The dynamic was obvious. And it caused no end of difficulties for both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, since every dollar of foreign aid spent above an administration request for one country or group meant less for another. Fixed earmarks like the one for Ukraine left the administration with less flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances around the world. “He could go to places like Chicago and Cleveland and raise money. It was a big factor—and it was a factor in terms of our zero sum budget,” says J. Brian Atwood, who served as Clinton’s administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The administration had a sizable “peace dividend” to use after the Cold War and had been hoping to direct some of it to development in the Third World, but McConnell again and again would direct it to his favored nations instead. “He took it all out of USAID when he earmarked for these countries,” says Atwood. “He not only created foreign policy issues for us but squeezed out money for other purposes.” Atwood would protest this arrangement at McConnell’s hearings, with “those cold, hard eyes” of McConnell staring down on him, to no avail. “He would smile wryly,” Atwood recalls. “We all knew what the game was about.”
* * *
The reach of money—and the pressure to raise it—was so broad that it encompassed even the realm of romance.
McConnell had started dating Elaine Chao in 1991, after being set up with her at a candlelight dinner arranged by an old friend of his, a former public-interest lawyer against the Vietnam War. (McConnell had prevailed over another suitor, President George H. W. Bush’s White House counsel C. Boyden Gray, according to the New York Times.) At the time they were dating, Chao was the director of the Peace Corps, and McConnell’s neighbors in Capitol Hill would see her pull up to pick him up in her official chauffeured town car. (When word of this use of the taxpayer-funded car got back to legislative staffers who handled the Peace Corps budget—on the subcommittee McConnell would later lead—they called the agency and demanded an explanation.)
But McConnell had known Chao and her family for a few years prior—as campaign contributors. When Chao had first met McConnell in 1987, she was serving on the Federal Maritime Commission, a natural posting for the daughter of a Chinese shipping magnate. James Chao had fled from mainland China to Taiwan in 1949, before coming to the United States a decade later, but had in recent years started doing more and more business with the mainland.
Chao had started raising money for Republicans while on the maritime commission, and in 1989 her family and associates’ largesse began to flow to McConnell as well. Just days after the Chinese army killed several hundred protesters amid the Tiananmen Square uprising, McConnell received $10,000 from her family and others tied to her father’s company, Foremost Maritime. A couple of months later, McConnell flew to a Los Angeles fund-raiser with Asian-Americans in the Pacific Leadership Conference, a group that included two people who would later be convicted of laundering political contributions for Democratic candidates. That event netted McConnell $10,750, which brought his total 1989 take from this new source of contributors to $21,750—not all that much less, the New Republic noted in a 2001 article, than the $32,500 he had netted that year from his top backers at the time, tobacco PACs.
The subsequent shift in McConnell’s approach to China was even more marked than his evolution on the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. On arriving in the Senate, his rush to show his conservative bona fides had included allying himself with Jesse Helms, the stridently anticommunist ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee. In McConnell’s first year, he had joined just seven Republicans to sign a fiery letter from Helms demanding that the Reagan administration name more hawks to top foreign policy positions. Helms’s brand of conservatism translated into fierce opposition of the Chinese government, and on the rare occasions when McConnell spoke out about China, he adopted a bellicose tone.
As the contributions started coming in, McConnell’s interest in China grew and his tone softened. He helped win a special provision that the members of the Pacific Leadership Conference were seeking, a fourfold increase in the number of annual visas for Hong Kong residents. He also adopted another goal of many in the Chinese-American business community, the opening of the Chinese economy. And he came around to supporting “most favored nation” status for China, without conditions—a major break with Helms. As the economic ties expanded and the Chinese economy boomed, so did McConnell’s standing with the companies thriving off the growth: in the two years prior to his 1996 reelection, the New Republic reported, he received PAC contributions from 19 of the top 20 contributors of the U.S.-China Business Council. James Chao—as of 1993, his father-in-law—remained generous, raising $34,000 for McConnell in the month in 1994 when he took the helm of the Senate’s Foreign Operations subcommittee. In 1996, the Chao family added $25,000 for the Kentucky Republican Party. (None of this activity kept McConnell from warning about “Red China” in fund-raising letters attacking the Clinton administration for the murky campaign money it received from Asian donors in 1996.)
