The FRONTLINE Interviews
Alec MacGillis
Author, The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell
Alec MacGillis is a political reporter for ProPublica. He previously reported for The New Republic, The Washington Post, and The Baltimore Sun and is the author of The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell.
This is a transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk conducted on January 9, 2019. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Mitch McConnell Secures a Long-Term Conservative Majority on the Court
There's a moment where [Brett] Kavanaugh comes into Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) office before the hearings, as he’s about to be announced.… So I’ll ask you, who is the composite Mitch McConnell that you know of that’s standing in that room?What does it mean to be there with Kavanaugh at the precipice of the swing vote possibly being placed on the court as a result of his efforts, his lifetime efforts?… What does Kavanaugh represent to Mitch McConnell at that moment?
What you're seeing in that moment, where McConnell is meeting with Kavanaugh is really kind of a culmination of a decades-long push by McConnell within the Republican Party, and in the evolution of Mitch McConnell, from someone who, years ago, was a remarkably moderate Republican, even a liberal Republican, to now standing at this moment, where he is with a man who is about to really secure the long-term conservative majority of the Supreme Court, and really achieve something that Mitch McConnell has been working to for years, the years after his remarkable evolution.
Mitch McConnell’s Early Life and Career
…That’s great.OK.So now let’s go backward.The boy Mitch McConnell, polio, the young boy Mitch McConnell, who is this kid?And what does the polio and other influences yield inside him at that early age?
McConnell often talked about his childhood polio as a really formative moment for himself.He suffered from polio for several years before he finally recovered.Among other things, it made him very close to his mother.He was an only child, and his mother was taking care of him in those years, even carrying him up the stairs to their upstairs apartment where they were living at the time.And so it made him very close to her.
And it also, in his own telling, gave him a real kind of—a fighter’s resolve.You know, if he could overcome that at that age, then he could overcome just about anything.And [it] just gave him, in his telling, kind of a steely determination from an early age.… It also left him with—definitely left him with a slight limp and hampered his dreams of becoming a Major League baseball player.He loved to play baseball.He played Little League and all that.But at some point it became clear that he just didn’t have the skills to go further, which is what sent him, at a very early age, into politics.
When you're alone that much as a kid, in a room, this was kind of pre-computers and pre-television even, really, what does he do?
He is very into sports, so he’s, you know, reading the sports pages, you know, typical American boy, getting into the baseball stats and all of that.But he also, from an early age, was one of these kids who gets into politics, almost as if it’s a sport, I mean, who starts to read up on political history, on elections, on election stats, election results, election outcomes, as if it’s sports, as if it’s baseball, and starts to sort of absorb the sort of American political tradition through the game of politics.
And so he then becomes one of those kids who is in school, running for every elected office there is, plotting over how he’s going to win this or that school leadership election, even if he’s not even the most popular kid, just getting into politics as a game, as something to win, as something to just approach tactically, as just kind of loving the sport of politics more than the actual substance of what's involved from the issues.
It’s Kentucky by the time he’s in high school, yeah?
Yes.
And Kentucky is sort of a purplish state, I guess, in those days.
Even Democratic, really.When he was a young man—well, when he was a teenager in Louisville, Kentucky was still, in terms of registration and in its elected officials, very Democratic.And it was a certain kind of Democrat.It was, you know, mostly conservative Democrats, Southern Democrats, Appalachian Democrats, but heavily Democratic, and was just starting to make its turn toward the what we now know to be the Republican South.
Being in the South, even a border state like Kentucky, during the early ’60s, through the civil rights movement, heading for ’68 or so, or when he’s in college or just out, we always hear big civil rights impulse inside of him.Can you talk to us about that and how it manifests itself?
It may be hard to believe now, but Mitch McConnell was an avid, avid believer in the civil right movement, avid adherent.He showed up at rallies when he was in college in Louisville, these pro-civil rights rallies on campus.One of his mentors, his first really big mentor, was a man by the name of John Sherman Cooper, who was a Republican senator from Kentucky; was not just a moderate Republican, but really a liberal Republican, was one of the staunchest supporters of civil rights in the Senate.He had sort of made his name opposing Joe McCarthy (R-Wis.) back in the ’50s, was a big friend of John F. Kennedy’s, was a big opponent of the war in Vietnam, and real kind of man about town in Washington.
