The Cynic

by Alec MacGillis

  Best of all, the ruling was expected to bring disproportionately more money into the coffers of Republican candidates, and no one was in a better position than McConnell to reach out to donors who’d be liberated by the lifting of the caps on overall giving. “There’s nobody who gives money to Republicans that he doesn’t know,” says Bruce Lunsford, his 2008 opponent, in only a slight hyperbole. These additional funds would even have the sheen of legitimacy that the outside money would not, as the identities of donors would be disclosed. But for corporations or donors who still wanted to give secretly, there were still the outside groups waiting open-armed.

  It was the best of both worlds.

  * * *

  In Inez, the traces of the Martin County Coal slurry spill are still everywhere. The embankment along meandering Coldwater Creek, once lined with cherry and walnut trees, now stands denuded and crumbling. One doesn’t have to dig deep in spots along the creek to turn up the dark goop. Residents who once grew vegetables in their backyards dare not to anymore, for fear of what was left behind. Linc Chapman has lost about half the distance from the creek to his house. The company was supposed to pay to restore the embankment, but nothing came of it. The creek itself runs far emptier of fish than it did before October 11, 2000, so much so that Chapman was gladdened to see a couple of redhorse suckers darting along one day in April. The “creek bed reconstruction expert” from Colorado hired for the cleanup had assured residents that “you’ll have trout swimming in these streams in two years,” to which Chapman had thought at the time: “You are so full of shit.” And indeed, aquatic life is just about “nonexistent” today, he says. “We had a lot of crawfish, freshwater eels, large-mouth bass, small-mouth, rock bass, blue-gill, channel cats, used to have a big run of quillback, they’re like a sucker. They suck in sand and fill it to their gills, and it’s hard to suck slurry through the gills.” All are pretty much gone.

  Farther up Coldwater Creek, one can still make out the lines on the trees that are still standing, showing how high the slurry climbed. Chapman also points out the uninhabited areas along the creek where the company dug big unlined pits to bury the sludge, with a thin layer of regular fill from the surrounding hills spread over the top of it. Some of the sludge was later dug back up and moved to proper disposal, but much of it remains. “As long as I live, there’ll still be the impacts of it here,” he says.

  Chapman’s family still doesn’t trust the local water—it bathes and washes with it, but drinks only bottled water, as do many of the townspeople, or at least those who can afford it. The reservoir just outside Inez is fed by water from the Tug River, the main stem into which the contaminated Coldwater and Wolf Creeks flow. Chapman and others argued for requiring the company to pay for an independent monitor of the water quality, to no avail. “They were all for monitoring but wanted to do it in-house. Well, that’s as useless as tits on a boar hog,” he says. “If they pulled a sample from the bottom of the reservoir, they’d find a foot of slurry.” No one’s monitoring it now, in-house or otherwise. “It’s one of those things where, after so much time that’s what big companies hope, that it’s out of sight, out of mind,” Chapman says. “When you’ve got the government in your pockets, you get by with what you want to get by with.”

  The mine itself sits fallow, with only some reclamation work being done. It’s now owned by Alpha Natural Resources, which in 2011 subsumed Massey Energy following an eventful decade for the company. In 2004, one year after Martin County Coal got only a small fine from MSHA, Massey CEO Don Blankenship spent more than $3 million to help elect a conservative Republican for the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, the state’s highest court, paying for ads that accused the incumbent judge of being soft on child molesters and drug dealers. Once on the court, the new judge provided the decisive vote to overturn a $55 million judgment against Massey—a turn of events so glaring that the U.S. Supreme Court later ruled that the judge should have recused himself.

  On April 5, 2010, nearly a decade after the Martin County spill, an explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia killed twenty-nine miners. Investigators later found that Massey had allowed explosive methane and coal dust to build up to the point where it was ignited by a spark from a poorly maintained coal-cutting machine, producing a blast that clogged water sprayers were unable to suppress. Massey had covered up lethal safety violations, tipped off mine supervisors to inspections, and manipulated ventilation equipment and machinery to dupe inspectors.

  Through it all, McConnell’s ties to the coal industry have only grown stronger. Requests under the Freedom of Information Act for correspondence between McConnell and the Department of Labor during the eight years the department was run by his wife show repeated entreaties from the senator on behalf of mining companies, including Massey, complaining about excessive enforcement efforts by safety inspectors and new rules on miners’ exposure to diesel particulate matter. One complaint about a $250,000 fine forwarded to federal regulators by McConnell makes its political appeal explicit: “I am a Registered Republican and need your help.”

  In late 2002, at the time as he was wrapping up the MSHA investigation in Martin County that would leave Massey unscathed, Tim Thompson had a meeting back at his office in Morgantown with another coal executive, Bob Murray, to discuss safety issues at one of Murray Energy’s mines in Ohio. Murray, an obstreperous former miner, had brought a whole entourage with him in what Thompson saw as a deliberate show of force. As tensions rose in the close-packed room, Murray turned to Thompson and said: “Mitch McConnell calls me one of the five finest men in America, and the last I checked, he was sleeping with your boss,” according to notes of the meeting obtained in 2003 by West Virginia Public Radio. “They,” he added, pointing at two MSHA men whom he’d been dealing with over the safety issues, “are gone.”

