Press: Mitch McConnell’s 17 years of wasted leadership

Once again, GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) proved he’s crazy as a fox. Knowing his days in leadership were numbered, with so many Republicans lining up against him, McConnell outsmarted them all. He refused to suffer the same embarrassment as former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). So, before Republican senators could gang up to dethrone him, he announced his resignation. 

And of course, Washington being Washington, we knew what would follow. Fellow Republicans, and even a lot of Democrats, joined in a chorus of praise for what a wise, old leader McConnell has been for the last 17 years. A mile away from the Capitol you could hear the lusty strains of “For he’s a jolly, good fellow!” 

Don’t be fooled. Mitch McConnell may be the longest-serving Senate leader in history, but he’ll be remembered not as a great leader, but as a man who failed to lead and who lacked the courage to lead at a time when his country needed him the most. 

It’s true, as many have noted, that McConnell was a master legislative and political strategist. He could read the political winds better than anybody. He probably knew how to navigate his way through competing forces in the Senate as well as any Senate leader since Lyndon Johnson.

McConnell knew how to play hardball, and wasn’t afraid to do so. In 2016, he shut down the Supreme Court clock for a whole year to block President Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland from confirmation — a move that rallied conservatives behind candidate Donald Trump and, more than anything else, may have ensured Trump’s win. 

Clearly, Trump wasn’t McConnell’s kind of Republican. But the Senate leader put aside his personal dislike for Trump and focused on getting things done. He pushed through Trump’s tax cuts. He established almost an assembly line in the Senate to confirm a slew of Trump-nominated judges. Then he fast-tracked the Supreme Court clock to rush the confirmation of Trump’s nominee Amy Coney Barrett.  

Even when he refused to accept the results of the 2020 election, McConnell stuck with Trump. It was only six weeks later, on Dec. 15, after the Electoral College certified its results, that McConnell finally acknowledged Biden’s win.  

Then came Jan. 6: McConnell’s one chance to show real leadership. And he blew it. 

There’s no doubt what McConnell thought about who was responsible for the assault on the Capitol. “Seventy-four million Americans did not engineer the campaign of disinformation and rage that provoked it,” he said on the Senate floor. “One person did. Just one.”  

But those harsh words came after McConnell had made his one inexplicable and unforgivable mistake: voting to acquit Donald Trump in the U.S. Senate. He knew Trump was guilty. Had he voted his conscience, he could probably have rounded up the 10 additional votes needed to convict the former president and thus end Trump’s political career once and for all.  

Instead, he chickened out. And today Donald Trump is politically stronger and more dangerous than ever before — all as a result of that one vote. Thank you, Mitch.

Regardless of party, McConnell might have been recognized as one of the most effective Senate leaders ever, if only in the end he’d been willing to stand up to Donald Trump. But now, rather than being celebrated as the man who saved America from Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell will be remembered as just one more piece of road kill left on the side of the highway by the Donald Trump Express.  

Press hosts “The Bill Press Pod.” He is the author of “From the Left: A Life in the Crossfire.”