He was a liberal Republican, and he was a hero to Mitch McConnell.And when Mitch McConnell was in Washington interning for him, in the ’60s, John Sherman Cooper even brought him along to watch the—as I recall, it was the signing of the Voting Rights Act that Mitch McConnell came along to see.There was this formative moment, getting to see the Voting Rights Act being signed with his hero, the liberal Republican, John Sherman Cooper.
That was Lyndon Johnson would have been involved in all of that as well, right?
Yes.Yes, this was the mid-60s.
Any examples of his writing, of his public statements about his sympathies for and the importance of civil rights to him?
He wrote several pieces about civil rights in the college paper, as I recall, when he was at the University of Louisville.In the late ’60s and early ’70s, there was this real kind of war going on, battle for the soul of the Republican Party, because you had this, still a lot of liberal and moderate Republicans who were battling this ascendant wing, the Barry Goldwater wing of the party.And Mitch McConnell was firmly on the side of the moderates and the liberals, so much so that he actually wrote a—there was a piece in Playboy that had been written by one of the leading moderates at the time, and Mitch McConnell wrote a letter to the editor to Playboy.He clearly was reading Playboy for the articles, and wrote a letter agreeing with the moderate stance laid out by the author.
There's no question of it that at that moment, he was firmly in the pro-civil rights, moderate to liberal wing of the party.
There's a kind of transference, of course, that takes place from that position.Let me ask you one or two other things.Pro-choice?
Very.
Pro-abortion?
Very pro-choice.
Examples?Stories about it?How did that manifest itself?
Mitch McConnell’s first elected office was in Louisville.He became the county executive for Jefferson County, which includes Louisville.This was a big step for him, you know, winning this election, knocking out the incumbent executive.This was in the mid-70s.<i>Roe v. Wade</i> had just been passed down, and there was already a push in Louisville by anti-abortion activists to limit the ruling, to make it as hard as possible to get abortions even after <i>Roe v. Wade</i>.
Mitch McConnell, as county executive in Jefferson County, was repeatedly snuffing out these anti-abortion bills that were coming up for vote in the county.Anytime he saw some effort to limit abortion, he was doing everything he could, as county executive, to block it.And he would do it pretty quietly sometimes, so as not to make too much of a, you know, big stir over it.But there was no question what side he was on.
Years later, one of the leading abortion rights activists in Louisville, who was working with the ACLU and women’s groups at the time, came up to him at an event and thanked him for everything he’d done to protect abortion rights in Louisville, back in the ’70s.And he looked kind of alarmed, and he said, “Oh, I don’t want to talk about that right now.”
Mitch McConnell’s Early Interest in the Courts
This metamorphosis, maturation, whatever happens with him over the next decades, we've thought a lot about it, and reading your book tried to find clues to step-by-step evolution, if that’s what you want to call it, of what Mitch McConnell went through, this notion that he goes to work at the Justice Department in the Ford administration, he develops an interest in judges through his work with Sen. [Marlow] Cook, who is involved on the committee and is—this is through [Clement] Haynsworth and [Harrold] Carswell’s nominations in the Nixon administration.
Right, yes.
Can you explain what happens in there?And is this really the moment where he starts to figure out judgeships are an important component of a political life?
So Mitch McConnell comes to Washington to work for Marlow Cook, who is the other senator from Kentucky, who’s quite moderate himself, moderate Republican, not as liberal as John Sherman Cooper, but a moderate Republican, and the job that McConnell gets within his team is basically being in charge of overseeing the judicial nominations that were coming down from Richard Nixon.
And in those years, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, there were several very controversial judicial nominations for the court, two of which—two of Nixon’s nominations ended up being rejected by the Senate.And McConnell was advising Marlow Cook on those nominations and getting deep into the weeds of the nominees’ backgrounds and judicial legal philosophy.
