The Price of Power: How Mitch McConnell Mastered the Senate, Changed America, and Lost His Party
“There is a kind of sterility, a lifelessness, that emanates from his career, a reflection of the spiritual barrenness that marks power seekers. Looking at McConnell in person, one sees a small man.”
Now that the American electorate, in its wisdom, has installed a convicted felon, Donald Trump, in the nation’s highest office; now that continuous mendacity in official statements has become our accepted mode of public discourse; now that the rule of law as the framework of our republic has been dismantled by the very institutions that should uphold it; now that our society’s descent into nihilism, narcissism, and superstition is complete—what better time to consider the biography of one of the chief engineers of our present chaos, the Honorable U.S. Senator from Kentucky, Addison Mitchell McConnell.
Michael Tackett has written a political biography, not a fully three-dimensional one. Reading it, we learn very little about McConnell’s personal life—his character, his interests outside politics, his relationships with close family members. The focus is on McConnell’s political rise, his methods and accomplishments.
Afflicted with polio as a young child, McConnell recovered and sought to demonstrate his fitness through competition in sports. He became a Little League all-star baseball player but was not good enough to compete in high school. Instead, he steered his competitive energies into politics, winning election as President of the Student Council. He continued his political path at the University of Louisville, where he ran for student government and became president of the College Republicans.
Early on, he showed an aptitude for understanding and skillfully using the levers of political power. He had a keen grasp of the tactics needed to defeat opponents in elections. His method was to discover an opponent’s political weaknesses, expose them, and relentlessly remind voters of them. His strategy was designed to discredit his opponent, not to blow his own horn. It worked. From the outset, he preferred opposition to proposition.
He won his first elected office in 1978, becoming a county judge executive, defeating the incumbent Democrat who early in the race led McConnell by 20 points. He used this position as a platform on which to gain name recognition in Kentucky for a run for the U.S. Senate in 1984. The Senate had been his political goal ever since he had served during his college years as an intern in the office of Senator John Sherman Cooper, an early political idol.
Against all odds, McConnell succeeded in his first run for the Senate. His opponent in the general election was the popular Democratic incumbent Dee Huddleston. In July, McConnell trailed 67-23. McConnell’s campaign manager discovered that Huddleston frequently missed key Senate votes because he was away from Washington earning speaking fees. This flaw in his record became the target of McConnell’s attack. Guided by Roger Ailes, he used negative campaign ads to chip away at Huddleston’s lead. One particularly effective ad showed bloodhounds searching for Huddleston. On election night, McConnell won by 5,100 votes.
This experience taught McConnell the importance of money in political elections and made him a foe of campaign finance reform. His realization that money is the fuel of politics set McConnell’s course for his long career in the Senate. It made him an enabler not only of his own career, but also the careers of other Republican Senators. As he rose through the ranks of Republican leadership in the Senate—chair of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee (1996), majority whip (2000), minority leader (2006), majority leader (2014)—McConnell used his fundraising skills and his tactical acumen to help elect Republican senators nationwide, thereby strengthening his party and his own role within it.
The power that McConnell accumulated and exercised through his control of the Senate has been felt most profoundly in our country’s legal system. Our legal system provides the framework that shapes all our social and economic interactions. As a member of the Judiciary Committee, McConnell was in a position to weigh the judicial philosophy that would guide the selection of appointees to federal courts. Of course, the preferred judicial philosophy would be one that aligned with his own interests and the interests of his party.
When he entered the Senate in 1984, McConnell believed that the only criterion for selection of federal judges should be their legal qualifications. He thought that the political inclinations of the nominees were the president’s prerogative. But when in 1987 Senate Democrats blocked Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court on clearly partisan political grounds, McConnell changed his mind. As the political philosophies of judicial nominees became more of a litmus test of a candidate’s fitness to serve than their legal qualifications, partisanship took precedence over fairness. This tension came to a head in 2016 when McConnell, in his capacity as majority leader, refused to hold hearings on President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the U.S. Supreme Court.
What followed in the subsequent four years of the Trump presidency was the installation of three arch conservative jurists to the Supreme Court, giving the court a conservative super majority that has overturned decades of legal precedent, increased the role of money in our political process, and given nearly unchecked power to the executive branch of government.
But McConnell’s most enduring legacy may be his enabling the political survival of Donald Trump through two impeachment processes.
Although McConnell claimed to be horrified by the January 6, 2021, insurrection that Trump instigated, and believed that it was an impeachable offense, he voted against Senate conviction on the House of Representatives articles of impeachment and made no attempt to use his position as majority leader to muster other Republican votes. His calculation was, as always, purely political. He saw impeachment as inflicting damage on the Republican Party and therefore also on his position as majority leader. He rationalized that the insurrection would end Trump’s political career, so there was no need to take the Republican Party down with him. Had Trump been convicted, he would have been ineligible to run for office again and would not be entering the White House for a second term in January.
So it’s fair to say that McConnell’s partisan stacking of the U.S. Supreme Court with conservative Republicans, and his failure to use the power of the Senate to check abuses of presidential power, have played a significant role in landing our country in its present crisis of democracy.
Like Lincoln, McConnell came from humble beginnings. He was born in a small town in Alabama in 1942. His mother was the child of subsistence farmers. His father, an Army veteran of WWII, married his mother while working in the Texas oilfields. He moved his family to Louisville, Kentucky, when McConnell was 14, bringing them into the middle class through a managerial position with DuPont.
McConnell was an undistinguished student in high school, in college, and in law school. His sole interest was in politics, a profession in which people compete for power and influence in order to implement policies that, presumably, are undergirded by some belief in the purpose of social organization and government.
But in the life story of Mitch McConnell, it is hard to find a trace of a guiding and controlling principle of human organization and cooperation, other than the principle of obtaining power as an end in itself, a means of perpetuating control. Looking back over McConnell’s career as presented here, one is hard pressed to find a single piece of legislation credited to him that brought benefit to our country at large. His achievements are all in the realm of advancing a narrow partisan agenda. A noteworthy exception is his support for American aid to Ukraine in its war with Russia.
Unlike another “master of the Senate,” Lyndon Johnson, McConnell is remembered more for what he obstructed than what he accomplished. There is a kind of sterility, a lifelessness, that emanates from his career, a reflection of the spiritual barrenness that marks power seekers. Looking at McConnell in person, one sees a small man.