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Last Updated June 22, 2005
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 at 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. 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. In June 2003 he and Dianne Feinstein called for the U.S. to expel the ambassador from dictatorial Burma. 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 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. 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 more 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. 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. In December 2003 the Supreme Court upheld almost all the provisions of the bill. "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 527 organizations would raise and spend huge amounts of money, as indeed they did. More quietly, as ranking member of the Rules Committee, McConnell helped put together the bipartisan Help America Vote Act. 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 and the party gained no seats. In the 2000 cycle, he had tougher sledding; Republicans lost five of the five closest races, and the result was a 50-50 split that put Democrats in position to gain a majority when Jim Jeffords left the Republican party in May 2001. 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 November 2002 the Republicans increased their majority to 21-17. In 2003 he helped support the gubernatorial candidacy of Congressman Ernie Fletcher and was pleased when Fletcher beat Democrat Ben Chandler 55%-45%. And in 2004 he helped rescue his colleague Jim Bunning's campaign. 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 2003 he was working for a buyout of tobacco quotas from farmers, and said he would support FDA regulation of tobacco in order to get it. "This is a marriage of convenience. The two issues needed to be married if we were going to get either one out of the U.S. Senate." In July 2004 the Senate voted 78-15 to add the buyout and FDA regulation to the must-pass corporate tax bill. But the House refused to support FDA regulation, and in October 2004 the Senate backed the tobacco buyout without it and passed the corporate tax bill by 69-17. McConnell has now won reelection three times. 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. In the primary she faced former 1st District Congressman Tom Barlow, who spent only $6,000; he lost the May primary by only 958 votes out of 461,000 cast--50.1%-49.9%--by winning 74%-26% in his old congressional district. After that, national Democrats put little money into the race. 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. McConnell spent $5.3 million to Weinberg's $2.2 million and 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. 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. McConnell advised Frist, who was relatively unversed in Senate procedures; in June 2003 he and House Whip Roy Blunt started attending each others' whip meetings. As the intelligence reorganization bill was being considered in October 2004, McConnell and Democratic Whip Harry Reid worked on reorganizing the Senate to account for intelligence and homeland security changes. They agreed to elevate the Homeland Security Committee and strengthen the Intelligence Committee, but they did not accept the 9/11 Commission's recommendation to give the latter both authorizing and appropriations functions. After Republicans gained four Senate seats in the 2004 election, McConnell looked ahead to a new form of bipartisanship: "The key now will be whether there are a group of Democrats willing to join with most Republicans in a coalition of the center-right." He declined to join in the laments about partisan divisiveness in Washington. "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." Bill Frist has long maintained that he would not run for reelection in 2006, and McConnell made no secret that he wanted to succeed him as majority leader; in September 2004 third-ranking Republican Rick Santorum let it be known he would not seek the post, but in March 2005 there was talk that former Majority Leader Trent Lott might.
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