It was in those years that McConnell really came to understand the importance, the centrality of judicial nominations in our political system, both the Supreme Court nominations and also lower-court, federal lower-court nominations, but even more than that, to really understand what it takes to get these nominations through the Senate, to really kind of figure out how to win that game, the game of judicial politics.And it really, for him, goes back to those early years in what was really his first job in Washington.
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…So you point out—you raised something in your book that causes us to have a little—we think it’s significant in our quest to try to understand a change that’s occurring in him as he faces the idea of elected office.One of them is the letter of resignation to Gerald Ford, which just feels like a sort of formidable declaration from this young man who’s been so civil rights-oriented to now be talking about what he’s talking about.
Do you want to see the letter?
Yeah, I could just look at the letter.
…
This is a fun moment in this story, finding this thing.Thank you for finding it.
…I found that in Marlow Cook’s papers.… OK, OK.So one of the key moments in the evolution of Mitch McConnell actually comes in the context of the Supreme Court.As he was leaving Washington in the ’70s to go back to Louisville to run for office for the first time, which was a big step for him, going to run for his first job in politics, he sends a letter of resignation to President Ford, thanking him for the chance to serve in his administration but also urging him to appoint judges to the Supreme Court who are opposed to court-ordered busing to integrate the schools.
And you think, my goodness, what is this?This is a man who, just a few years ago, was a big supporter of the civil rights movement.And then here he is, staking out anti-school busing ground.And what you're seeing here is Mitch McConnell seeing where the winds are blowing back home in Louisville.Louisville had become the locus of one of the first big fights over court-ordered busing, and busing was growing more and more unpopular in Louisville.And Mitch McConnell sees this happening and realizes that it would be easier for him to win office in Louisville if he staked out this anti-integration ground.
What I was most amused by, as I found this letter in the archives in Louisville, was that there was a cover letter that went along with the letter.It was attached to the letter as it went up the ladder to the president.The cover letter was from one of McConnell’s supervisors in the Department of Justice, noting to the president that McConnell was, in fact, going home to run for office, to run for office in Louisville, and that his evolution on school integration probably had something to do with that.
Mitch McConnell Plays to Win
For you, it’s an example of?
For me, that moment was an example of what I came in my research to see as the defining trait of Mitch McConnell, which is that, for him, even more than for other politicians, it’s all about setting yourself up to win the next time.It’s all about the game of winning elections more than what you actually believe in, what you're actually trying to achieve in office.
Mitch McConnell, I believe, was actually a moderate Republican when he was starting out, because that’s what he was surrounded by.Those were his mentors at the time.And it was still possible, at that time, to be a moderate Republican from Kentucky.But as time went on, and he realized where the winds were blowing politically in the South, he realized that he was going to have to shift pretty dramatically to the right if he wanted to win elections and win elections easily.
Mitch McConnell has always been very self-aware of—it’s one of his strongest traits, actually.He’s been very self-aware of what an unlikely candidate he is.He’s not a very skilled, naturally skilled campaigner at all.This is an especially—a special lack in the South, in Appalachia, where they really prize candidates who have a certain—a common touch, you know, kind of a folksiness and sort of populist verve.And Mitch McConnell completely lacks that, and is very aware of that.He’s not at all suited to being a candidate out on the hustings.
So he realized that he had that real inadequacy, that real shortcoming as a candidate, and was going to have to do everything he possibly could to set himself up to win despite that.And that meant, first of all, raising a lot of money and becoming a big defender of the role of money in politics, because he was going to need money to overcome his shortcomings.But it also was going to mean shifting to the right as much as necessary to win in the South as the South was moving to become a conservative Republican stronghold.
Some of that money in the early going goes to Roger Ailes, young Roger Ailes, making ads for him.I loved the hound dog ad.It just feels like such an amazing—it’s almost anachronistic now….It’s just sort of basic-basic, right.Tell me about the relationship with Ailes and that ad.
…
So in 1984, Mitch McConnell takes the big step of deciding to run for the Senate, of making the big jump from Louisville to Washington, and he challenges a fairly popular incumbent senator, a conservative Democrat by the name of [Walter] Huddleston.This is going to be a tough challenge.Again, Kentucky at this time is still fairly Democratic.There's still a lot of conservative Democrats who like [Walter] Huddleston, and to take him on, McConnell realizes he’s going to need some help.
