Recall that the initial plan peddled by Ocasio-Cortez was so astoundingly socialistic — bans on gas-powered cars, meat, air travel, and free housing and salaries for everyone, whether one chose to work or not — that she was compelled to pretend it wasn’t real. The official Green New Deal, co-sponsored by Sens. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Cory Booker (D-NJ), all Democratic Party presidential candidates at the time, was only marginally less insane. Lefty pundits and the media wrote laudatory pieces about the vision.
So, McConnell put the Green New Deal up for a vote in the Senate. Or, as the Associated Press explained at the time: “McConnell wields Green New Deal as a bludgeon against Dems.” Markey called his own bill “a Republican trick.” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called the bill “a sham.” In the end, McConnell forced 43 Democrats to vote “present” on a bill they claimed would rescue a planet on the precipice of bursting into a ball of fire.
There were many great moments for McConnell that are now lost in the din of the Trump era. The Kentuckian, probably the greatest strategist in modern Senate history, recently announced he would be retiring from politics after seven terms. This brought on celebration from MAGA Republicans, who detest McConnell with the heat of a thousand suns.
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No one would ever contend that the man exudes charisma, which makes the fact that he never lost an election in nearly 50 years of running for office pretty impressive. Like an aging Hall of Famer clinging to his career, McConnell stayed in senatorial gerontocracy one term too long. That will hurt his legacy.
There are, of course, numerous legitimate criticisms of McConnell’s tenure. He ruled the conference with an iron hand, alienating many. He often undermined dynamic upstart candidates, not only MAGA but also Tea Party, funding establishment politicians who would consolidate his rule. He abetted Democrats in their conspiratorial Russiagate fantasies. Under McConnell, there were decades of spiraling debt spending without any genuine effort to curb spending, reform entitlements, or rein in the administrative state. On this front, McConnell is far from alone.
The real problem is that McConnell failed to show the proper deference to Donald Trump. And sometimes, such as the time the president pressured McConnell to get rid of the legislative filibuster, that was a good thing. But more pertinently, McConnell sits at the center of the founding myth of Trumpism, which states that before 2015, the GOP had conserved nothing, accomplished nothing, and stopped nothing. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard someone say, “Republicans gave Obama everything he wanted.”
The opposite is true.
After winning wave elections in 2006 and 2008, Democrats controlled both legislative branches and the White House. Republicans hadn’t looked as feckless and leaderless since the “Old Right” was ineptly sitting in Congress watching one massive expansion of the state after the next. The coming Obama transformation of America was fait accompli according to the pundit class. To say differently was unpatriotic.
McConnell became the leader of the Right, holding together a fractious GOP conference that ran from squishy centrist to hard-liner, denying Obama his revolution. As McConnell noted at the time, “When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”
McConnell’s mission was to ensure that nothing went smoothly for Democrats. In due time, Obama’s frustration over the gridlock manifested in an unprecedented abuse of executive power. Despite revisionist history, however, the GOP “obstructionist” Congress was acting within its constitutional powers. The situation was merely a reflection of the split in the electorate. And, in the end, Obama’s White House decrees would be far easier to overturn than any legislation.
Meanwhile, McConnell filibustered the DREAM Act of 2010. When Obama ignored the will of Congress and went ahead and enacted it through executive actions, Senate Republicans backed a national lawsuit against the administration. Sorry, but McConnell couldn’t parachute a SEAL team into the White House to stop Obama.
McConnell sank the Democrats’ cap-and-trade bill, which would have created fabricated “markets” for fossil fuels in the same way Obamacare did for healthcare. As with the Affordable Care Act, overturning it would have been nearly impossible.
Later, McConnell stood in the way of the euphemistic Paycheck Fairness Act and the Paying a Fair Share Act of 2012, which would have raised taxes. McConnell stopped the American Jobs Act bailout, and also the authoritarian card-check bill. He filibustered the antispeech DISCLOSE Act and national federal minimum wage efforts. Senate Republicans sued and won when Obama ignored Congress and named recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board.
But forget all of that. It’s often difficult for voters to contemplate a counterhistory. An unencumbered Obama would have been the most significant leftist in U.S. history. It’s always laughable when Democrats contend that Obama was a “moderate.” McConnell forced him to moderate.
Other than placating the Iranian mullahs, remaking healthcare was the central cause of the Obama administration. It was assumed Republicans would fold after giving a few meetings to vent. McConnell held every Republican, even ones from Maine who often vote with Democrats, in opposition. And the longer the process took, the more grassroots opposition began to grow. By the time Sen. Ted Kennedy died, and Republican Scott Brown miraculously won the reliably left-wing seat in Massachusetts, it was over in the Senate.
It was then that Democrats decided to upend the political order and cram the Affordable Care Act through reconciliation. It was the first time in U.S. history that a political party unilaterally pushed through a massive national reform without any buy-in from half the nation or a vote from an opposition. It frayed the political order in ways from which we haven’t recovered — and led to Trump.
Then, it’s unlikely any legislator did more to ensure that the originalist judicial revolution became a reality. Most famously, despite immense pressure, McConnell refused to give Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland, whom the media incessantly described as “centrist” or “moderate,” a Senate vote. This act, well within his constitutional authority as majority leader, was imperative to stop Democrats from transforming the high court into a lawless institution that relied on arbitrary empathy and theories pulled from the ether.
Senate Democrats, who convinced themselves that Obama’s ascent meant they would forever rule, a bipartisan habit, invoked the nuclear option on the judicial filibuster in 2013. McConnell warned Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) at the time, “You’ll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think.”
He did.
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When Schumer filibustered the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court in 2017, McConnell wasn’t going to wait around and let Democrats do it, so he got rid of the rest of the judicial filibuster. By the time Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and McConnell sat Amy Coney Barrett on the court, it had been transformed into a government institution that more or less does its job. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and a slew of other important decisions would probably not have happened without McConnell.
McConnell was far more an ideal conservative, but making him fall for Republicans’ failures, real and imagined, is revisionist history.
