Mitch McConnell, perhaps the greatest strategist in Senate history, recently announced he would be retiring from politics after seven terms. This brought on celebration from MAGA Republicans, who detest the Kentuckian with the heat of a thousand suns.
There are numerous legitimate criticisms of McConnell’s tenure: He ruled the conference with an iron hand, alienating many.
He often undermined dynamic upstart candidates, not only MAGA but also Tea Party, funding establishment politicians who would consolidate his rule.
Under McConnell, there were decades of spiraling debt spending without any genuine effort to curb spending, reform entitlements or rein in the administrative state. On this front, McConnell is far from alone.
For MAGA, though, the real problem is that McConnell failed to show the proper deference to Donald Trump.
And sometimes, like when the president pressured McConnell to get rid of the legislative filibuster, that was a good thing.
Even more pertinently, McConnell sits at the center of the founding myth of Trumpism, which states that before 2015, the GOP had “conserved” nothing, accomplished nothing and stopped nothing. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard someone say, “Republicans gave Obama everything he wanted.”
The opposite is true.
After winning wave elections in 2006 and 2008, Democrats controlled both legislative branches and the White House. Republicans hadn’t looked as weak since the “Old Right” was ineptly sitting in Congress watching one massive expansion of the state after the next.
The coming Obama transformation of America was a fait accompli according to the pundit class.
McConnell emerged as the leader of the right, holding together a fractious GOP conference that ran from squishy centrist to hardliner, denying Obama his revolution.
McConnell’s mission was to ensure that nothing went smoothly for Democrats.
He filibustered the DREAM Act of 2010. When Obama ignored the will of Congress and went ahead and enacted it through executive actions, Senate Republicans backed a national lawsuit against the administration.
Sorry, but McConnell couldn’t parachute a SEAL team into the White House to stop Obama.
McConnell also sank the Democrats’ cap-and-trade bill, which would have created fabricated “markets” for fossil fuels in the same way ObamaCare did for healthcare. As with the Affordable Care Act, overturning it would have been nearly impossible.
McConnell stood in the way of the euphemistic Paycheck Fairness Act and the Paying a Fair Share Act of 2012, which would have raised taxes.
McConnell stopped the American Jobs Act bailout, and also the authoritarian card-check bill.
He filibustered the antispeech DISCLOSE Act and national federal minimum wage efforts.
Senate Republicans sued and won when Obama illegally named recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board.
But forget all of that. Contemplate a counterhistory: An unencumbered Obama would have been the most significant leftist in US history.
It’s always laughable when Democrats contend that Obama was a “moderate.” McConnell forced him to moderate.
Other than placating the Iranian mullahs, remaking health care was the central cause of the Obama administration. It was assumed Republicans would fold after being given a few meetings to vent.
But McConnell held every Republican in opposition. And the longer the process took, the more grassroots opposition began to grow.
By the time Sen. Ted Kennedy died, and Republican Scott Brown miraculously won the reliably left-wing seat in Massachusetts, it was over in the Senate.
It was then that Democrats decided to upend the political order and cram the Affordable Care Act through reconciliation. It was the first time in history that a political party unilaterally pushed through a massive national reform without any buy-in from the minority.
It frayed the political order in ways from which we haven’t recovered — and led to Trump.
Then, it’s unlikely any legislator did more to ensure that the originalist judicial revolution became a reality.
Most famously, despite immense pressure, McConnell refused to give Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland a Senate vote.
This act, well within his constitutional authority as majority leader, was imperative to stop Democrats from transforming the high court into a lawless institution that relied on arbitrary “empathy” and theories pulled from the ether.
Senate Democrats, who convinced themselves that Obama’s ascent meant they would forever rule — a bipartisan habit — invoked the nuclear option on the judicial filibuster in 2013. McConnell warned Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid at the time, “You’ll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think.
He did.
By the time Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and McConnell sat Amy Coney Barrett on the court, SCOTUS had been transformed into a government institution that more or less does its job.
Dobbs v. Jackson and a slew of other important decisions would probably not have happened without McConnell.
Like an aging one-time all-star clinging to his career, McConnell stayed in senatorial gerontocracy one term too long. But blaming him for all Republicans’ failures, real and imagined, is revisionist history.
David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner. Twitter @davidharsanyi