Anybody out there old enough to remember how Mitch McConnell first got elected to the Senate? No? So I’ll tell you.
It was 1984. McConnell was the Jefferson County Judge-Executive in said Jefferson County, home to Louisville. Kentucky was still a mostly Democratic state then—four of its seven House members were Democrats, and both senators. McConnell was running against Walter “Dee” Huddleston, a two-term incumbent mostly known for his attention to home-state issues.
McConnell ended up winning the election by around 5,200 votes, and he did it on the strength of one theme, and really one ad. It seems Huddleston had missed a number of votes and gone off thither and yon giving paid speeches, so McConnell—with the help of a certain Roger Ailes—ran an instantly famous ad in which a man with a pack of bloodhounds goes off around the country and world in search of Huddleston (“my job was to find Dee Huddleston and get him back to work”). The spot generated massive free media, as the political class had not yet learned to say in 1984, and has gone down in political ad history. One of his ads in his 2014 race even referenced the famous spot.
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What goes around comes around. These days, with respect to the government shutdown, we could well be asking “Where’s Mitch?”
Oh, he shows up for work, and every day, he manages to mumble a few words about the shutdown. But if you’re looking to the Senate majority leader to do or say anything that might vaguely resemble leadership, you’re wasting your time.
We’re now so accustomed to such a total lack of standards and such utter hackery that we’re not even surprised at McConnell’s behavior. But we should be.
In December, he passed and supported a bill with no wall funding. The House earlier this month passed a similar bill. All McConnell would have to do would be to re-pass the same bill he passed in December, and there’d be a bill on the president’s desk. But he won’t do it.
He says he’d be wasting time sending Donald Trump a bill he’ll just veto. Waste of time? That depends on whose time we’re talking about. If McConnell were to act like he ran an independent legislative body (imagine that!), he’d be putting pressure on Trump to agree to reopen government. That’s not a waste of time! Certainly not to the 800,000 workers being denied paychecks, or to the thousands of people who aren’t getting their mortgages, or to the small business people (some of them in Kentucky) who aren’t getting their loans processed, or you name it.
But they don’t matter. Trump and Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter matter.
There are encouraging signs of… not quite panic, yet, among Republican senators, but definite worry. And a weakening of their collective resolve to stay behind their leader. It was quite notable this week when 11 Senate Republicans voted with Chuck Schumer (!) and against McConnell, Trump, and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to oppose the lifting of sanctions on Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. I can’t think of another high-profile vote when anywhere near that many Senate Republicans defied McConnell—and Trump.
Granted, the vote failed (it needed 60, not 50). Maybe McConnell let some of them go provided the vote total didn’t hit 60, but even so, the mere fact that 11 of them decided to make this statement is interesting. It’s like little birdies just starting to open their eyes and learning to fly out of the nest.
Now, there’s a bipartisan letter signed by four or five Republican senators (and three Democrats) to Trump saying they’ll negotiate a border security package if the government reopens, which would mean Trump signing a short-term spending bill without getting his wall funding first. I was told Wednesday afternoon that the White House was pressuring Republicans not to sign. So this effort probably isn’t going anywhere. Still, it’s another sign that the little birdies are starting to wiggle as the American public increasingly, and rightly, blames Trump and them for the shutdown. Is McConnell, ever so slightly, losing his grip?
Could be. Some GOP senators are clearly getting antsy here. They want McConnell to do something. The great irony is that while he’s probably the last person to do anything, he is also probably the one person in Washington who could maybe end this stupidity.
He could go to Trump privately and tell him that the way to do this is to sign a short-term spending bill, reopen government, and then go get 50 feet of something he can vaguely call a “wall” and call it a day. And he may yet do that one of these days, as the polling gets worse for the GOP. Remember, McConnell protecting Republican Senate seats is not just an abstraction in 2020 involving other people. He’s up for reelection himself, and he’s in the high 30s in terms of approval rating in his state. That’s higher than normal for him, but nothing to write to mom about, if the Democrats can find a decent candidate to run against him this time.
But until that day arrives, here we are. And the United States Senate, which used to call itself a great deliberative body and actually earned that title for two or three decades, just sits there. There’s no Constitution. There are no checks and balances. There’s no attempt to govern this country.
Whoever runs against McConnell in 2020 ought to revive those bloodhound ads with dogs that have been taught to sniff for backbone. Around Mitch, they’ll be sniffing in vain.
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