And he reaches out to a young political strategist TV ad maker by the name of Roger Ailes, who had been coming up in the world of radio and TV production and was already kind of making a name for himself as a very effective, no-holds-barred TV ad maker, political TV ad maker.And McConnell hires Roger Ailes, and Ailes makes an extraordinarily effective ad for McConnell that casts [Walter] Huddleston as a lazy, no-show on the job. But the ad was not entirely based in fact.Huddleston’s record, absentee record, was not nearly as bad as the ad made it out to be, but the ad proved incredibly effective.
And you could just see McConnell’s standing in the polls in that race, rapidly climbing the more the ad ran.McConnell ends up winning that race barely, by just 5,000 votes or so.That was a year where Ronald Reagan won election incredibly easily, 1984, won re-election in Kentucky by more than 250,000 votes.And it was very clear that Mitch McConnell had won both with the help of Roger Ailes and with the help of Ronald Reagan.This was an ultimate coattails kind of victory.
And McConnell took from that victory in 1984, that very narrow victory, the lesson that, if he wanted to win more easily in the future, if he wanted to secure his career as a long-serving senator in Kentucky for the rest of his life, which is what he wanted, he was going to have to shift his politics closer to those of Ronald Reagan and the ascendant conservative Republican majority.
It’s so interesting.… That hound dog ad, when you see it, and when I read about the anxiety that Ailes and others had about how to show it to him and what would his response be, and would he ding the idea of the ad, he really seemed to love the aggressive and the sort of down-home quality of it.
Oh, he loved the ad.For him, you know, it’s whatever it takes.So while it was stylistically out of whack with what we think of as Mitch McConnell, you know, for him, it’s all about winning the game, and he saw that this was something to win the game with.It was very stylistically out of line with him.This is a guy who, in that very election, was going around carrying a briefcase on the campaign trail because he thought it would make him look older.He was very youthful looking in 1984 and saw that as a hindrance…
Mitch McConnell’s Arrival in Washington and his Political Shift
He gets to Washington, and my sense is that now, as we talk about the metamorphosis and the creation of the Mitch McConnell we know now, it’s Ronald Reagan; it’s the conservative ascendency.He’s, as you say, a moderate Republican, maybe out of step with that, especially if you want to rise and rise as fast as possible.What steps do we see him take?What does he do to find himself more in step with the Reagan presidency?
The transformation, once he gets to Washington, is remarkably swift.You see this especially on abortion.So in the late ’70s, there he was in Louisville, defeating all these anti-abortion bills that were coming up, doing everything he could to protect abortion rights in Louisville, post-<i>Roe v. Wade</i>.He gets to Washington, and almost immediately he starts voting with the anti-abortion side on various bills that are coming along.That’s the issue where you see the shift happen most, most quickly.
The other shift comes in campaign finance.He very early on discovers campaign finance as an issue that he cares a lot about and can make his name in…So even by 1990 or so, he’s already becoming the Republican Party’s go-to guy on fighting against limits on funding our campaigns.
We come to see him as a long-game player.We certainly see it in all the court stuff, really, really, really, looking out 30 years, or seeming to anyway, making statements like, “Legislation can come and go in one term, but a court, a guy on the court is 30 to 40 years of substantial change.”When does that start to manifest itself?...
It’s about winning the long game, but it’s also just about winning that next election.He’s so focused on the next cycle, whether it’s his own re-election, you know, his own—whenever he’s up again for a six-year term, or his party’s chances in the next two-year term, it’s all about setting yourself up for that win.And if what you care most about is winning elections, the issues you're going to care most about are campaign finance and the court, because those are the two issues that help your party win.If you realize that your party, and you yourself, depend greatly on getting as much money as you can for your campaigns and on the free flow of money from wealthy donors and corporations as he does, then you realize that you need to keep that flow coming.You need to make sure that limits on campaign finance are fought back, and that the money is going to be there for you and your party.
