Mitch McConnell announced Wednesday his retirement from the Republican leadership in the U.S. Senate. He leaves his post when this session of Congress ends but indicates he remains as a sort of backbencher with standing, à la Nancy Pelosi in the House.

After winning election to the upper chamber four decades ago, the Kentuckian cited cutting government as his primary purpose. He failed.

In this, he joins every Republican Senate leader of his lifetime. Bob Dole? Howard Baker? Everett Dirksen? Bill Knowland? They failed to restrain leviathan too. Some tried harder than others.

In so much else, McConnell succeeded. These triumphs curiously elicited primarily not cheers from allies but boos from his enemies. People accentuated the negative when it came to McConnell. Exhibiting the charisma of an undertaker with the personality of the corpse tends to affect people in that way. His most recent favorable-unfavorable ratio stood at 6 percent to 84 percent, which makes him somewhat more popular than AIDS but less than detention.

He looks out of step with his party on foreign policy and behind a step on immigration.

These combined to sink efforts to trade a strong border security package with a $95 billion foreign aid package earlier this month in a deal that seemed all idol and no whip in favor of liberals. When congressional leaders recently met to give the treasury more money to avoid the government spending itself into another shutdown, McConnell joined Democrats Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries in the pig pile on Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson.

While some Republicans regard Ukraine funding as important, McConnell, who has stewarded tens of billions to the war-torn nation, surely mistook his beliefs for his party’s when he said in late 2022, “Providing assistance for Ukrainians to defeat the Russians, that’s the number one priority for the United States right now according to most Republicans.”

No matter his replacement, one senses Democrats miss him more than they now admit. This likely proves true for MAGA Republicans celebrating his departure as well.

Ironically, the relic of the pre-2016 Republican Party engineered the greatest triumph for the post-2016 Republican Party.

He alchemized Justice Merrick Garland into Justice Neil Gorsuch by successfully gambling, after Justice Antonin Scalia died more than 11 months prior to the next presidential term, on a Republican victory in the 2016 presidential election. He then invoked the so-called nuclear option — instituted with regard to lower court nominees by Democrats four years earlier, to their lasting regret — to kill any filibuster of Gorsuch.

When the Left in 2018 carted out Anita Hill in whiteface, McConnell kept his caucus strong in support of Brett Kavanaugh. Just one Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, defected.

In 2019, when asked what he would do if a Supreme Court seat opened up in 2020, McConnell answered with a wry smile, “We’d fill it.” Ruth Bader Ginsburg pass away not in February of an election year, as her friend Antonin Scalia, did but in September less than two months prior to the big vote. McConnell pressured President Donald Trump to nominate Amy Coney Barrett, expedited the hearings, and corralled the votes that placed her on the high court.

“Leader McConnell has defiled the Senate like no one in this generation,” then–Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reacted, “and Leader McConnell may very well destroy it.”

On spending, the border, foreign policy, and much else, McConnell appeared to attempt to lead the 2004 Republican Party in 2024. Even he eventually figured out the time in spite of his broken clock. “One of life’s most underappreciated talents,” he explained in his Wednesday announcement on the Senate floor, “is to know when it’s time to move on to life’s next chapter.”

As new characters emerge in the coming chapters, one senses Democrats — habitually finding a degree of appreciation for the Republicans in the rearview mirror that they despised in real time — occasionally look fondly upon the Southern gentleman who negotiated with them rather than yelled at them.

Republicans, so many now in a don’t-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-way-out mood, likely shift their assessment of the longest-serving party leader in the history of the U.S. Senate too. More decisions such as West Virginia v. EPA, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard mark McConnell as the gift that keeps on giving. In other words, McConnell impacted the courts not just in 2019 but in 2029 and beyond.

The past yielding few if any Republican Senate leaders — perhaps long-toothed readers invoke those seven months in 1953 when Bob Taft served as majority leader — that produced better tangible results for conservatives suggests the Right’s assessment of McConnell changes. The future indicating that something Josh Hawley this way comes suggests the Left’s assessment of McConnell changes too.