I have been waiting for a very long time to write this column, and yet I can’t quite summon up the joy and relief I thought I’d get out of it. We’re speaking, of course, about the long-awaited denouement of Mitch McConnell, the current Senate minority leader and longtime head of the GOP’s caucus in that body for 17 long, brutal, underachieving years. As Breitbart reports:
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) will step down from his leadership position later this year, he announced Wednesday on the Senate floor, saying “Father Time remains undefeated” and “it’s time for the next generation of leadership.”
McConnell, already the longest serving Senate party leader in history, will step down at the end of this Congress in early January 2025.
“I turned 82 last week,” a noticeably exhausted McConnell told the Senate Chamber. “The end of my contributions are closer than I prefer.”
McConnell reminisced “with deep appreciation” about the days after his 1985 arrival in the Senate (although he said 1984 in his speech), acknowledging those years “helped shape (his) view of the world” while acknowledging he is now out of place.
The Senate veteran said he remains “unconflicted about the good within our country, and the irreplaceable role we play as the leader of the free world. It’s why I worked so hard to get the national security package passed earlier this month.”
If you’ve been a regular reader of this column, you’re aware of two nicknames I’ve given to McConnell and the brand of “leadership” predominating in the Senate caucus he’s controlled since 2007.
READ MORE from Scott McKay: Thanks to Politico, We’re a Christian Nationalist America Again
I call him “Morphine Mitch,” which isn’t so much a takeoff on as a correction of the “Cocaine Mitch” nickname he earned when a ship owned by his family was found by authorities to have been carrying a load of Bolivian marching powder a few years back.
“Cocaine Mitch” might have some validity, but in truth it’s far from accurate. With cocaine, people are energized, or at least that’s what I understand. And nobody has ever been energized by Mitch McConnell.
On the other hand, morphine is given when doctors want to kill your pain as you lie wounded and/or dying, and that is precisely the function Mitch McConnell has performed in the Republican Party.
He’s done everything he can do to stamp out dynamism, verve, innovation, fighting spirit, and even real connection with Republican voters from the Senate, and it’s telling that the few members of the body who do show those things — Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Ron Johnson, J.D. Vance, Rick Scott, Josh Hawley, and a number of others — are all opponents of McConnell within that caucus.
Go ahead. Find somebody who lines up with McConnell who isn’t a stiff like John Cornyn or James Lankford or Bill Cassidy. I’m happy to listen.
Exactly, right? Nobody.
The three names initially bandied about as McConnell’s replacements are very much of the same odor as he emits: Cornyn, John Barrasso, and John Thune. Call them the Morphine Johns if you want — they’re the same corporatist Establishment stooges he is, though one can always hope that an unproven corporatist Establishment stooge might do less damage than would a master-level corporatist Establishment stooge.
But in speaking about McConnell and his disciples, chronic readers of this column will remember another of my labels: the Washington Generals.
It’s something of an obscure reference, I’ll admit. You have to know your Harlem Globetrotters lore to fully appreciate it. But here’s a quick video tutorial:
And this is a very, very appropriate name for the game Morphine Mitch and his crew have played over the past 17 years.
The Generals are not just a bad team; they’re intentionally bad. They throw game after game, which would be a colossal betrayal of their fans if they had any. Meanwhile, the Globetrotters — and I am every bit as pained as you are in envisioning Chuck Schumer as Meadowlark Lemon or Curly Neal — break all the rules with alacrity, win in every way possible, and always put on a show for the folks in doing so.
It’s a lot more fun to root for the Globetrotters than it is for the team full of stiffs on the other bench. But that’s not the only reason Republicans have underachieved in every Senate election cycle since McConnell became the leader of that caucus. Oh, no. It’s a lot worse than that.
No, McConnell has actively sabotaged conservatives who have run for the Senate. It started all the way back in 2010 when he did it to Joe Miller, a Tea Party conservative who by all rights ought to be in his third term representing the people of Alaska, and it’s been a mostly unbroken string since.
And in 2022, McConnell pulled out every stop he could to ensure that Republicans didn’t capture a Senate majority — especially screwing over Don Bolduc, Blake Masters, Adam Laxalt, and Mehmet Oz, not to mention the GOP nominee Kelly Tshibaka in Alaska, who ended up losing to swamp rat Lisa Murkowski thanks to McConnell’s well-documented machinations there.
I’m also not the only one suspicious of McConnell stooge Lindsey Graham acting on his behalf when, in the wake of the Dobbs decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which wiped away Roe v. Wade and gave the abortion issue back to the states to decide, the latter brought a federal 15-week abortion ban bill. When Graham did that it was very, very clear what the effect would be — it destroyed the argument the pro-life movement and the conservative movement at large had been making from the very beginning, which was that abortion was an issue to be decided in the states.
Bringing that bill was a grievous wound for blue- or purple-state Republicans like Bolduc, Masters, Herschel Walker, Oz, and others. It solidified abortion as the big driver of Democrat votes in that cycle, something the conservatives were not well-suited to counter.
Anyone could have told Graham — and McConnell — that bringing that bill was a terrible idea in 2022. It had no chance to pass, so there was nothing but downside. That’s the kind of move you have to make when your aim is to insure the Globetrotters win. Everybody has a bad day on the court at some point, yet Harlem never loses.
And neither, seemingly, do Schumer and the Democrats.
The Senate never cuts the federal budget. It never defunds, say, Planned Parenthood. It couldn’t unwind Obamacare. It can’t control the border. I could go on all night naming things the majority of Americans want but McConnell has never produced.
But he sure can rally the troops to fire off billions of dollars to keep the Ukraine war going.
McConnell is terrific at counting votes, mind you. It isn’t that he’s incompetent. It’s that it’s far more important for Mitch McConnell to have a majority within the Senate GOP caucus than it is for the caucus to have a majority in the Senate.
And should Republicans ever stop underachieving in those Senate races, they’d be sitting on 55 to 60 seats. Which would be pretty good for Republican voters.
But not so good for Morphine Mitch.
Because if you had the kind of wave election that disgust with the Obama Democrat mob is bound to crystallize into at some point, the six or eight new Republican senators the wave would produce are wholly unlikely to be Mitch McConnell stooges. Republican voters generally cannot stand the Washington Generals; more often than not, it takes millions and millions of dollars coming down from D.C. political action committees, often connected to McConnell, to prop up the establishment stooges in GOP primaries, and even that doesn’t often work.
And that fact produces the sabotage and starvation of a Don Bolduc or Blake Masters. Because McConnell would rather see Democrats elected than more Josh Hawleys or Ted Cruzes who ask rude questions at caucus meetings.
But now he’s leaving, owing to advanced decrepitude and the discredit that he’s suffering over his demand for Ukraine funding without substantial steps to control the southern border.
All I can say is: It’s about damn time. Years and years too late, in fact.
But if we’re going to replace McConnell with one of his mini-Mitches — those Morphine Johns whose names are being thrown around — rather than someone newer, younger, fresher, and smarter, then there’s not much celebration due at his exit.
What America needs isn’t just a new GOP Senate leader. It needs new GOP Senate leadership. We need to send the Boston Celtics out to take on the Globetrotters, not the stupid Washington Generals.
