The Most Effective Leader Senate Republicans Ever Had

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, February 25, 2025

 

Republican Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky announced last Thursday that he would be retiring from the U.S. Senate after seven terms in office. The decision was entirely expected. McConnell’s health has been slipping for years, as was clear when he suffered two rather alarming “senior moments” in front of the cameras back in the summer of 2023; he stepped down as Senate majority leader after the 2024 midterms in recognition of this. The only question was whether he would fill out the remainder of his term. He has announced that he will but that then it’s time for him to go.

 

He will be dearly missed. Mitch McConnell is, without exaggeration, one of the three most important Republican politicians of the last half century — the other two are Reagan and, for good or ill, Donald Trump — and the most effective leader Senate Republicans have ever seen, full stop. I find it depressing that this is not a universally shared sentiment among conservatives. I am well aware of the inexplicable loathing with which the MAGA rank and file regard McConnell, and all I can say in response to it is that you people have no earthly idea how lucky you were to have had this man in charge of the Senate Republicans for the last 18 years. You don’t know how good you had it.

 

No Republican ever herded cats better than Mitch McConnell. Nobody has ever more skillfully united a conference, particularly one that was once — in an era before Trump, before the memories of many readers, I suspect — notoriously fractious and ill disciplined. When Barack Obama swept into office in 2008 with control of the House and a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the Senate, it looked like nothing would stop the government from assuming control over the American health-care sector with Obamacare. (Remember “the public option”? That was the government’s own health-insurance scheme, a camel’s nose under the tent intended to eventually crowd out and replace private coverage over time.) The way McConnell singlehandedly helped the GOP — in the extreme minority and seemingly powerless — weather the onslaught and rally to fight back during that period defines his virtues.

 

Instead of being beaten and demoralized after two consecutive electoral horsewhippings, in 2006 and 2008, McConnell held all members of his conference together in opposition to Obama’s grand plans to remake the U.S. health-care system. Even typically “squishy” senators like Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, both of Maine, never budged an inch during the process. And by maintaining strict GOP discipline, he fired up public resistance to Obamacare to the point where the Republicans scored the most unlikely 41st Senate vote of all: Scott Brown’s winning the seat of the deceased Ted Kennedy in heavily Democratic Massachusetts. Obamacare was destined to pass in some form or another (Harry Reid had to use legislative legerdemain to sneak it through because of Brown’s shock victory), but what we got was blessedly less bad than it was intended to be because of the desperate resistance McConnell led against it.

 

When Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly of a heart attack near the end of Obama’s second term, the media world squealed with glee at the thought that the balance of the Supreme Court might be enduringly tipped from conservative to progressive. When Obama picked Merrick Garland to replace Scalia, the one and only person standing in the way was Senate Majority Leader McConnell. Throngs of Democrats and media liberals bayed and howled with rage, demanding that he allow a floor vote on the Garland nomination. McConnell’s response, in so many words: “No, I don’t think I will.” The decision to keep the seat open is widely agreed to have galvanized otherwise reluctant Republican voters — including many of my friends and family — to pull the lever for Trump that November. And it paid off.

 

When Harry Reid used the “nuclear option” in 2013 to kill the filibuster in the Senate and seat some of Barack Obama’s lower court nominees on the federal bench, McConnell ominously warned him, “You’ll regret this.” So when Chuck Schumer foolishly tried to filibuster Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court nomination in 2017 — his hand was partially forced by Democratic rage over McConnell’s success in keeping Garland off the Court — McConnell pitilessly ensured that the Democrats would indeed feel the sting of regret by dispensing with judicial filibusters altogether. (It was an escalatory arms race that, because of his leadership, Republicans for once definitively won.) And when Ruth Bader Ginsburg chanced to die near the end of Donald Trump’s first term — in an eerie echo of Scalia’s timing — McConnell twisted the knife by speeding Amy Coney Barrett’s hearings along.

 

So why is it that Team MAGA has always disliked McConnell? It’s primarily emotional: He was the face of the GOP during the “losing” era — during the Obama years when the suffocating national cult of wokeness was truly birthed — and so people associate him reflexively with those bad times, with the squish style of Republican politics that Trump in his brazenness seemingly swept away. But McConnell didn’t run the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns (or the 2020 one for that matter).

 

Throughout his career, McConnell has usually been forced to play the hand dealt to him by others, and no legislative leader in my lifetime ever played a bad set of cards more brilliantly. Those familiar with the progress of Hannibal’s adventures in Italy during the Second Punic War will know why I used to jokingly refer to McConnell, during the Obama years, as “Mitch McCunctator,” a tribute to how he handled the onslaught of Obama-era legislation by delay, deception, legislative trickery, and implacable discipline. Sometimes the numbers are just against you — as they fearsomely were for Republicans during the first two years of Obama’s tenure — and you have to play defense. But McConnell was always willing to play offense as well, and for long-term stakes; his legacy in shaping the judiciary will be the most important of all.

 

It is therefore a truly bittersweet irony that the Republican Party that Mitch McConnell spent his life fighting for — scrapping with Democrats in every possible scrum and emerging with bruises, but often with the upper hand — no longer seems to have much time for him. He first came to Washington in 1984, carried along in (still ancestrally Democratic) Kentucky by the wave of Ronald Reagan’s overwhelming reelection. And yet the party of Reagan is long gone. Now we have the party of Trump, and the party of Trump isn’t just uninterested in what McConnell did for conservatism, they’re invested in pretending it never happened. As for me, I was there. If you were too, then join me in saluting ol’ Yertle the Majority Leader as he prepares to step back. Enjoy a piece I wrote almost exactly a year ago: an appreciation not of the career but of the memes of Mitch McConnell.