Senate Republicans are sticking it to Mitch McConnell while he’s down
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell suffered a bad fall last month and is still recovering. It hasn’t been clear if McConnell was planning to try to make a comeback in the Senate or if this was ultimately going to force him out. But now a news outlet is running an article about how McConnell is supposedly about to retire – and it doesn’t appear that the story is coming from McConnell at all.
On Thursday the Spectator ran an article with the headline: “Sources: GOP senators preparing for McConnell retirement.” The article went on to claim that other Senate Republican leaders are expecting that McConnell will be “retiring from his duties as leader, and presumably the Senate itself.” It then went on to spell out at length how other Republican Senate leaders are positioning themselves to move on from McConnell.
In other words, the sources for this article don’t even really claim to know that McConnell is retiring. These sources are pretty clearly the other Republican Senate leaders (or their surrogates), and they decided that they want headlines out there about McConnell’s health problems. It seems obvious enough that McConnell’s own Senate Republican colleagues want the media and the public to view McConnell as too feeble to remain in charge, so that there will be overwhelming pressure for him to step aside.
To underscore how thoroughly this reporting about McConnell’s supposed retirement is not coming from McConnell himself, two hours after the Spectator article was published, McConnell tweeted “I am looking forward to returning to the Senate on Monday.” We have no way of knowing if McConnell has indeed been leaning toward retiring, or if he’s been on the fence, or if he still intends to finish his entire time. But either way, McConnell did not want this story out there right now.
So we’re now in a remarkable situation where Mitch McConnell’s own Senate Republican colleagues are trying to find a way to shove him out the back door the minute he returns to work on Monday by creating the appearance that McConnell is retiring and then turning it into a self fulfilling prophecy.
Talk about a lack of loyalty. For years and years, McConnell has held the Republican Senate together for the corrupt common purpose of getting their megadonors’ right wing judges confirmed, keeping the dirty money flowing, and keeping control of the Senate. McConnell only really lost his ability to keep his corrupt Republican Senate majority intact once Donald Trump came onto the scene and oafishly wrecked McConnell’s carefully laid corrupt long game.
Yet now that Trump’s flame out has made McConnell less useful to his Senate Republican colleagues, they seemingly can’t wait to move on from him. They literally can’t wait. His term ends in a year and a half anyway, but they want him out now, so they can fight each other to see who gets his leadership position, and who gets control of all the dirty money that comes with it.
Whichever way this battle goes, its only immediate impact will be on the Republican Senate caucus itself. If McConnell does retire from the Senate, the Kentucky legislature recently changed the law such that the state’s Democratic Governor will be forced to pick from one of three Republicans that it chooses as potential replacement. So the Senate math won’t change, just the Senate Republican leadership.
That could actually be a big deal. The most obvious candidates to replace McConnell as Senate Republican leader are John Cornyn, a plodder who won’t be nearly as effective as McConnell at raising dirty campaign money, and a crook in Rick Scott who just got done ripping off the NRSC so badly that he left 2022 Republican Senate candidates high and dry. Either man would make Senate Republicans significantly weaker heading into the 2024 election. So while McConnell’s departure would not give the Democrats McConnell’s seat, his departure – if it does happen – can probably only be seen as a good thing for the Democrats going forward.
Mitch McConnell is 100% getting what he deserves. He’s a bad person who’s spent many years doing terrible things to the country and the public, solely so he could get ahead in the process. But now that he’s become less valuable to his longtime co-conspirators, there’s something remarkable about how quickly they’re trying to force him off the stage. McConnell has survived for a very long time in spite of his own caucus seemingly hating him, and only going along with him for fear of what things would look like without him. But when you’re in that position, you have to spend every single day staying a step ahead of everyone on all sides. And it appears that McConnell’s health related absence may have finally cost him that step.