Back in 1989, in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre, McConnell had declared that he would “never forget the sight of those young people without arms up against tanks and machine guns.” But as the next decade progressed, the ties grew ever closer with the regime that had ordered that crackdown. The Chinese representative to the United Nations was a guest at McConnell and Chao’s wedding. Later that year, the newlyweds went to Beijing with James Chao, and McConnell became only the second Republican senator to meet with Chinese leader Jiang Zemin since the 1989 massacre. Jiang met again with the couple when he came to Washington in 1997. And in 1999, McConnell and Chao hosted the Chinese ambassador at the University of Louisville, where the ambassador railed against the U.S. House of Representatives for having condemned his government’s violent suppression of the Falun Gong religious sect, comments that McConnell made no attempt to distance himself from in his own remarks. Harry Wu, who spent about twenty years in Chinese prisons as a political dissident before landing at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank, told the Herald-Leader what motivated McConnell’s warming relations with Beijing: “No mystery. It’s the money.”
The University of Louisville itself became a focus of the growing McConnell bond with China. In 1991, at the start of his second term and as his relationship with Chao and his ties to Chinese-Americans donors were building, McConnell began setting up what would become the McConnell Center for Political Leadership at his alma mater, essentially a scholarship program for young Kentuckians interested in political science that also hosts occasional lectures and visits by dignitaries. From the start, there was a strong Chinese inflection at the center—scholarship recipients were expected to spend a summer in China, and a disproportionate share of the center’s events involved China, such as the ambassador’s anti–Falun Gong speech.
Given that the focus of such ventures often reflects the interests of the funders, it was natural to wonder whether the center was getting support from some of the same Chinese-American donors who had started donating to McConnell’s campaigns in the same period. But there was no way of knowing. The McConnell Center, for which McConnell raised $2.4 million at the outset and another $1 million or so over the course of the next decade, was not going to disclose its donors, a condition that the University of Louisville faculty affiliated with the center were not happy with, but accepted as an unconditional requirement from McConnell. “We made a little pact with the devil,” says Ron Vogel, the former chairman of the university’s political science department, now a professor at Ryerson University in Toronto. “We had a discussion: Do we want to have a McConnell Center? If we’re going to have one, the money had to be raised for it, and if he’s going to go out and raise the money, he’s not going to want us sniping about it.”
The faculty decided to go along with it, and McConnell got a big boon: the publicity that came from the perennial photo ops he’d take with each year’s ten scholarship
recipients and from the events with the visiting dignitaries, all under the aegis of a program named for him. There were occasional conflicts, such as the time in the late 1990s when one of the scholarship recipients became pregnant, to McConnell’s great anger. He proposed a new requirement that recipients not have any children, a suggestion opposed by the faculty, who argued that the program should be supportive of a young woman who decided to carry a child to term, and should not be engaged in administering chastity oaths. Over time, though, the odds of such conflicts diminished as McConnell shifted the center out of the control of the faculty, with leadership of his choosing.
All throughout, McConnell and allied administrators at the university fought to keep the center’s donors secret. When the Courier-Journal sued for disclosure, the case climbed all the way to the state Supreme Court, which in 2008 ruled that future donors would have to be disclosed but that the center’s sixty-two donors to that point could remain hidden. The Courier-Journal had managed to suss out some of the past donors—$833,000 from Toyota (which counted McConnell among its Washington allies during the storm over its massive 2010 recall); $600,000 combined from R. J. Reynolds and Philip Morris; and $250,000 from Yum! Inc., the huge KFC/ Pizza Hut/ Taco Bell franchiser, which stood to benefit from a bill sponsored by McConnell to protect the fast-food industry against lawsuits charging that their offerings cause obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.
