Mitch McConnell, the senior senator from Kentucky, is the Senate minority leader. First elected in 1984, he is known as a tough, thick-skinned leader who does not shrink from a fight. As a Republican in Kentucky, he has been used to frequently coming up on the losing side, but has perservered with considerable success nonetheless.
McConnell grew up in Alabama, where he overcame polio, and at age 13, moved to Louisville. He has been in politics for most of his adult life. Between college and law school at the University of Louisville, he was an intern for Republican Sen. John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky. Soon after graduating from law school, he became chief legislative assistant to Kentucky Sen. Marlow Cook. He served in the Ford administration Justice Department and then moved back to Louisville. In 1977, at age 35, McConnell won the office that had been Cook’s political stepping-stone, Jefferson County judge-executive. In 1981, he was re-elected, and in 1984, he ran for the Senate against incumbent Democrat Walter (Dee) Huddleston. McConnell ran a clever ad showing bloodhounds sniffing for Huddleston in vacation locales where Huddleston had collected fees for speeches while the Senate was in session. McConnell won by 5,169 votes out of 1.2 million cast. Part of a Washington power couple, he is married to former Bush administration Labor Secretary Elaine Chao.
McConnell began his Senate career with a seat on the Foreign Relations Committee. In 1992, he won a seat on the powerful Appropriations Committee and then moved up to become chairman of the Foreign Operations Subcommittee. In that role, he has worked since the early 1990s in opposing Burmese dictators who imprisoned Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. With Dianne Feinstein, he sponsored bills imposing trade sanctions on the regime. McConnell has long been a strong supporter of Israel and an advocate for human rights in Cambodia, Egypt, and other nations. But he also took care of Kentucky. He frequently used his seat on Appropriations to channel aid to his home state, and he was particularly active on issues affecting the tobacco industry. In 2003, he forged an agreement for a buyout of tobacco quotas from farmers with the trade-off that the industry accept some Food and Drug Administration oversight of tobacco. But House Republican conservatives balked at FDA regulation, and in 2004, the Senate backed the tobacco buyout without it, passing it as part of the corporate tax bill 69-17.
Another major area of interest for McConnell has been campaign finance law. He became the Senate’s leading opponent of efforts to curb political action committees and soft money, the large, unregulated contributions to political parties. He argued that such restrictions were unconstitutional infringements of free speech. In October 1999, with more than 40 senators on his side, he killed a version of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill. In early 2001 John McCain brought the bill forward again, and despite McConnell’s efforts, it passed. But it excluded many provisions from previous McCain-Feingold bills, including public subsidies for candidates and voluntary spending limits. McCain’s bill was also amended with a provision to double the limit on individual contributions, which McConnell supported. When he was challenged about the potential inconsistency between his opposition to campaign finance regulation and his vote for amending the Constitution to allow the banning of flag-burning, another form of free expression, McConnell switched his position and became one of the few Republicans to consistently vote against measures to ban the burning of the American flag.
After the campaign finance law was enacted, McConnell filed a lawsuit challenging its constitutionality. “There won’t be any less speech or money spent. Dramatically more will be spent, just in a different way,” McConnell predicted, and warned that unregulated fundraising groups called 527s would raise and spend huge amounts of money, as indeed they did in the 2004 cycle. The lower courts upheld most provisions of the law. But in January 2010, the Supreme Court, reversing earlier precedents, struck down a key reform when it ruled that curbs on political spending by corporations are an unconstitutional infringement on free speech. The law banned the broadcast, cable, or satellite transmission of election messages paid for by corporations or labor unions from their general funds in the 30 days before a presidential primary and in the 60 days before the general elections.
In 1990, McConnell began to climb the leadership ladder. He ran for chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, but lost to Phil Gramm of Texas. He tried again in 1996 and won. But he was unable to get Republican senators to contribute as much to the campaigns of fellow Republicans as the Democrats gave to their campaigns, and Republicans gained no seats in 1998. In the 2000 cycle, he had even tougher sledding. Republicans lost most of the close Senate contests, and the outcome was a 50-50 split that put Democrats in position to gain a majority a few months later, when Jim Jeffords left the Republican Party in May 2001 to become an independent affiliated with the Democrats.