You also come to realize how much the court matters in winning elections.The court determines, as we've seen in recent years, the court has such a huge role to play in our political system, whether it’s in voting rights and how much we’re going to protect the rights of the poor and minorities to vote in our elections, it also plays a huge role in our districts and how we draw our districts, and whether we’re going to do something about gerrymandered districts.That’s an issue that’s become just, you know, a huge determinant of who’s winning our elections these days.And then also in campaign finance, the court is, again and again, had making big rulings on the limits on big money in politics.
So if you want to make sure that your chances and your party’s chances of winning elections the next time around are as high as they can be, the issues you're going to care about are campaign finance and judicial nominations.And that’s been the case with Mitch—with McConnell.
And it doesn’t seem like he’s into the judges for big ideological reasons.It seems, as you say, if you're focused on the near-term election as your primary focus, you're not talking about the swing of conservative thinking from Barry Goldwater to whoever tends to be on the court…
For McConnell, the court has become a way to show his conservative credentials, despite a lot of evidence suggesting that he’s actually not very ideological and that he actually doesn’t care very much about a whole lot of the issues that conservatives are actually motivated by, whether it’s immigration or the environment or any number of other fronts where conservatives have been, you know, fighting their battles the last couple decades, McConnell has, again and again, shown very little interest in the substance of a lot of these issues.
But if he can secure a conservative majority for Republicans for the long term, it’s a way to show that he’s won for them in a very kind of general way: “Just look at my numbers.I've gotten all these conservatives on the court, both the Supreme Court and the other federal courts.”And you can just point to those numbers without actually having to demonstrate any real interest or even grasp of a lot of the actual issues that conservatives care about.
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The Nomination of Robert Bork
You can just imagine what the man we are describing now feels as a young freshman senator, when he watches [Robert] Bork.He doesn’t probably care about his ultraconservative politics or beliefs in that sense.But he watches him taken down by Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), Joe Biden (D-Del.), a Democratic war room, TV ads by Gregory Peck, an entire world that he’s hoping to go into and pioneer on behalf of Republicans and his own ideas.He watches this happen.And the motivation for him standing up in the Senate, after Bork has gone down in flames, and sort of wagging his finger at the Democrats, and in some ways revealing grievances that seem to me to be based on the things we've just been talking about, can you see that happening?
What year is Bork?
It’s ’87, ’87-88.
So you also see McConnell’s sharp swing to the right after he gets to Washington in his very strong reaction to what happened in the Bork confirmation process, where he had this kind of visceral anger.You see this visceral anger on his part toward the Democrats after they manage to block Bork.And it wasn’t so much about feeling any kind of real upset over the loss of Bork’s judicial philosophy on the court.Again, McConnell is not someone who cares deeply about conservative ideology.It wasn’t like he wanted to get Bork’s thinking on reining in the antitrust movement, you know, onto the Supreme Court or anything like that.He saw Bork’s loss as a loss for his team.
This is someone who thinks about politics in deeply partisan terms, more partisan than ideological, and sees the Democrats’ blocking of Bork as a win for them, a loss for his team, and he vows revenge.
Vows revenge?It will manifest itself in the Merrick Garland moment, if no other time, yeah?
I don’t know how strongly he actually felt about Bork.I feel like the Garland—there's so much else that, like—
We’re not going to make Bork the equal sign to Garland, because many, many, many things happened along the way.Barack Obama gets elected.He’s the minority leader, and he vows to slow Obama down, right?
Right, right.
Mitch McConnell’s Approach to Obama’s Judicial Nominees
Let’s talk a little bit about that…
Early 2009 is just an incredibly critical and decisive moment for Mitch McConnell in his career.He’s finally achieved his dream of becoming the leader of the Republicans in the Senate.That’s all he’s been working for all these years.But now he’s got to decide how he’s going to play it.He’s facing a new president, Barack Obama, who has just gotten elected by a large margin in this incredibly historic election.He’s our first African American president.He’s coming in with big Democratic majorities in the Senate and the House.
And it’s a moment of real national crisis.We’re at the depth of the great recession…And there's this whole real feeling, national feeling, of this need for us all to come together to deal with this, to rescue our country in this moment of crisis.