Perhaps most notable, though, was the $500,000 gift for the center from a subsidiary of BAE Systems, the giant British-based defense contractor, which in 2010 paid a record $450 million fine to settle an extended bribery investigation by American and British authorities. In 2007, with that investigation already public knowledge, McConnell secured for BAE three earmarks worth $25 million—for purchases that the Pentagon itself had not requested.
It was just what some of the university’s faculty members had warned about at the outset. “We didn’t want this to become a mechanism for influence peddling outside normal channels for political accountability,” says one professor. “We were concerned about who would be funding it and that the department would be implicated in postures we wouldn’t even know about because we wouldn’t know who the funders were.” Vogel, the former political science department chairman, was more fatalistic: “What money supporting these things has ever been clean?”
* * *
One day in 1995, McConnell was huddling in the Senate with one of his few confidants, Robert Bennett of Utah, when he told him he was about to flip on a hot-button issue. Back in 1990, McConnell had joined most of his fellow Republicans in voting for an amendment to ban flag-burning—and had then proceeded to attack Harvey Sloane in that fall’s campaign over his party’s opposition to the amendment. But with Bennett’s fellow Utah Republican, Orrin Hatch, mounting a new push for an amendment five years later, McConnell was ready to join only three other Republicans in opposing it—Bennett and two liberal New Englanders, John Chafee and James Jeffords. As Bennett recalls, “He said, ‘You know, I voted for it and just as I walked off the floor I realized I made a mistake. And I’m not going to vote to weaken the First Amendment ever again.’ ”
If one needed further proof of how central money in politics had become for McConnell, this flip-flop was it: he was willing to surrender a perennial crowd-pleasing issue to strengthen his case for arguing against limits on campaign financing. Up until this point, McConnell had relied on expedient arguments to make his case against new regulations, pointing out to his fellow Republicans how this or that new rule would hurt their party or help the other party. He was no less blunt in justifying his opposition to campaign finance restrictions to the reformers and editorialists who chided him for it, arguing that Kentucky Republicans had no choice but to rake in as much money as they could if they wanted to compete in a state with so many more registered Democrats and with its two major newspapers, the Courier-Journal and Herald-Leader, leaning left. Money, he said, was the great leveler.
But this justification was growing thinner. Kentucky still had more registered Democrats than Republicans, but it was trending toward the latter, especially in federal elections—1996 would be the last time a Democratic presidential candidate carried the state. Eventually the state would be down to a single Democratic congressman out of six. McConnell’s case for fighting restrictions would be far stronger if it could be lashed to a constitutional principle, namely the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech. In Buckley v. Valeo, its landmark decision on campaign finance, the Supreme Court had ruled that the First Amendment barred limits on political spending, while leaving some room for the government to regulate direct contributions to candidates. This ruling, in 1976, had not kept McConnell from maintaining his support for various levels of restrictions for more than a decade—including that constitutional amendment he proposed in 1987 to circumvent Buckley’s interpretation of the First Amendment. Two decades later, though, he saw the power of the First Amendment claim in Buckley. To make his resistance to stricter regulations credible, he knew it would help to be seen as standing on that principle. There was no better way to stake a claim to principle than to hew to it even when it went against one of his party’s political planks: the prohibition of flag-burning.
It was shrewd. McConnell got great symbolic weight out of surrendering a political gambit—an amendment to ban flag-burning—that was never going to be more than symbolic itself. It was cost-free, with a huge payoff (and to make sure it was cost-free, McConnell cosponsored a separate, fig-leaf bill calling for the protection of the flag). “He switched to the First Amendment,” says Joan Claybrook, who often faced off against McConnell on campaign finance reform in her long tenure as president of Public Citizen. “It was pure politics—whatever rationale sold, he would use. I don’t think he believed it for a minute.” Even those far more sympathetic to McConnell suspect that his free speech invocations had more than a little expedience in them: “He believes in freedom of speech, but as a pragmatic politician he also believes in the power of political spending,” says Richard Lugar, the former Republican senator from Indiana who was one of McConnell’s closest associates. “Pragmatically, he’s come to the conclusion that raising money is tremendously important for his own success.”