In 2002, when Don Nickles of Oklahoma stepped down as Republican whip, McConnell campaigned for months among colleagues, and his only opponent, Larry Craig of Idaho, dropped out several days before the contest. Then in December, Republican Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi came under a storm of criticism when he spoke favorably of Strom Thurmond’s segregationist campaign for president in 1948 at an event honoring Thurmond on his 100th birthday. McConnell was Lott’s strongest public defender, threatening retaliation against Democrats if they moved to censure him. But on Dec. 20, as the controversy showed no sign of abating, he privately recommended to Lott that he “step down as soon as possible.” Ordinarily, McConnell might have been in line for the leader’s position at that point, but he did not challenge Tennessee’s Bill Frist when Frist ran for Lott’s post. So Frist became Senate majority leader and McConnell majority whip and a key adviser to Frist, who was relatively unversed in Senate procedures. While others complained about heightened divisiveness in Congress, McConnell declined to join the lament. “I’m amazed at all the hand-wringing over the level of discourse and partisanship. It leads me to believe that nobody has read any history. The level of divisiveness now is really quite mild when it’s compared with numerous periods in our history,” he said.
McConnell showed considerable mastery of Senate rules and, when Frist retired from the Senate in 2006, he ran for majority leader. It was a behind-the-scenes campaign, as described by his ally, Utah’s Robert Bennett. “Brick by brick, he built a firewall. So whenever somebody decided they wanted to run, all we had to do was sit down and say to them, ‘This is what you’re going to have to deal with.’ One by one potential opponents said, ‘Wait a minute, I don’t want to run and lose,’ ” Bennett said, later describing the campaign to the Associated Press. Republicans ended up losing their Senate majority at the polls in 2006, so McConnell became minority leader instead of majority leader, but he did so without opposition. Making a comeback in leadership, Lott narrowly beat Lamar Alexander for minority whip. “There will be nothing here (the Democrats) can do without some degree of cooperation from a very robust 49-vote minority,” McConnell told The New York Times soon after the 2006 election. “The question is, Are you going to work together and try to do good things for the country or not?”
There was some bipartisan cooperation at first. Appropriations bills left over from the previous Congress were passed in early 2007, and agreement on a minimum wage increase was reached after Democrats agreed to Republicans’ demand for tax cuts for small businesses. But harmony did not last long. In February, Majority Leader Harry Reid introduced a resolution, supported by some Republicans, opposing President Bush’s strategy for a troop surge in Iraq. McConnell announced that he would block debate on Reid’s resolution unless Republicans got votes on their resolutions setting 11 goals for the Iraqi government. On this, as on other issues throughout the next two years, McConnell was able to hold 41 or more Republicans together to get Reid to meet their demands, as Republicans conducted a record number of filibusters. McConnell observed that he lived by “an 80/20 rule.” He spent 80% of his time trying to coax 20% of Republican senators to stick with the party.
On Iraq, he succeeded, although Bush later wrote in his memoir that McConnell was not sure he would. By the summer of 2007, even some Republicans admitted to doubts about the war, but McConnell was able to hold enough of them to prevent passage of the Democrats’ timetable for troop withdrawals or a funding cutoff. By September, there were signs the troop surge was having an impact, and by the end of the year, Democrats had abandoned their drive for withdrawal timetables.
On another issue, immigration, McConnell faced a deeply divided Republican Conference. He supported the attempts of Arizona Republican Jon Kyl to fashion a comprehensive bill that included a guest worker program and a legalization process for illegal immigrants currently in the country. But most Republicans opposed the bill. It failed to survive a vote to end a filibuster against it, and an alternative was offered later in June 2007. McConnell, recognizing its unpopularity in Kentucky (a state with a very small immigrant population), this time opposed it.