But instead of sort of joining together with Obama and doing what he can to sort of negotiate a Republican position within this kind of broader consensus over what we’re supposed to do to rescue our country at this moment, to rescue the economy, when all these people are losing their jobs, when things are really are kind of at the brink, McConnell decides to take a different tack.He decides that he is going to hold together his Republican minority as tightly and cohesively as possible in opposing just about everything that this new president proposes to do.
And he’s going to do this because he recognizes that the best way to regain power, the best way to chip away at this popular new president, is to basically make Washington look as broken as you can, because if you make Washington look broken, even if you're the one who’s doing the breaking, doing the opposing, your own party, the Republican Party, will benefit from that intransigence, because the blame for Washington being broken, looking broken, will fall on the party in power.It will fall on Barack Obama, and it will fall on the Democrats, both because they're the party in power.
Second of all, the Democrats are the party of government, the party that believes in a strong federal government.If you make the government appear to be utterly dysfunctional and broken, it makes the Democrats look bad.It just undermines their whole philosophy.
Third, Barack Obama is the guy who was supposed to bring us all together.That was his whole promise.There's no red America, blue America; we’re all one America.That was the whole—the promise and premise of Barack Obama.
If you make Washington look completely dysfunctional and broken, it completely undermines his driving central personal message and makes him look like a personal failure.McConnell intuited that.
The Death of Justice Scalia and Mitch McConnell’s Gamble
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So as you come to the end of the Obama presidency, and [Antonin] Scalia dies, and you quickly run out, do a press release, seize the moment, what are you doing?
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It was in March, right?
Yes.
OK.Scalia’s death in March of 2016 is really a crisis moment for Mitch McConnell, because here you have, suddenly, the prospect of the Democrats getting majority, even a long-term majority, on the court.This was, in some ways, the most treasured seat on the court for conservatives.Scalia was their hero.And here you had the very strong chance that Barack Obama, in one of his last acts, was going to be able to fill this hallowed seat that the Republicans saw as theirs.
No one saw this coming.And Scalia is found dead in his bed one day, and what to do in this moment of crisis becomes probably the defining moment of Mitch McConnell’s career.The normal course of affairs would be for Barack Obama, the president, to nominate someone to fill this vacancy, and for the Senate to hold hearings on the nomination, and then a vote.This was in March of 2016.This was, with 10 months left in President Obama’s tenure, nearly a quarter of his second term.
But Mitch McConnell decides that he’s not going to follow that normal process.Instead, he declares, right away, that the Senate, which he’s now in charge of as the majority leader, is not even going to entertain the nomination.Whoever Obama nominates can come to Washington, and shake hands, and have a glass of water or cup of coffee with senators, but he will—he or she will not even get a hearing, and will certainly not get a vote.
This is a complete break with norms of process and behavior in Washington, to have someone who’s nominated 10 months before the end of a presidential term not even get a hearing.Mitch McConnell’s calculus is that it’s worth destroying that norm, exploding it, despite all the damage that it will do to our institutions, because he realizes that losing this seat just comes at too great a cost for Republicans.
He also realizes that there's a political angle to this, which is that if you can hold that seat open, the seat becomes a campaign issue that you can rally Republican voters around the presidential election, voters who might otherwise not be very excited about their nominee.And already, at that point, in March of 2016, it was becoming clear that Donald Trump had a very good chance of becoming the Republican nominee.
There were a lot of Republicans, Republican voters, who were not thrilled about this, who were appalled by Donald Trump as their nominee.But you could hope to get them on board if you could make clear that the election carried with it the stakes of filling this seat on the court.McConnell realized that, you know, at the time, there were a fair number of pundits, myself included, who thought that this might work the other way, that leaving the seat open would give Democrats something to rally around, that Democrats would be so upset about McConnell’s blocking a qualified nominee for the court, not even giving this man a hearing, that Democrats would be so upset about this that it would become a big rallying cry for them.
The Courts and the 2016 Election
Right.
But McConnell figured out that, in fact, this issue would matter more on the right, that conservatives care more—have always placed more value on the court, on the makeup of the court, partly because of very strong feelings on the abortion issue on the right, and that, in fact, that if he blocked the seat and exploded all the norms around the way we handle court nominations, that it would, in fact, play to the Republicans’ advantage in the fall election.And that’s exactly what happened.
