I keep hearing about how Mitch McConnell was a terrible person because he stacked the Supreme Court and enabled Donald Trump. That's fair enough, but it's hardly McConnell's biggest achievement:
These days you often hear reporters and commentators saying matter of factly that legislation requires 60 votes in the Senate. This is truly McConnell’s greatest accomplishment. People say this like it’s in the Constitution, like the two-thirds requirement for conviction at impeachment or to approve a treaty. But it is a novel development and it has radically altered U.S. politics. It transforms the federal Senate into a genuinely Calhounian body in which minority factions exercise a de facto and permanent veto over the majority.
It’s what creates gridlock, the breeding ground of political disaffection and extremism.
That's from Josh Marshall, who's old enough to remember that McConnell's real genius was not in breaking a single norm a single time, but in pioneering norm breaking as a governing strategy. He was the one who inherited scattered efforts from his predecessors and transformed them into a single brilliant insight: that the Senate operated on lots of traditions that were just that—traditions. Not rules, not laws, and they could be broken by simply realizing there was nothing to stop you.
This is plainest to see in McConnell's adoption of the routine filibuster. He wasn't the first, but he was the one who put the pieces together and realized you didn't have to pick and choose bills to filibuster. You could just filibuster them all:
Filibusters doubled the year McConnell took over as Republican leader, and they've doubled again since then.
But that's not all. McConnell also routinely refused to hold hearings to confirm judges. He would refuse to appoint Republican members to executive agencies, thus preventing a quorum and stopping the agency in its tracks. He held the debt ceiling hostage multiple times. He sometimes flatly refused to hold hearings for executive branch positions, hoping to hamstring Democratic presidents. And most famously, he refused to hold hearings to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court as long as a Democrat was in the White House.
McConnell was also an inspiration to others. Tommy Tuberville's recent blockade of military promotions, for example, never would have happened in the pre-McConnell era. In the post-McConnell era it was just a routine annoyance.
This is McConnell's legacy. In his final years he softened a bit and became effectively anti-Trump. But in his prime he was an unrepentant arsonist who destroyed the Senate and never looked back.
Real filibuster reform is needed. I wouldn't get rid of it--but put the onus on the one doing the filibuster to maintain it.
mitch mcconnell’s grave should have two seats and a moon on the door
monument to mitch mcconnell
Unfortunately, it could end up that he is buried right next to the democracy he spent so much time digging the grave for.
When you allow yourself to be ruled by the hillbilly / redneck freak show they call Kentucky, this is what you get.
What McConnell realized is that the American public treats the President like an elected King, and blames him first and foremost for all the dysfunction if it happens. If Republicans actively sabotaged the country and Obama's Presidency, the Democrats would take the hit for that - and they did in the outsized midterm losses of 2010.
+1
Knowledge of legislative process is not JQ Public's strong point, and especially not when actively misled about it.
Well now, didn't something else happen in 2010? Starts with 'A' and ends with 'Obamacare'? Yes, Republicans did their best to sabotage Obama. But this wasn't why there were outsized midterm losses that year. IMHO, of course.
I'm gonna put his obit next to Kissinger's.
I can see it now. Paintings of black velvet of Kissinger, McConnell and Trump. The MAGA equivalent of JFK, RFK, MLK. The Three Evils.
Maybe Reagan kneeling in the corner.
You forgot Jesus standing behind them with hands on their shoulders.
The organs of the State, like the legislature or the courts, exist to serve the Party, and not the other way round, because it the Party, and not the State, that is the Vanguard of the Revolution.
All power to the soviets of car dealers and venture capitalists!
Calhoun -- or Lenin?
The wealthy people don’t need the state except for the army and the police. Since the Republicans represent the wealthy they don’t have to constructively do anything. They can just block almost everything.
They may think they don’t, but …
Bill Gates has a lakeside mansion on Lake Washington, along with many others of Seattle’s ultra wealthy.
The only reason those mansions have any value at all is that 60 years ago the state cleaned up LW and other lakes, against protests about “taking” property by reducing its value as convenient pollution dumps. Lakeside beaches were often closed all summer for dangerous this and that.