In maneuverings on the budget in 2007, McConnell insisted Democrats hold down spending to the levels proposed by the Bush administration and provide funding for the Iraq war without strings attached, and he prevailed. He forced the Democrats to back down on a tax increase they wanted to pay for an adjustment in the alternative minimum tax to prevent the tax from hitting middle-income taxpayers. He opposed a bill by John Warner of Virginia and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut to regulate reductions in carbon emissions on the grounds that it would impose “a stealth and giant tax on virtually every aspect of industrial consumer life.” Still, McConnell worked on a bipartisan basis on some issues. He cut an early deal with Reid that paved the way for Senate passage of the $700 billion Wall Street rescue that the Bush administration sought in the fall of 2008. He also supported the loan package that year for the Detroit automakers; General Motors and Ford as well as Toyota have big plants in Kentucky.
McConnell has seldom had an easy time of it in his re-election bids, and 2008 was no exception. Since 1984, he had won re-election three times, but always after spirited competition, from former Louisville Mayor Harvey Sloane in 1990; from now Gov. Steve Beshear in 1996; and from Lois Combs Weinberg in 2002. Sloane and Beshear held McConnell to 52% and 55% of the vote, respectively. He did much better against Weinberg, winning 65%-35%. But in 2008, Democrats, still smarting from former Majority Leader Tom Daschle’s defeat in 2004, were determined to put up a tough opponent against McConnell. They found Bruce Lunsford, a hospital and nursing home operator and multimillionaire who ran for governor in 2007 but lost the Democratic primary to Beshear. Lunsford spent some $10.8 million, more than $7 million of it his own money, and ran a string of negative ads against McConnell, including one showing dogs chasing the senator—a takeoff on McConnell’s 1984 bloodhound ads—and another criticizing McConnell for supporting the financial industry bailout.
McConnell seemed unfazed by the political peril. He raised $21 million from 2003 to 2008 and ultimately spent it all. His ads compared himself to Kentucky’s long-serving Democratic Sen. Alben Barkley, who was Senate majority leader and later Harry Truman’s vice president, and reminded voters of the money and projects he had brought home. In the last two weeks of the campaign, he embarked on a 4,000-mile statewide bus tour with 62 stops in 55 counties. On Nov. 1, just before the election, he announced that the Veterans Affairs Department had approved $75 million for a veterans’ hospital in Louisville.
McConnell won 53%-47%, running behind GOP presidential candidate John McCain’s 57% in Kentucky. McConnell lost the state’s two largest urban counties, Jefferson and Fayette, where the Louisville and Lexington newspapers have long opposed him. He also lost some traditionally Democratic counties in the eastern mountains and in the western part of the state. He won 13% among African-Americans, more than McCain, and 44% among voters under 30. Interestingly, given his yeoman work to prevent Bush’s troop surge from being undermined by withdrawal timetables, he won only 57% among voters for whom Iraq was the most important issue.
The victory made McConnell the longest-serving senator in Kentucky history—and a Senate minority leader facing difficult challenges. Barack Obama restored the Democrats’ hold on the White House, and Democrats emerged from the election with a larger majority in the House and with 58 seats in the Senate, leaving them just short of the 60 votes needed to defeat a filibuster. McConnell later told National Journal, “In January of 2009, I looked at a lot of poll data, and the ray of hope that I could give my members was that the independents that wiped us out in ’06 and ’08 held similar views, ones that I knew most of my members had, on spending and national security. I thought we could regain their confidence on spending and national security.” But it was essential to hold the 41 Republicans together. He was not entirely successful at first. In February 2009, the Senate approved Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus bill 61-37 with three Republican votes. “Pushing back these efforts to basically Europeanize America will not be easy,” McConnell told a conservative audience that month. Then came significantly more bad news for McConnell. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, trailing his 2004 Republican primary opponent Pat Toomey in polls, announced in late April 2009 that he would switch parties and join the Democrats. In July, when Democrat Al Franken was seated in Minnesota after a recount, the Democrats got to the magic 60, a theoretically filibuster-proof majority.
