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Kentucky: Senior Senator Sen. Mitch McConnell (R) Last Updated February 11, 2004
Mitch McConnell is Kentucky's senior senator, the architect of its 7-1 Republican congressional delegation and Senate Majority Whip; his wife is Labor Secretary Elaine Chao. He grew up in Alabama, where he overcame polio, and after age 13 moved to Louisville. He has been in politics almost his whole career. He was an intern for Senator John Sherman Cooper in 1964 and, after finishing law school, became a staffer for Senator Marlow Cook. He moved back to Louisville and in 1977, at 35, won by a narrow margin the office that had been Cook's political stepping stone, Jefferson County judge-executive. In 1981 he was re-elected, again narrowly. In 1984 he ran for the Senate, against incumbent Dee Huddleston. McConnell ran ads showing bloodhounds sniffing for Huddleston in vacation locales where he had collected fees for speeches while the Senate was in session. McConnell won by 5,169 votes of 1.2 million cast. Many senators go to Washington and over the years become less conservative; McConnell has become more so. As his longtime adversary on campaign finance regulation, John McCain, has said, "There are few things more daunting in politics than the determined opposition of Senator McConnell." He has taken on tough assignments on occasion: As Ethics Committee chairman in 1995, he led the investigation of Bob Packwood for sexual harassment (the committee recommended expulsion, and Packwood ultimately resigned). He has often opposed trial lawyers, backing product liability and medical malpractice laws that would reduce their leverage and sponsoring the auto choice plan that would let car owners pay less for insurance by disclaiming pain and suffering damages. In July 2002 he tried to put a provision requiring lawyers' clients to be informed of the costs of legal services onto the corporate accountability bill, but lost 62-35. He has served as chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, and after the 2000 election he was one of the leading Republicans working on the bill to improve election procedures. McConnell served on Foreign Relations until 1992, then switched to Appropriations and in 1994 became chairman of the Foreign Operations Subcommittee. In that capacity he has had much to say about foreign aid. He has strongly supported aid to Israel and in July 2001 called for reconsidering aid to Egypt in light of the often vile propaganda its government-supervised media puts out. He has kept close watch on the unsteady condition of Cambodia. McConnell has frequently used his seat on Appropriations to insert riders that help Kentucky and channel aid to the state. He has also worked hard on tobacco issues. In early 2003 he was still working for a buyout of tobacco quotas from farmers, which he said would be "no slam dunk" and would likely have to come as part of a bill allowing the FDA regulation of tobacco. McConnell's greatest expertise is on campaign finance. He first got interested while teaching a night course at the University of Louisville, and his thinking at first was quite different from what it is now. In 1990 he drafted a bill that would have banned PACs, cut in half out-of-state donations and banned soft money. But in a few years he came to believe that these provisions and those in the various bills sponsored by John McCain and Russ Feingold are unconstitutional infringements of free speech. He disputes the notions that campaign ads are some kind of pollution and that too much is spent on them. In 1994 he spoke all night to filibuster a campaign finance bill, "the only true all-night filibuster in the last 12 years," he said in 1999. In October 1999, with more than 40 senators on his side, he killed a version of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill. In 1999 Bill Clinton broke with tradition and refused to nominate Bradley Smith for FEC commissioner, the law professor picked by Senate Republicans, who opposed much campaign finance regulation as a violation of the First Amendment. McConnell got Clinton to nominate Smith by putting a hold on the nomination of Richard Holbrooke to be UN Ambassador. In March 2001, McCain insisted on bringing campaign finance forward again, and despite McConnell's efforts, managed to pass his measure. But as McConnell pointed out, it did not include many provisions in previous McCain-Feingold bills, including public subsidies for candidates and voluntary spending limits. And the sweeping provisions against independent advertising inserted by an amendment by Paul Wellstone (which McConnell voted for) seemed likely to be ruled unconstitutional. McCain's bill was also amended by a doubling of the limit on individual contributions--something McConnell supported. In 2001 the House Republican leadership blocked consideration of the similar Shays-Meehan bill. But after the implosion of Enron, Shays and Meehan got enough signatures on a discharge petition to bring their bill to the floor, and it passed in February 2002. For month than a month, McConnell put forward 13 "technical corrections," and Majority Leader Tom Daschle refused to bring the issue to the floor until he and McCain settled their differences. The bill passed on March 27, and immediately McConnell filed a lawsuit charging it was unconstitutional. He had an interesting trio of lawyers--First Amendment litigator Floyd Abrams, Stanford Law Dean Kathleen Sullivan and former Solicitor General and Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. In May 2003 a deeply divided three-judge federal court issued 1,700 pages of opinions and upheld some provisions of the law but not others. McConnell's interest in elections is not just theoretical. He ran for chairman of the NRSC and lost to Phil Gramm in 1990 and in 1992 by one vote; he won the post in November 1996. But he was unable to get Republican senators to contribute as much to campaigns as Democratic