as was predicted.)
He also wonders if McConnell will try to save his beloved party once again by running in 2026 when he’ll be 84. “He wanted to declare victory and leave the field, and he won’t be able to do that,” Cross said. “Now he has to save his party from the people who are running it into the ditch.”
There are some pretty poor precedents for elderly politicians staying too long, like Strom Thurmond or Dianne Feinstein. Let’s hope McConnell doesn’t join them.
As McConnell pointed out, this election shows us that Trump-fever has broken; people like democracy and want to keep it, and will no longer listen to blather about voting machines or vaccine microchips or national abortion bans. We’ll have to listen to Trump in campaign mode for a bit longer but it’s also possible the DOJ will put us out of our misery.
The Republicans biting at McConnell’s heels should remember that his policies have created the most conservative Supreme Court in memory, income inequality not seen since the Gilded Age, and a broken campaign finance system. What more do they want? Sit down and be grateful and leave McConnell to make his last machinations in peace, so then he can finally leave the stage. Also remember, McConnell has been up against much better foes than these. To quote the immortal Omar Little: “When you come at the king, you best not miss.”
This story was originally published November 16, 2022 at 2:18 PM.
