This assessment is from July 2023, after McConnell froze at a public event. It happened a second time in late August.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell told reporters he was “fine” when he returned to the microphones Wednesday.
This was a short time after he stopped in mid-sentence during a press briefing and fell silent for close to thirty seconds. His colleague John Barrasso spoke with him gently and led him away.
Many senators serve beyond his age, eighty-one, and his term doesn’t end until after the 2026 election. So this is no political obituary. But the incident got me thinking.
McConnell became Senate Republican leader at the start of 2007. He has served in that capacity for all the years since, through the tenures of four presidents. A Senate leader is always powerful, whether in the majority or minority; he has been in both. “The great thing about the Senate is that it's tilted toward the minority,” he told me when I first met him a few days after his tenure began. The minority has the filibuster, and sometimes a single senator can block appointments and other business (as Senator Tommy Tuberville is doing to Pentagon appointments right now).
McConnell seemed to relish being in the minority. In 2008—I go by memory here—Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate majority leader, was with McConnell at an emergency meeting at the White House and reportedly complained that they couldn’t flush the toilets in the Senate without McConnell demanding a cloture vote.
McConnell also, of course, was known to sign on to bipartisan legislation at times. He did on that occasion. But when he wants to slow down the Senate, he has, again and again.
When in the majority, he also could move the Senate. The three Supreme Court justices he rammed through to confirmation during the Trump administration, and the ruling they promptly made to end abortion rights, would count as an obvious part of his legacy, but far from the only part. At some point there will be a lot to say about this polarizing figure. For the moment I’ll just note his longevity.
On that day when I met him in 2007, Barack Obama was a senator preparing to run for president. Joe Biden was also a senator preparing to run for president. George W. Bush was in the White House, and was just sending a surge of troops to stabilize the chaos his administration had triggered in Iraq. Donald Trump was a TV star.
On that day the housing bubble had yet to burst. The Great Recession was not yet imagined, much less the pandemic. China was not yet the world’s second largest economy. Russia had committed neither of its invasions of Ukraine.
Twitter was new and relatively small. Netflix was a few days away from launching what it called a streaming service. Apple was still several months away from introducing a product called the iPhone. Taylor Swift was a teenage country music star. Olivia Rodrigo was not old enough for kindergarten. RBG was alive.
McConnell has influenced a great deal that has happened since. This is true on the national stage and in his home state of Kentucky, where Republicans dominate the legislature.
In 2021 they passed a bill by a veto-proof margin that seemed designed for any moment that McConnell might step down. Should he leave office before 2026, the Democratic governor would be forced to appoint a successor from the same party as the retiring senator—which is to say the Republicans McConnell has led for so many years.
Thanks for reading Differ We Must—a companion to my forthcoming book of the same name. It’s the story of Lincoln’s life as told through his meetings with people who disagreed with him.