Hardball.It isn't very long after that that Trump starts to talk about a list, a list that eventually gets delivered by the Federalist Society.Don McGahn is in charge of getting it to him.Mitch McConnell has a say in all of that, and an alliance gets formed.Here we are, again, in the malleable political wins that Mitch McConnell is so capable of.An alliance gets formed around the idea of this list, and a litmus test for Trump that cuts to Trump’s advantage in the election.
Yeah, and actually saying more about the Democrats’ failure.
Yep.
You know, at the time that McConnell announced that he was not even going to allow anyone’s nomination to be heard or entertained at all, there was a notion that this might actually help the Democrats in the election; that by exploding the norms around judicial confirmations, that McConnell would so upset a lot of Democrats, enrage them over this behavior, that it would drive them to the polls in the fall and rally their enthusiasm around their nominee, Hillary Clinton.
But that’s not how it turned out, partly because Democrats really failed to make this an issue in the campaign.It was an issue of enormous consequence.I mean, this was a decisive seat on the court.This was a seat that, you know, is going to be held for 20 to 30 more years by whoever is nominated to fill it.And Hillary Clinton and Democrats more generally really failed to drive home the stakes, the consequences of this seat in the election, whereas Republicans, on the other hand, managed to use that vacant seat as a major driver of support for Donald Trump, even among voters who would otherwise have been very cool to Trump.They drove home, among evangelical Republicans who might otherwise have been appalled by Trump, they drove home the fact that this seat was going to be the Republicans’ best chance for overturning <i>Roe v. Wade</i> and a whole host of other conservative priorities.
Mitch McConnell’s Evolving View of the Constitution
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One thing in the book that I wanted to get [to], which was specifically is there's one specific column that he writes when he’s in college, where—I can give it to you, but he writes—he co-authors it, and it says the Constitution should meet modern needs.And he says, “One must view the Constitution as a document adaptable to [conditions of] contemporary society.”And he says as long as “basic rights are denied,” a “strict interpretation” which ignores these injustices is “innately evil.”Since it goes to sort of the constitutional interpretation, it seemed like a significant—
Yeah, I forgot about that one.And I also want to, if we could, talk a little bit more about his smashing the norms, on how it’s so at odds with his whole self-conception as a guardian of the institution.
Good.
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OK.One of the other really quite remarkable signs of McConnell’s moderation in his early years was a column he wrote for the college paper at the University of Louisville, where he gets into the whole debate over how we should view the Constitution and whether the Constitution is a fixed, hardened, unchangeable document or something that needs to be adapted to the times, something that we need to interpret in a way that makes sense for our times.
And McConnell, back then, comes down firmly on the side of viewing the Constitution as something that does need to be viewed as adaptable, that does need to be sort of understood through the needs and conditions of our moment.And of course, years later, that would come to be an anathema for his whole side of the spectrum.
Mitch McConnell and the Norms of the Senate
Just another watermark on the arc of Mitch McConnell’s development.So say what you were going to say about the norms and the breaking of the norms.
What makes McConnell’s willingness to explode the norms of behavior in Washington with the way that he handled that Merrick Garland nomination is that he’s always sold himself and conceived of himself as a guardian of the Senate as an institution.That’s who he claims to be.He’s not someone who ever wanted to run for president.He was always someone who wanted to run the Senate, preserve the Senate.He knew the rules of the Senate better than anyone, knew the history of the Senate better than anyone.You go to his archive that he’s got in Louisville there, and it’s all about the Senate, the history and tradition of the Senate as an institution.
…And yet he was willing to go out there and just completely do great damage to the institution of the Senate with the blocking of this nomination.He had been leading up to that moment for years, with his aggressive use of the filibuster, using the filibuster far more than the Senate minorities had in years prior, being far more willing to do anything necessary to slow things down, to block legislation, to block nominations to administration jobs and judicial nominations.He just wielded that filibuster and all the other tools of obstruction much more freely than the Democrats had in years prior.You just look at the numbers, and it’s just there to see just how much more willing McConnell was to wield those tools of obstruction; and, in doing so, cause real, real damage to the comity of the Senate as an institution.
