The Shamelessness of the Failed Senate Rebellion against Mitch McConnell

By Christian Schneider

Wednesday, November 16, 2022

 

And if your mission is to troll your way to the presidency in 2024, you don’t need a powerful, dignified master of Senate procedure leading you.

 

After Republicans butt-fumbled away their chance to retake the majority in 2022, fingers immediately began pointing at McConnell, the GOP’s longest-serving leader.

 

“First we need to make sure that those who want to lead us are genuinely committed to fighting for the priorities & values of the working Americans (of every background) who gave us big wins in states like #Florida,” wrote newly reelected senator Marco Rubio, urging that today’s leadership vote be postponed.

 

Missouri senator Josh Hawley declared the midterm elections the “funeral for the Republican Party as we know it,” calling the party “dead.” Presumably, he did so while holding a bloody knife. It was Hawley, after all, who was last seen cheering on a mob of Trump supporters who may not have seen him because they were busy trying to hang Vice President Mike Pence. It was Hawley who chose to feed Trump’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, leading voters such as those who stormed the Capitol to believe that the election had been stolen — and almost certainly helping to cost the GOP control of the Senate. So naturally, it is Hawley who’s now playing the child who murders his parents and expects sympathy from the court because he’s an orphan.

 

Finally, on Tuesday, Florida senator Rick Scott announced a long-shot bid to replace McConnell as Senate Republican leader — the first challenge McConnell had faced since assuming his perch atop the caucus in 2007. “I believe it’s time for the Senate Republican Conference to be far more bold and resolute than we have been in the past,” Scott wrote in a letter to his colleagues. “We must start saying what we are for, not just what we are against.”

 

These are the words of a group of unserious senators who have no interest in actually governing over the next two years. As members of the minority, Senate Republicans should have only one role, which is to sit in their seats and say the word “nay.” They should exist to block the Democrats’ bad ideas from making their way to President Joe Biden’s desk. Instead, McConnell’s detractors plan to govern through a historical Senate process known as “lib-owning,” which doesn’t require the institutional strength and knowledge possessed by their longtime leader.

 

Of course, McConnell easily held off their challenge on Wednesday, because there are more than enough Republican senators who appreciate the steady hand with which he has guided them over the years. But clearly, too many others have forgotten the phenomenal job he’s done. After all, three conservative justices have McConnell to thank for their places on the U.S. Supreme Court. And Donald Trump, though he’d never admit it, has McConnell to thank for every one of the big legislative victories of his presidency, from his historic tax cut to the First Step Act reducing sentences on nonviolent criminals.

 

(Trump, because he had little to no idea how Congress or the federal government worked, desperately needed McConnell’s experience. As Maggie Haberman reports in her new book, even after four years in office, Trump still believes the Senate minority can block any bill by simply refusing to show up for the vote.)

 

Perhaps McConnell’s critics want a leader who reflects a version of the party that is more populist, never mind that their “populism” doesn’t seem all that popular. Or perhaps their failed effort to replace him is rooted in his long-running feud with Trump. During the former president’s second impeachment, McConnell all but put up a neon sign inviting prosecutors to go after Trump for his post-election activities. Since then, Trump has hammered away at McConnell, at one point saying the minority leader has a “death wish” and referring to his “China loving wife, Coco Chow!” (McConnell, of course, is married to Taiwanese-American Elaine Chao, who served as secretary of transportation in Trump’s own administration.)

 

Fittingly, Trump’s acolytes are now blaming McConnell for the caucus’s electoral losses, because he chose to pull funding from lost-cause candidates such as Blake Masters in Arizona and Don Bolduc in New Hampshire. (Bolduc ended up losing by nine points, and Blake Masters lost by around five points.)

 

The criticism of McConnell’s resource-allocation choices is particularly risible coming from Scott, given that Scott led the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and thus bore primary responsibility for electing more Republicans to the Senate this cycle. During the GOP primaries, Scott argued against intervening in contested races to help nominate more-electable Republican candidates. Democrats, on the other hand, were more than happy to put money into helping the least-electable Republicans win their primaries, a strategy that appears to have worked.

 

It wasn’t McConnell’s fault that Republican primary voters picked such awful candidates during the primaries. McConnell did not trick Bolduc into being an election denier. McConnell did not father Herschel Walker’s love children (as far as we know). He did not force Mehmet Oz to drink a plastic cup of wine at a football tailgate party.

 

As McConnell himself put it in the lead-up to Wednesday’s vote, “We under-performed among independents and moderates because their impression of many of the people in our party, in leadership roles, is that they’re causing chaos, negativity, excessive attacks. And it frightened independent and moderate Republican voters.”

 

It is not as though McConnell has been perfect. But when he has erred, it has been in going too easy on Trump. Perhaps the former insurrectionist-in-chief would now be ineligible to run for president in 2024 if McConnell had applied more pressure on his colleagues during Trump’s second impeachment trial. The Republican Party’s long-needed separation from Trump would be complete, and the rebirth of the “dead” GOP Hawley and so many others helped kill would already be under way.

 

And therein lies the bottom line: Whatever McConnell’s mistakes, it is indisputable that the insurgents who tried to topple him today bear 100 times more responsibility for the party’s current dire straits than McConnell does. What they were essentially asking their colleagues to do today was elect a leader who would encourage the caucus to troll its way back into the public’s good graces.

 

Fortunately, their colleagues chose the competence and experience that will make the 81-year-old McConnell the right leader for as long as he wants the job.