senators did in 1998. He was criticized for contributing heavily to Mark Neumann of Wisconsin, who ran against Russ Feingold, and for skimping on Washington state's Linda Smith, a McCain-Feingold backer; both lost and the party gained no seats. After the election, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska ran for the post, but McConnell won 39-13. In the 2000 cycle, he had tougher sledding; Republicans lost most of the close races, and the result was a 50-50 split. McConnell has had more success in building up Kentucky's long ailing Republican Party. He helped Ed Whitfield pick up the 1st District and Republican legislative candidates win in western Kentucky in 1994. He backed Anne Northup in her win in Louisville's 3d District in 1996. In 1998 McConnell strongly backed Jim Bunning's candidacy for the Senate. In 2000 McConnell helped the Bush campaign target and carry Kentucky; he backed the ballot proposition to merge the Jefferson County and Louisville city governments. He helped to persuade two Democratic state senators to switch parties in July and August 1999, which gave Republicans a 20-18 margin in the state Senate. In 2000 he helped them hold that majority. In 2002 he brainstormed with Republican senators weekly; encouraged them to or at least did not discourage them from, defunding and thus effectively ending the public financing system in governor elections; recruited candidates; reviewed radio and TV ad scripts and appeared in ads for Republican senators. In November 2002 the Republicans increased their majority to 21-17. But he was not always partisan. In January 2002 he filed papers in the criminal case brought against two aides to Paul Patton and two Teamsters officials for violating campaign finance laws in 1995; McConnell argued that the laws were unconstitutional and the men should not have been prosecuted. McConnell has now won reelection three times. In 1990 he had spirited competition from former Louisville Mayor Harvey Sloane, and won by only 52%-48%. In 1996 the then new Democratic Governor Patton put his political resources behind the Democratic nominee, former Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General Steve Beshear. He attacked McConnell on campaign finance regulation, the minimum wage and NAFTA. McConnell charged that Beshear was a lobbyist, a political insider and, worst, a fox hunter; on the campaign trail Beshear was followed by a character dressed in fox-hunting regalia. McConnell spent $5 million to Beshear's $2 million and, after early polls showed a close race, won 55%-43%. In 2002 McConnell's opponent was Lois Combs Weinberg, daughter of former (1959-63) Governor Bert Combs. She had the support of the state's Democratic establishment, but memories of her father, one of the state's most notable governors, had evidently dimmed. She had primary opposition from former 1st District Congressman Tom Barlow, but he spent only $6,000. Weinberg decided to save money and spent only $105,000 on TV before the May primary. In the meantime McConnell was running ads accusing her family's natural gas company of running roughshod over a Knott County landowner. She won, but by only 958 votes out of 461,000 cast--50.1%-49.9%. She evidently didn't calculate that Barlow would win 74%-26% in his old congressional district, with a 47,000-vote margin; he carried just about every county west and south of Lexington, plus a few more scattered counties. Primary night was effectively the end of Weinberg's campaign; in June, Al Cross of the Louisville Courier-Journal wrote, "Now her chances seem almost entirely theoretical," and the chances that national Democrats would put money into this race were nil. McConnell refused to debate and ran ads showing how he had done things for Kentuckians--helping the widow of a police officer killed in the line of duty, getting compensation for the families of workers sickened by radiation poisoning at the Paducah uranium plant. Weinberg said in July she needed $5 million to be competitive; she spent only $2.2 million to McConnell's $5.3 million. McConnell won 65%-35%, carrying 112 of 120 counties, losing only in a few Democratic strongholds in the eastern mountains. Back in Washington, he won another election a week later, to become majority whip. He had been campaigning for months among colleagues and his only opponent, Larry Craig, dropped out several days before the contest. He planned to spend most of his time on the Senate floor when it was in session. In December, when Trent Lott was criticized for his comments at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party, McConnell was at first his strongest public defender, suggesting on December 15 that Lott might resign from the Senate if ousted (which would mean a Democrat would get his seat and the Republicans would no longer have a majority) and threatening that if Democrats moved to censure Lott, he would amend the motion to add censure of some Democrats' comments. But on December 20 he privately recommended to Lott that he "step down as soon as possible"; McConnell did not challenge Bill Frist for the majority leadership, and urged Rick Santorum not to either. All the while he kept dabbling in Kentucky politics. He was criticized by some for endorsing his former top aide Hunter Bates for the 2004 4th District House seat, after Republican Geoff Davis had come close to beating Democrat Ken Lucas in 2002; Bates later left that race. And he continued jousting with the Courier-Journal, the state's dominant newspaper, which has long attacked him for opposing campaign finance regulation and for refusing to divulge the names of contributors to the McConnell Center for Political Leadership at the University of Louisville. Most senators strive to get favorable coverage, or avoid reading negative press. McConnell seems to relish it. "I enjoy their ire," he says. "I'm proud of my enemies. I wouldn't trade them for anything."
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