But it was in that moment of Merrick Garland that you saw just how far he was willing to go in doing damage to the institution.And that’s just especially striking that he was willing to do that damage, because he’s always held himself up as the guardian, the protector of the institution.In fact, he’s done more damage to that institution in the past decade than anyone.
Wow.
It’s true.
The Federalist Society
Do you know of any connection between McConnell and the Federalists?Or is it admiration for them?
I think it’s just like it’s more like it’s the team thing.They groom the people; he gets them approved.Again, because he’s not an ideologue, like, it’s not that he’s deeply familiar with their, you know, their arguments on various fronts; it’s just they're the farm team, producing the people that he is then getting through.
Exactly.
The Confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh
My last one.When the vote for Kavanaugh happens that he’s engineered successfully, getting the nominee through and change on the court, what is that moment for Mitch McConnell’s career?
Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation really is the crowning achievement for Mitch McConnell’s career, two different ways.First of all, by winning that long-term conservative majority in the court, which is now possibly in place for decades to come, he’s vastly improved his own chances and his party’s chances for winning future elections, because all these different areas of election law, where the conservatives are now going to be laying out the ground rules, whether it’s gerrymandering or voting rights or campaign finance.
Second of all, winning that long-term majority for the court is a way for him to show other Republicans that he has triumphed for them.There's always been a doubt among conservatives about Mitch McConnell, because it was so clear that he was not really, really on board with them ideologically.He just seemed to care so little about the substance of the issues that they cared about.But here he could hold up this court majority and say: “Look, I got you this.I have now got you a majority on this court for years to come, and it was my doing.”And it’s just, for him, that is the legacy he wants to have.Whether that actually will prove to be the actual legacy of Mitch McConnell is another matter.
In the Garland case—of course you know Garland was renowned for being a moderate and had a lot of good relationships with Republicans.How does McConnell keep his caucus in line in what was actually a pretty difficult thing to do?
Right.It wasn’t easy for McConnell to keep other Republican senators on board with his plan to block Merrick Garland.I mean, this is someone, a nominee, who was seen as quite moderate, quite centrist, who had a lot of friends in the Senate.He was a well-known figure, very admired person.And for McConnell to get everyone else within the Republican caucus to go along with blocking him, with not even giving him a hearing, was not easy.But McConnell has shown a real, real skill in recent years in keeping his Republican caucus together, in blocking things and getting them to refuse to go along with Obamacare.Even if it would have helped Republicans to, in some ways, to negotiate on Obamacare, to pull it a little bit further to the right, it was McConnell who was able to say: “No, we’re not going to play ball with them at all on this.We’re just going to stay together as a cohesive, obstructive unit, and that’s how we’re going to win.”
So the responsibility for blocking Garland, while it was Mitch McConnell’s plan from the start, the responsibility, of course, is shared more broadly across the Republican caucus.It was all those other dozens of Republican senators, some of whom knew Merrick Garland and admired him, who went along with Mitch McConnell on this.There was more than one hand in exploding the norms in that period.This is something that everyone in the Republican Senate caucus agreed to.
Excellent.
The Court and Voting Rights
A couple more things we could hit on real quickly.Just I think it’s so important, …McConnell understood that holding the court means getting to set the ground rules for elections, because in all these different ways, the court determines the rules of our politics.And one of the biggest ways, of course, is voting rights.How broadly are we going to protect voting rights in this country to make sure that everyone’s voices are heard?
This is an area that McConnell cares about a lot.Way back in the ’90s, he was aggressively fighting the expansion of voting, fighting efforts like the Motor Voter Act that we had in the early ’90s to make it easier for people to register to vote, to make it easier for people to get to the polls.Mitch McConnell saw, understood that the—and he was very open about talking about this, that the more people you get to the polls, the more people are allowed to vote and are encouraged to vote, the worse it will be for his party.He understood very, very fundamentally that in a state like Kentucky, that the more poor folks come out to vote, whether white or black, poor folks that come out to vote, the better the chances are that the Democrats are going to win.
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