McConnell’s influence goes underground

Republished from Kentucky Lantern

“We’re in the personnel business,” Sen. Mitch McConnell has said ever since he concluded the biggest piece of business in Donald Trump’s first administration, a massive tax cut — and argued that a bigger legacy of that Congress was going to be conservative judges.

Now Trump is about to become president again, and McConnell can reshape his own legacy, starting with another type of personnel business — Trump’s planned nominations of unqualified, risky people for some of the highest, most crucial positions in the government.

The idea that McConnell would vote to make Tulsi Gabbard, a Russophile, director of national intelligence is as outlandish as the notion that he would have voted to make Matt Gaetz attorney general.

It’s also hard to imagine McConnell liking the idea of former Fox News host Pete Hegseth as secretary of Defense or vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. secretary of Health and Human Services, though RFK2 might be able to obfuscate his way through a committee hearing and lose no more than three Republican senators, the maximum he could stand if all Democrats voted no.

After Gaetz pulled out, he said McConnell was one of four Republicans who sank his nomination, but it sank so quickly that there must have been plenty of Senate torpedoes.

Still, Gaetz’s tweet reminded us that McConnell is the most prominent anti-Trump Republican, one who endorsed the former president only because he felt obliged to do so as Senate GOP leader, a job he leaves at year’s end. Trump allies may be quick to label other nominee skeptics as junior versions of McConnell, who has been a highly unpopular national figure.

So, the Kentucky senator is likely to take a low profile in the Senate’s advice-and-consent function, with the possible exception of Hegseth, since McConnell has taken the chairmanship of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee and declared that Senate Republicans must “secure the future of U.S. leadership and primacy” in the world. That means very different things to him and Trump; ask anyone in Europe.

McConnell’s first and boldest public statement about the process came Nov. 12, when he accepted the American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award for career achievement and was asked about confirmations. He said, “Each of these nominees needs to come before the Senate and go through the process of being vetted.”

Spontaneous applause interrupted McConnell, because two days earlier Trump had demanded that prospective Senate leaders agree to allow him to avoid the advice-and-consent process by taking the Senate into recess — when an archaic provision in the Constitution allows a president to make appointments that can last until Congress adjourns.

McConnell spoke before Trump announced the unqualified picks. Afterward, McConnell told another group, “There will be no recess appointments,” according to a post on X.com by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker magazine. Mayer deleted the post, “apparently in response to uncertainty about whether the gathering at which McConnell was speaking was off the record,” wrote William Kristol (son of Irving) on The Bulwark, an anti-Trump outlet. “But neither McConnell nor any of his aides has denied he said it.” (His office didn’t respond to my inquiry.)

So went the first round of a cagey cage match between McConnell, the epitome of a Senate institutionalist, and Trump, a fundamental anti-institutionalist who correctly sees the Senate as the biggest check on his autocratic, authoritarian schemes that could change the nature of our democratic republic — which depends on checks and balances among the branches.

Trump lost the first round on points, when McConnell lieutenant John Thune of South Dakota was elected majority leader, and suffered a brief knockdown in the second round with the withdrawal of Gaetz.

The later rounds could go beyond personnel. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, no McConnell buddy, opposes Trump’s plan to use the military to deport undocumented immigrants. Thune and other farm-state Republicans don’t like tariffs, the only tax Trump seems to like. And on any issue, Democrats will need only four of the Senate’s 12 or so GOP institutionalists to make an anti-Trump majority.

Some of those institutionalists are also unlikely to face voters again, which makes them even more independent. McConnell hasn’t said he will retire in 2026, but every indication has been that he will. His protégé, CNN commentator Scott Jennings, said Sunday, “He’s one of this group of senators that is unthreatenable; they’re not subject to the normal political machinations.”

After being Trump’s chief enabler, and his reluctant maybe-savior in the second impeachment, McConnell no longer bears the burden of leadership and can be an independent and influential voice — perhaps enough to wipe part of the Trump stain off his legacy. But look for him to be careful about making news. The more he lays low, the more effective he is likely to be. When it’s all over, maybe he’ll tell us what really happened.

This column is republished from the Northern Kentucky Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com. Follow Kentucky Lantern on Facebook and Twitter. Kentucky Lantern stories may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

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