An added bonus in McConnell’s newfound consistency in standing up for the First Amendment was that it provided cover for his continued inconsistency on the particulars of campaign finance law. Just as he had abandoned his support for spending limits and in its place proposed banning soft money, the unlimited contributions that flowed to parties from corporations, unions, and wealthy individuals, as the decade went on McConnell started taking up the defense of soft money, calling it preferable to undisclosed spending by outside groups. “Soft money is just a euphemism for free speech,” he said. The shift could be explained, again, by changing circumstances: back when McConnell had proposed soft money clampdowns in 1993, it appeared Democrats had the edge with soft money. (Claybrook still recalls bringing along a chart to show McConnell at hearings, to persuade him out of his conviction that Democrats were benefiting more from soft money than Republicans.)
But after the soft money scandals of the 1996 election, which involved illegal foreign money and the use of the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House, the reformers’ attention turned to reining in those funds—and who should rise in opposition but McConnell. By that point, the truth of Claybrook’s claim about the Republicans benefiting no less from soft money than Democrats had become harder to deny. (“If we stop this thing, we can control the institution for the next twenty years,” McConnell reportedly told Republican colleagues in 1997, referring to the effort to ban soft money.) And McConnell had himself become a crucial cog in the party machinery that relied so much on soft money, by having become, in 1997, the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. As efforts to limit soft money gained momentum late in the decade—led by the bipartisan duo of Arizona Republican John McCain and Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold—the f
irst line of resistance to them was the author of an op-ed from just a few years earlier arguing for that very reform.
From his new perch as chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, McConnell would parry endlessly with the advocates of greater restrictions on soft money who would appear before him at hearings and who, almost in spite of themselves, came to respect his grasp of the subject. “He did not seem to be reading off of a script like everybody else is,” says Joshua Rosenkranz, a lawyer who, as then-president of the Brennan Center for Justice, came before the committee arguing for restrictions on outside spending on elections in the final weeks before Election Day. “It was one of the more intellectual exchanges I’ve had on Capitol Hill in a world where intellectual exchanges are quite rare.” It was striking watching the dour senator come alive on this issue, Rosenkranz says. “There is passion there—it is real and palpable,” he says. “Whether it’s passion driven by a philosophy of what the Constitution should permit in a free society or passion driven by a desire to enable his side to win elections, I just don’t know.”
McConnell took his cause everywhere. He started enlisting conservative talk radio, notably Rush Limbaugh’s show, to talk up his cause. He became a regular on the networks and cable TV—in 1999, he made ninety-nine appearances on national television. In addition to rallying conservative think tanks and editorialists behind his cause, he reached out to the American Civil Liberties Union, realizing that having that liberal group on his side would only buttress his claim to be fighting spending restrictions on constitutional and not partisan grounds. The ACLU, which at the time viewed contribution limits as a restriction on free speech (it has since rethought that stance), acquiesced. “McConnell wanted to make use of our opposition, and we did not mind,” says Laura Murphy, head of the ACLU’s Washington legislative office. “He developed a healthy respect for our organization and our principled stand.” McConnell also crossed the aisle within the Senate, framing his anti-reform arguments in ways he knew might connect with some Democrats. He showed up at the office of Bob Kerrey, the Nebraska Democrat, to try to get him to drop his support for limited public campaign financing. McConnell knew Kerrey fancied himself an entitlement reformer, so that’s how he pitched this case: “He came and made a case that public finance is creating a new entitlement,” Kerrey recalls. “I had spent a lot of time on entitlements, so he almost persuaded me to be with him.”
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