“You haven’t written anything trashing me lately,” the senior senator from Kentucky once sniped at me.
We laughed. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has a gruff charm. That was his way of poking fun at me when I saw him around town.
For a long time, I wanted to quickly snap back by thanking him for regularly reading this column. But I bit my tongue because I think it is best to let him have the last laugh. After all, he is the longest-serving party leader in the history of the U.S. Senate.
Now, at 83, having stepped down as his party’s leader last year and announcing last month that he will not seek an eighth term, the senator is in the twilight of his career.
The bad news for McConnell is that despite his decades towering over Washington as a top GOP leader, he is now eclipsed by President Trump’s takeover of his party.
Trump has called McConnell “a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack” and warned that Republicans would lose if they remained aligned with him. And Trump issued a racially pointed insult to McConnell’s wife. McConnell didn’t fire back.
The only public shot McConnell ever took at Trump came after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, saying he was “morally responsible.”
Yet, when it came time to act, he voted to acquit Trump. The weak explanation: “We have a criminal justice system in this country…”
According to the New York Times, at the same time, McConnell told advisers in private: “The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us.”
This year, McConnell tried to regain some dignity by defying Trump with votes against Trump’s nominations of Pete Hegseth for Defense secretary, Tulsi Gabbard for director of National Intelligence and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services secretary.
Sorry, Mitch. As Aristotle is credited with saying, “One swallow does not a summer make.”
To put it another way: Despite a few good votes on bad nominees, the history books will still highlight McConnell’s power plays over the years to polarize the Senate with his hard-right ideological agenda.
McConnell can’t erase the procedural tricks to block President Obama’s judicial appointments, thwarting voters who elected a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate majority to nominate and confirm judges.
McConnell’s tactical success left federal courts short of judges. That led then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to make the difficult decision to end the filibuster so that judicial nominees could fill a backlog of non-Supreme Court vacancies.
McConnell most famously threw a wrench into the judicial system after Justice Antonin Scalia died. He prevented the Democrat’s nominee, Merrick Garland — a centrist Democrat with impeccable credentials — from even having confirmation hearings.
Instead, McConnell invented a bogus excuse about not filling a seat during a presidential election year — stalling in the hopes that a Republican would win the White House and make the appointment instead.
His gamble paid off, but it set a new low as a brazen breach of Senate norms. And then McConnell fast-tracked the confirmation of Trump’s nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, less than three months before the 2020 presidential election after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died.
Beyond the damage McConnell did by distorting the Supreme Court’s balance, he also opened the door for corporations and the rich to flood Washington with money to buy influence in Congress and on the campaign trail.
McConnell remains a folk hero among wealthy Republican donors for his crusade against campaign finance laws. He was the lead plaintiff in the 2003 case McConnell v. FEC, arguing that the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act was unconstitutional because, as conservatives claimed, “money equals speech.”
At the time, the argument seemed laughable. The court ruled against McConnell. But the dissents in the case from conservative justices set the stage for Citizens United v. FEC less than a decade later. That ruling opened the door to unlimited, undisclosed corporate dark money to overwhelm the political system.
McConnell’s legacy extends beyond damaging campaign finance. His record is full of hostility toward abortion rights, gay rights and environmental protection. And he consistently backed tax cuts that benefited the wealthiest Americans—while exploding the deficit.
Yes, most Republicans on Capitol Hill went along with McConnell’s legislative agenda, but he set the agenda as the party’s leader.
For the history books, he will be the main player paving the way for Trump.
As Joy Behar recently summed up McConnell’s career: “He stole a Supreme Court seat from Obama, voted to acquit Trump after the insurrection and even endorsed him for president again. Thanks for nothing, Mitch. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”
McConnell could pull a surprise ending to his career. If his conscience is finally catching up with him he could switch parties, become a Democrat, and endorse Kentucky’s Democratic Governor Andy Beshear as his Senate successor.
Republicans already hate him because Trump told them to. He literally has nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Anything short of that is too little, too late.
McConnell will go down in history not as a statesman, but as the man who brought us to this perilous moment.
That’s not trashing you, senator. It’s simply stating a fact.
Juan Williams is senior political analyst for Fox News Channel and a prize-winning civil rights historian. He is the author of the new book “New Prize for these Eyes: the Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement.”
