The Imagineers over at Disney really knocked themselves with the new Mitch McConnell model they unveiled in Washington, D.C. this week. People who didn’t know any better might have thought that was the actual Mitch McConnell being wheeled around the Senate instead of a hollowed-out automaton, its face frozen into the smiling rictus of a taxidermied Cheshire cat.
Contrast that with the monstrous Donald Trump installed in the Hall of Presidents just a few years ago and the advances in the technology really become apparent. Kudos, Disney. First you didn’t cancel Kimmel and now this—truly a great American company.
Before his return, it had been almost 100 days since our former Senate Majority Leader was last seen in public, a hundred days marked by an enviable lack of Mitch McConnell in our lives. That blessed interregnum now seems to be at an end, though, as the Senate reconvenes to take up the important business of bending over for the president. After all, there’s little else to do when House Speaker Mike Johnson just sent the rest of Congress home for… checks notes… six weeks?
Whether the Old Crow returns full-time to his part-time job remains to be seen. Being a senator has never been the most strenuous occupation, but even the attenuated schedule of the world’s greatest deliberative body may require more charge than even Disney’s AAA batteries can provide.
There’s something fitting about a diminished Mitch returning to an institution the more vigorous version of the now-84-year-old McConnell spent the last decade reducing. The Senate has always been rancorous, of course, but McConnell’s tenure transformed this last bastion of comity into a viper’s nest of partisan division and minority obstruction. His finest moment, as he himself recalled, was blocking Obama’s Supreme Court pick (remember Merrick Garland?) from even having a hearing.
“In my time as Majority Leader, the single biggest decision I’ve ever made was actually a decision not to do something,” he told Fox News’ Martha McCallum in a 2021 interview. “And that was to fill a Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Scalia during the 2016 election.”
What followed was, well, everything that followed.
If you want to place the blame for the calamity through which we are living, you could do a lot worse than boxing up the whole excremental affair, putting it on McConnell’s doorstep, lighting it afire, ringing the doorbell, and running away. Apologies to the home health aide who will probably be tasked with dealing with it.
Mitch has been a swamp creature for these swampiest times, content to paddle around in the muck of a city carved from the wetlands just below the Mason-Dixon line. It’s an atmosphere that well-suited the man from Louisville. A place where his quick mind could overcome his flat personality. A place where a man with the weakest chin ever molded could strong-arm those who came from more.
Now he’s back. Diminished, certainly, but how appropriate that he returned to cast a vote in favor of one of Trump’s judicial picks, Matthew R. Byrne, to sit as U.S. District Judge in the Southern District of Ohio. Will it surprise you very much to learn that Byrne was the sole dissenting voice in a case that would have established a statewide abortion ban? Or that, in a custody case involving a transgender teen, Byrne refused to use the teen’s preferred name or pronouns? Of course it would not surprise you because you understand this administration and you understand exactly why Mitch McConnell would rise from the dead to support it.
And if you don’t, let me explain: It’s because Mitch McConnell sucks.
Yes, he voted for a farm bill also—but barely.
How normal people end up transformed into turtles and frogs like McConnell and his late compatriot Lindsey Graham is a subject for better minds than mine. Perhaps they made a deal with a troll under a bridge. Or perhaps they were always little men with outsized ambitions. Perhaps the power they amassed only highlights their inability to wield it well.
McConnell’s absence and subsequent return have illustrated an important lesson for politicos, as well as for us lesser mortals: nobody is irreplaceable. Not Mitch. Not Donald. Not you. (I, on the other hand, am indispensable.) The servos in McConnell’s hand may one day again grip the levers of power, but the once-mighty backroom broker will likely never again hold any real influence over those who would be king.
This week’s McConnellssaince may also be read as a generational coda. He is among the most senior members of the gerontocracy currently ruling (and ruining) our collective roost, and had already declared his current term to be his last before this latest health incident. When he goes, he will take with him a political career that dates to the Carter administration. Adieu, Mitch. Don’t let the door hit you in the wheelchair on the way out.