Even Bill Gates didn’t have enough money to fix that himself. He needs the state and I expect he knows it.
This situation applies to most places that rich people live.
Mitch was truly an evil genius, with a (commie) Chinese spouse to boot. Did he also have a Siamese cat?
Enough frivolity. The man isn't dead yet, and probably won't be within our lifetimes.
Well, there's dead, there's dead, there's dead, and there's dead.
He's dead as an effective politician. He's admitted as much.
He's not well medically -- that's pretty evident. I wouldn't bet on him lasting long.
He's pretty obviously also at least part vampire, which means he will never die.
And his legacy will curse us for generations, so in that way he's immortal.
Take your racism somewhere else. Elaine Chao is Taiwanese, not Chinese.
... he was an unrepentant arsonist who destroyed the Senate and never looked back.
Perfect for the MAGA era, no? Even if he was mostly a concierge to the Donor Class
Think about it too: Can anyone name a major piece of legislation that he championed to solve some sort of problem facing the country? Did he ever push to help anyone besides big GOP campaign donors?
Excellent point to remember – thank you Kevin!
I understand that you have policy disagreements with McConnell, but why don't you give the devil his due? Are you really arguing that the Senate should be governed by unwritten traditions? Surely Democrats could change these rules now, no?
So that would be 2007
Year Senate Majority
2007 Democrat
2008 Democrat
2009 Democrat
2010 Democrat
2011 Democrat
2012 Democrat
2013 Democrat
2014 Democrat
2015 Republican
2016 Republican
2017 Republican
2018 Republican
2019 Republican
2020 Republican
2021 Republican
2022 Republican
2023 Democrat
Given some of the numbers from that chart, the "other side of the aisle" was quite willing to provide additional gasoline. "But Mom! They started it!" notwithstanding.
And about that chart... The major ticks are 5 years, and the dots seem to be not for a year, but for a congress. Major ticks at 4 or 6 years would have been more appropriate.
He shit in his own abode, then wondered why the place stank.
I hate to admit it, but Mitch was a brilliant strategist. Republicans have long been a minority party, and he figured out how to wield more power than they deserve. There is an evil genius at work here.
Freakin hardball it is. Gun to a knife fight, all the cliches apply.
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who remembers that McConnell started doing this the moment he took over as Senate GOP leader at the beginning of 2007.
It made no sense to me at the time - all he was doing then was saving GWB the trouble of vetoing bills that Congress passed. But it did two things.
One was immediate: legislation that quietly dies in Congress gets a lot less media attention than legislation that is killed by Presidential veto. The other was longer-term: by the time Obama became President, the press had already internalized the 60-vote requirement as an underlying reality, rather than a new thing that he'd invented just to frustrate America's first Black President, so they didn't make a big deal out of it, which they might've done if Mitch had started doing that in 2009.
Old enough to remember when you needed the "Master of the Senate" (aka LBJ) to break a filibuster, which almost always used for civil rights bills.
As us geeaers die off, and leave the Senate, we'll see the filibuster gone, to be replaced by that model of efficient legislative debate, known as the House Rules Committee model.
Anarchy he ultimately couldn't control anymore.
I love Jonathan Chait's line in his article about McConnell: "Republicans leaders come in as radicals and leave like statesmen." People actually lamenting his departure.
However I do believe there was a silent deal or acknowledgement between McConnell and Trump that Trump would do nothing after Jan. 6 and leave quietly on Jan. 20 or McConnell would support his impeachment. Was McConnell badly mistaken Trump would be finished in the party? Absolutely.
The thing that's really frustrating is I was screaming for Dems to do this before Mitchie ever did but they refused. I'm fucking jealous.
But Mitchie's true legacy is despite being the most effective senate leader in 2 generations HE LOST TO DONALD TRUMP. Beaten by a fool.
Your chart should begin at the beginning in 1789. Prior to 1983. Prior to 1983 or thereabout, the filibuster was incredibly rare.