wsj.com Opinion | The Man Democrats Loathe More Than Trump
Fred Barnes
If you think Donald Trump is the Democrats’ Public Enemy No. 1, get one of them started on the Senate majority leader. “I would never want us to be as malevolent or cynical as Mitch McConnell is,” Sen. Michael Bennet (D., Colo.), a relatively moderate presidential candidate, told The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board this week. Underlying that hostility, Mr. Bennet immediately acknowledged, is a grudging respect for Mr. McConnell’s effectiveness: “I think we need to be as strategic as Mitch McConnell is.”
The central example is Mr. McConnell’s refusal in 2016 to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death. “The worst thing that’s been done in the last 10 years, and maybe in our history, in terms of judges is what he did on Merrick Garland, ” Mr. Bennet said. (Worse than what his party did to Brett Kavanaugh, he added in response to a question.)
Mr. McConnell agrees on the significance of what he did in 2016, calling it the “biggest accomplishment of my career.” On the day Scalia died in February, the Kentucky Republican declared that no Supreme Court nomination would reach the floor that year. The next president would fill the vacancy. It was a gamble. He needed at least 50 of the other 53 Republican senators to stick with him.
They did, and one of them attributes Donald Trump’s victory to it. “That call, in a close presidential race, tipped the race,” says Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming. It clarified the choice for conservative voters who found Mr. Trump’s character appalling.
Mr. McConnell, 77, has been instrumental in Mr. Trump’s successes on Capitol Hill, too. He delivered tax reform in 2017 with a 51-48 majority and no help from Democrats. He allowed the First Step Act of 2018, a criminal-justice reform bill that he had opposed, to come to the floor and pass with bipartisan support—including his own vote. And he’s pushed through judicial confirmations at a record clip. “We intended to take full advantage of the opportunity to continue to transform the courts for as long as we have the ability to do so,” he says. His motto is “leave no vacancy behind.”
Not that Mr. Trump always appreciates his efforts. The president blamed the majority leader for ObamaCare’s survival after the late Sen. John McCain bolted. “Can you believe,” Mr. Trump tweeted in August 2017, “that Mitch McConnell, who has screamed Repeal & Replace for 7 years, couldn’t get it done.” But the two men put aside their differences the following month at a White House lunch. At an October 2018 rally in Richmond, Ky., Mr. Trump called Mr. McConnell “the greatest leader in history.”
In some ways Mr. McConnell is Mr. Trump’s opposite—a taciturn insider rather than a bombastic outsider. From the start of his Senate career in 1985, his ambition was to be majority leader. He begins discussing it on page 5 of his 2016 memoir, “The Long Game.” He made a name for himself by defending Kentucky’s tobacco industry and opposing campaign-finance regulations. Outside the Senate, those stances brought more opprobrium than popularity. But inside, Mr. McConnell quietly built support as he rose in the ranks to majority whip in 2003, minority leader in 2007, and majority leader in 2015 after Republicans took the Senate.
The Senate has changed dramatically in the 35 years since Mr. McConnell’s arrival. “There’s been a kind of realignment of the two parties to the point where almost every Republican is more conservative than every Democrat and almost every Democrat is more liberal than almost every Republican,” he says. Some observers bemoan this polarization, but not Mr. McConnell: “I don’t think that’s necessarily a condemnation of today’s Senate.”
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Opinion: Mitch McConnell Aims to Unite Americans, Not Divide Them
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell warns of a "modern-day McCarthyism" that has taken root in the United States. Image: Shawn Thew / EPA
It does, however, lead to condemnations from whichever party isn’t in charge. “We have the least effective Senate,” Mr. Bennet told the Journal, accusing his colleague of hypocrisy. Five years ago, then-Minority Leader McConnell inveighed against the “tyranny” of Harry Reid, who led the Democratic majority, “and the fact,” in Mr. Bennet’s words, that Mr. Reid “never let anything go through regular order, and the fact that we never had amendments.” Mr. McConnell is doing the same, Mr. Bennet said: “You’ve got all these theoretically grown-up people down there who literally never vote on an amendment.”
Some Republican senators echo these criticisms, albeit in private. Mr. McConnell declines to answer them, but an aide tells me the majority leader doesn’t plan to change course: “When he has tried open debate, it fizzles out pretty quickly because individual members block each other’s opportunities to offer amendments.”
Mr. McConnell usually manages to hold his caucus together despite the grumbling. In 2017 he rallied all 52 Republican senators to abolish the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, allowing the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch—something he probably couldn’t have done had Mr. Reid not done the same for lower-court nominations in 2013.
Most bills still require 60 votes to reach the floor, and Mr. McConnell believes this is as it should be. “The legislative filibuster is one of the key safeguards of American government,” he says. “It makes persuasion necessary and makes policy less likely to swing wildly with every election. America doesn’t need a second House of Representatives. America needs the Senate to be the Senate.” He says he’ll fight to retain the legislative filibuster if Democrats take the Senate in 2020 but declines to discuss his strategy.
