Mitch McConnell stepped aside as Senate Republican leader in 2024, just a few months before Republicans would regain the majority along with the White House. He announced that he’d serve out the remainder of his term, which ends this year, but he didn’t clarify that he’d do so while only technically alive. That’s why you have to read the fine print.
McConnell vanished from public view back in June and returned last week in a state of mid-vanish. He was wheeled out of his house and taken to the Senate in a manner that recalls the corpse-driven hijinks from the 1980s comedy Weekend At Bernie’s. It was obvious from photos and video that McConnell is no longer a man who dresses himself, but as long as his staff and colleagues can nudge him in the right direction, that’s apparently good enough for the Senate. It’s less the “the world’s greatest deliberative body” these days and more of an elite hospice center. In fairness, though, the withered remains of Mitch McConnell is still a more competent and engaged senator than John Fetterman.
People have come up with their own theories regarding why McConnell didn’t just resign after the serious fall he suffered this summer or, for that matter, after the 2024 election when he was no longer the Senate leader but just one vote out of 100. He did oppose three of Donald Trump’s terrible Cabinet nominees — Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth — and was the only Republican vote against Kennedy Jr. and Gabbard. Not that it mattered: All three were confirmed, and McConnell clearly held no sway over supposed “normal” Republicans Bill Cassidy, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and Thom Tillis, who unleashed Kennedy Jr. on the public like a viral agent. (Please don’t watch below. It’s depressing.)
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I don’t personally buy the argument that McConnell was propped up like Mrs. Bates because Republicans feared somehow losing his seat. McConnell is from Kentucky, and even if gas prices reach triple digits a gallon, the state will never send a Democrat to the Senate, certainly not a progressive like Charles Booker. It also wasn’t likely that soon-to-be former House Rep. Thomas Massie could’ve swept in and won a special election. He just lost his own primary!
This atrocity all falls on McConnell and his enabling family and his staff, who want to keep getting paid. We’ve seen this play out across the aisle with Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who remained in office until her literal death in 2023, and she was probably non compos mentis for an uncertain but nonetheless disturbing period. Ed Markey from Massachusetts is just four years younger than McConnell, and he plans to serve another six-year term. Angus King, who’s 82, and Bernie Sanders, who’s 85, were both elected to another term in 2024. That doesn’t seem responsible. The framers of the Constitution imposed age minimums for Congress and the presidency, but they apparently never considered age maximums. Maybe they assumed smallpox and consumption would overcome ego.
McConnell’s extended absence — which would’ve cost any normal person their job — was a hindrance for Republicans, so they were glad to have him present and mostly conscious enough to cast a tie-breaking vote for the Farm Bill, which passed 12 to 11 last Wednesday. McConnell didn’t contribute much to the Agriculture Committee meeting other than his “yes” vote, which required prompting. He initially voted “no,” appearing confused about the question like it was an exam he hadn’t studied for, but Republican Sen. John Hoeven and his aides quickly explained to him that “yes” was the correct answer. You can’t get away with that on a daytime game show, but the Senate seems to have more lax rules.
This was a sorry sight, of course, considering that McConnell was once the Senate’s master tactician who confounded Democrats and always knew how members of his caucus planned to vote. Now, he barely knows who he is. Still, I don’t feel sorry for Mitch McConnell, and you can’t make me.
When former President Joe Biden was asked about McConnell’s departure from Senate leadership, he said, “I’m sorry to hear McConnell stepped down … I’ve trusted him, and we have a great relationship. We fight like hell. But he has never, never, never misrepresented anything. I’m sorry to hear he’s stepping down.”
Biden often romanticized his Republican “friends,” especially his former Senate colleagues. Whenever Biden spoke about them, you might as well have filmed him in black-and-white with Gershwin music playing in the background. In reality, McConnell was a reliable bad-faith actor. Perhaps Biden’s own memory was fuzzy, but McConnell openly misrepresented why he blocked Barack Obama’s Supreme Court pick after Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016. He said this was all so that the “voters could decide,” but when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in 2020, he suddenly decided that the voters shouldn’t decide. That’s not political hardball. It’s a cynical power play.
McConnell also misrepresented basic reality for political gain — the lay public would call this “lying.” When the GOP almost forced another debt ceiling catastrophe in 2023, McConnell slammed Biden on the Senate floor, claiming that the president was “M.I.A.” and that “months of inaction ... have left our nation drifting toward economic disaster.”
McConnell delayed acknowledging Biden’s obvious election victory in November 2020 because he believed pacifying MAGA would help Republicans win the January Senate runoffs and hold the majority. (He was wrong.) He bears responsibility for enabling the lies that led to January 6. Worse, McConnell refused to help Democrats convict Trump after he was impeached for his attempted coup. This proved his final shot to do something decent, like Sen. John McCain casting the decisive vote that saved the Affordable Care Act, and McConnell threw it away. Of course, the consistent theme of McConnell’s entire career is that he never did anything decent. He only acted in what he perceived as his immediate best interest. Maybe he believes clinging to power as a shell of his former self is somehow in his best interest. However, it’s more likely that he’s no longer capable of such complex strategies. He’s just barely there.
I am Angus King's constituent. While it's true he is an elderly man, he is cognitively intact and capable of making decisions. That appears to be true of Chuck Grassley as well, who is a decade-ish older than King and McConnell. King's problem (and the biggest problem I have with his generation of policy makers) is that his frame of political reference has not been updated since the Reagan administration, and his misreads of the moment since his re election are legion. I worry about that as much as I do any physical infirmity.
In terms of McConnell, I suspect his actual days left above ground are numbered, and I am dreading the ballwashing and fake mourning that will inevitably happen from both sides and the media when he finally experiences the sweet release of death. We are a cynical country.
Yeah, about that:
https://bsky.app/profile/philoof.bsky.social/post/3mvlyfparik2t