Mitch McConnell’s lamentable legacy

Mitch McConnell’s lamentable legacy

During Mitch McConnell’s first race for the Senate in 1984, President Ronald Reagan came to Kentucky and endorsed his good friend, “Mitch O’Donnell.” Vice President George H.W. Bush identified McConnell, incorrectly, as the mayor of Louisville.

Over the following four decades, no politician, Democrat or Republican, would make such a mistake again. And this week, McConnell stepped down as the longest-serving and one of the most historically important Senate leaders in history.

During his tenure as leader, McConnell secured passage of important bipartisan legislation. He negotiated compromises with the Obama administration that prevented a default on federal government debt; extended the George W. Bush-era tax cuts; and bailed out the financial services industry during the Great Recession. He worked with President Biden to get the Infrastructure Bill, the CHIPS Act and military aid to Ukraine through the Senate.

That said, as Michael Tackett implies in his new book, “The Price of Power: How Mitch McConnell Mastered the Senate, Changed America, and Lost His Party,” he has also caused considerable damage to democratic norms, practices and institutions.

While he was in college, McConnell wrote that the American government should insure “the BASIC RIGHTS OF ALL citizens, regardless of race, creed, or national origin.” He voted for Lyndon Johnson because Barry Goldwater opposed civil rights legislation.

In 2019 and 2020, however, McConnell refused to hold hearings on, let alone bring to the Senate floor, the Voting Rights Act passed by the House restoring the Department of Justice’s authority to “pre-clear” state voting laws that allegedly discriminate against people of color. McConnell insists that “nobody’s votes are being suppressed anywhere across America, in any of the states.” But in 2021, the Brennan Center for Justice identified 253 bills introduced, pending or passed that restrict voting access in 43 states.

In an op-ed published in 1973, McConnell claimed that “the lack of an overall limit on spending is an open invitation for special interests” to unduly influence candidates. We are “close” to being a “bought nation,” he added. He advocated excising the “cancer” of money in politics by publicly financing elections, limiting campaign contributions and mandating full disclosure by donors.

Two decades later, McConnell made an argument that, according to Tackett, became “the heart of his political identity”: Campaign spending is an act of free speech. He launched an all-out assault on the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill. And he played a pivotal role in court challenges that resulted in Citizens United v. FEC, the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision that paved the way for virtually unlimited and often undisclosed “dark money” political contributions from millionaires and billionaires in political action committees, operating under the fiction that they are not coordinating with candidates or political parties. Read More