The tax bill passed with a simple majority through a process reserved for budget bills, but even that requires near-unanimity among Republicans, who now hold 53 seats. Mr. McConnell follows the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. “You wear 20% of your ties 80% of the time,” he says, “meaning 80% of your ties, you only wear 20% of the time. It applies to a group too. You spend 80% of your time with 20% of your members. Most of the time is spent with the people who are high-maintenance or who like to create challenges.” Usually, he adds, “I do things one-on-one—for a number of reasons. Because it doesn’t embarrass somebody in front of somebody else.”
The foremost member of the 20% club is Maine’s Susan Collins. Her vote is often the hardest to get and the most needed. Ask Republican senators who won the most favors in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, and they’ll invariably answer Ms. Collins. It was worth it, Mr. McConnell says. Her vote was critical, and she really wanted to vote yes, so long as the bill helped Maine. “Mitch’s strength is understanding that each of us represents a state that may be different from Kentucky,” says Ms. Collins, one of only two GOP senators from states Hillary Clinton carried in 2016.
Ms. Collins also saved Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination last year after he was accused of youthful sexual misconduct. “Mitch didn’t know how I was going to vote,” she says. “He did not ask and I didn’t volunteer.” She told him over lunch immediately before announcing her “yes” vote in a speech that methodically dismantled the case against Justice Kavanaugh. The vote to confirm was 50-48.
In May a constituent in Paducah asked Mr. McConnell what he’ll do if a high-court vacancy arises in 2020. “Oh, we’d fill it,” he replied. When I ask him to elaborate, he says he’d do it even at the 11th hour. Mr. McConnell allows that “it would be hard to process even a noncontroversial Supreme Court nominee”—perhaps by now an oxymoron—“in under two months. But certainly we would try if that happened.”
The left finds that prospect alarming. “If there is a SCOTUS vacancy next year and @senatemajldr carries through on his extraordinary promise to fill it—despite his own previous precedent in blocking Garland—it will tear this country apart,” David Axelrod, a top White House aide during President Obama’s first term, tweeted last month.
Mr. McConnell scoffs at the charge that he’s hypocritical and points to his statement on the Senate floor nine days after Scalia’s death. “Of course, it’s within the president’s authority to nominate a successor even in this very rare circumstance,” he said then. “Remember that the Senate has not filled a vacancy arising in an election year where there was divided government since 1888, almost 130 years ago. But we also know that Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution grants the Senate the right to withhold its consent, as it deems necessary.”
Mr. Axelrod’s histrionics are mild compared with other attacks on Mr. McConnell. At a Louisville restaurant last October, a man snatched the takeout box from his table and emptied it on the street. Also in Louisville, a mob assembled last month outside his house, and Twitter suspended his campaign’s account after it posted a video of their obscene shouts.
He shrugs off most of it; aides describe him as impervious. “I learned a long time ago that the higher you go up in politics, the more criticism you get,” he says, “and that just sort of goes with the job. I’m largely unaffected by the criticism of those who have a totally different agenda. I get up every day hoping I can advance a right-of-center agenda. . . . And to the extent that we’ve succeeded in doing that, and I think most would concede that I have, I’ve got my share of enemies who don’t like that.”
He did respond indignantly in July to being called “Moscow Mitch” for opposing two bills intended to thwart Russian interference in the 2020 election. In a speech on the Senate floor, he called the smear “modern-day McCarthyism.” He says he opposed the bills because Democrats had stuffed them with provisions having no connection to Russia.
What got to him, he says, was being “called unpatriotic, un-American, and essentially treasonous by a couple of left-wing pundits on the basis of boldfaced lies.”
Mr. McConnell has served longer than any current senator except Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy and Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley. He arrived on Capitol Hill in 1968 as an aide to then- Sen. Marlow Cook and later worked as a Justice Department lawyer and returned to Kentucky for a stint in local government. In 1984 he challenged Democratic Sen. Dee Huddleston, known for missing votes to give paid speeches. Roger Ailes, then a GOP consultant, produced ads for Mr. McConnell featuring bloodhounds searching for Mr. Huddleston. Mr. McConnell won by 5,269 votes.
He is now in his sixth term and seeking a seventh, which he is strongly favored to win. But he worries about the majority come 2020. “Colorado is a competitive state for us, and so is Arizona, and so is North Carolina,” he says, referring to the seats now held, respectively, by Sens. Cory Gardner, Martha McSally and Thom Tillis. “On the other hand, we think we’re going to win the Alabama seat back”—the one Democrat Doug Jones holds by virtue of beating Roy Moore in a 2017 special election. Republicans will hold their majority if they lose no more than three seats, or two if a Democrat wins the White House.
Mr. McConnell credits Democrats for helping. “Our people are very energized by all this left-wing socialist talk on the Democratic side,” he says. “Not only do our voters but our donors believe that the Senate is a firewall against the very worst that could happen if the Democrats get the entire government back.”
Mr. Barnes is a senior columnist for the Washington Examiner.
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