As with Iraq, McConnell may have had his doubts about holding his caucus together, but he plugged ahead anyway. In May 2009, sensing dissent among Democrats, he got the Senate to deny the administration $80 million to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He opposed the Democrats’ health care proposals as a government takeover of health care, and with Republicans united and Democrats divided, he took aim at the option in the bill for a federally run insurance provider. He encouraged the Senate’s two physicians, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and John Barrasso of Wyoming, to speak out against the Democrats’ plans. The so-called public option was eventually dropped from the legislation when it passed in 2010. Throughout work on the bill, McConnell deepened his working relationship with the Republican leader in the House, John Boehner of Ohio. “I have found him absolutely delightful to work with,” he told National Journal in March 2010, “and philosophically we tend to see things the same way. I think he understands the Senate and I understand the House and we both see the differences.”
In April and May 2010, McConnell made efforts to stop the Democrats from passing their version of the financial regulation bill, but, like health care, it ultimately passed. He also fought President Obama’s nominations of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court without success. In July 2009, he reversed his previous opposition to filibusters of high court nominees, claiming that the Democrats had changed the rules of the game. When he was speaking on the floor against Kagan in August, Sen. Al Franken, a former comedian, was presiding in the chair and at one point rolled his eyes. McConnell later admonished the freshman senator, saying, “This isn’t Saturday Night Live, Al.”
McConnell’s ability to hold his caucus together paid off at some critical moments. After the election, Obama hoped to strike a deal with congressional Republicans to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for two more years for all taxpayers except those earning over $200,000 a year. But Senate Republicans led by McConnell rejected any proposal that did not extend the tax cuts for everyone, and Obama was forced to go along. Congress approved a bill extending the tax cuts for all taxpayers. The Senate also stopped in its tracks the Democrats’ bill to impose a cap-and-trade system of emissions swaps on industry. It passed the House in 2009, but never came up for a vote in the Senate in the 111th Congress (2009-10).
In March 2010, McConnell spoke about GOP efforts in the House and Senate to repair the party’s brand. “Unified opposition has been the single most important thing that occurred this past year,” he told National Journal. “That turned the political environment literally upside down from where it was 12 months ago and let the public know that there was a genuine debate up here over principle.” In August 2010, after McConnell had his first one-on-one meeting with President Obama, he showed no sign of finding common ground with the president and his party. Asked whether there was too much obstruction in the Senate, McConnell said, “I think the Senate is operating largely like our founding fathers anticipated it would.”
In the November 2010 election, Republicans gained six Senate seats, leaving McConnell with 47 GOP votes and Democrats far short of a filibuster-proof majority. But Congress-watchers speculated that McConnell might have difficulty in working with the strong independent-minded conservatives who gained power in the elections, including Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who went over the head of GOP establishment leaders and backed several primary candidates who were more conservative and plugged in to the tea party movement than establishment-backed candidates. The most dramatic case was the contest for Kentucky’s other Senate seat.
After helping Republican Jim Bunning win the seat in 1998, McConnell had lost faith in Bunning’s political skills and ability to hold the seat, especially after he was re-elected in the Republican year of 2004 by only 51%-49%. Going into the 2010 election, McConnell made it clear Bunning should not run again. The incumbent was livid. He called McConnell a “control freak,” and blamed him when he managed to raise only $300,000 in the first quarter of 2009. “Leaders of the Republican Party in the Senate have done everything in their power to dry up my fundraising,” Bunning said.
The consensus choice of McConnell and other Kentucky Republicans to replace Bunning was state Secretary of State Trey Grayson. But also running was Rand Paul, a Bowling Green ophthalmologist and the son of 2008 libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul, a House member from Texas. Bunning and DeMint endorsed Paul, who also had support from tea party groups. In the May 2010 primary, Paul beat Grayson, 59%-35%. McConnell appeared at a victory rally for Paul in a conciliatory gesture. And Paul reciprocated by saying he would support McConnell’s re-election as Senate GOP leader. But the presence of Paul, DeMint and other activist conservatives in the Senate introduced a new political dynamic that was bound to present McConnell with management challenges well into the 112th Congress (2011-12).