  Thompson now says that he was not intimidated by Murray’s remark: “I don’t get too scared. I don’t overreact,” he says. “His mine was in Ohio, I was in West Virginia, and McConnell is in neither of those states.” But his MSHA superiors in fact transferred Thompson to another region, away from Murray’s mines, as was one of the other MSHA men at the meeting. Murray offered a suggestive response to the Herald-Leader in 2006 when asked about Thompson’s transfer: “I said he should be removed. But they didn’t do it because I said so.”

  Thompson fought the transfer for several years before giving up and retiring. At some point, McConnell’s chief of staff contacted Thompson via a coal industry lawyer and asked for a statement on what happened at the meeting. Worried about any hard feelings with McConnell over the disclosure of Murray’s comments regarding Chao, Thompson complied. “I wrote to say, ‘Mitch McConnell had nothing to say or influence it, that Murray was acting like a renegade.’ ” The reason for the request was plain to Thompson: “My guess was there could’ve been some bad publicity that they tried to nip.”

  In 2007, Murray Energy suffered its own large-scale disaster: a collapse at its mine in Crandall Canyon in Utah, which claimed the lives of six miners and three rescuers. Bob Murray has been one of the most valued fund-raisers for Republicans in Washington—since 2007 alone, national Republicans have received more than $1 million from Murray, his family, and his salaried employees, who, documents show, were pressured to attend fund-raisers with visiting Republicans and contribute to the company PAC.

  Murray’s financial commitment ratcheted up as the threats to the Appalachian coal industry mounted. The industry was facing growing competition from cheap natural gas acquired through fracking, but Murray declared that its primary threat was the Obama administration’s push to reduce carbon emissions. McConnell took this tack with increasing stridence as well. “The president may as well call his war on coal what it is: a war on jobs in this country, and a plan to ship jobs overseas,” he said in 2013.

  That a senator from a coal-producing state should take up this cry is not surprising. Still, it rung hollow. Coal wasn’t as central to Kentuc
ky’s economy as it had once been: by 2013, coal-mining employment had fallen to fewer than 17,000—a third the number of people employed in the state’s far less storied auto-manufacturing sector, which had grown to the third-largest in the country. For another, coal mining in western Kentucky, part of the Illinois Basin, was holding on even as it declined in the east, suggesting that the challenge went beyond new regulations to the geological reality that Appalachian coal was getting more expensive to dig out.

  McConnell’s concern for the state’s coal industry had long seemed directed more at the executives who supported his campaign than the workers themselves. In 2006, when yet another mine explosion claimed the lives of five miners in the Kentucky Darby LLC mine in Harlan County, an aide in McConnell’s office spoke with Tony Oppegard, the former MSHA appointee who’d been kicked off the slurry spill investigation. Oppegard was representing some of the widows in the Darby Mine No. 1 disaster, and the aide urged the widows to call if they ever needed anything. Shortly afterward, they did need something: permission to sit in on meetings with MSHA. Oppegard called McConnell for assistance, and never heard back. “That was typical for us,” he said. “When it came to an actual issue we needed help with, they didn’t call back.” Tom Buchanan, who led a group of small contractors in eastern Kentucky that do mine reclamation work, had a similar experience when they tried to set up meetings with McConnell in Washington to discuss the reclamation funding dedicated to the state. “He never did even meet with us,” he says. “Oftentime we would call his office, and he never actually said no—he’d say we have an opening next Wednesday when he knew we were there this Wednesday.”

  It’s not about being pro- or anti-coal, says Linc Chapman, back in Martin County. He is a staunch Republican and he himself worked in the mines, as a safety director. He accepts that when it comes to the side effects of coal mining, “you’ve got to have a certain amount of sacrifice to prosper.” He just believes that the truly great disasters need to be avoided—and could be avoided if companies followed basic rules, and government held them to them. “If they did this right it would never have occurred,” he says. “But when you’ve got the government in your pockets, you get by with what you want to get by with. Massey has a lot of political pull, and they let them slide. They didn’t force them to do things right.”

  His fellow Inez resident, Mickey McCoy, puts it more bluntly: “Where was McConnell? Where was our representative? Where he’s always been: in the back pocket of King Coal.”

  Chapter Three

  FOLLOW THE LEADER

  Bob Graham, the idiosyncratic Florida Democrat perhaps best remembered for keeping minutely detailed daily journals, joined the Senate in 1987, just two years after Mitch McConnell. Yet so much did McConnell keep to himself, and to his own party, that Graham had barely gotten to know his colleague from Kentucky—until, that is, they both had heart surgery within three days in early 2003 at Bethesda Naval Hospital.

  McConnell had gone for a stress test recommended by the Capitol physician, and had failed it, leading to cardiac catheterization and instructions to undergo triple bypass surgery, pronto. Graham was there to have nonemergency surgery on his aortic heart valve. And in the week of convalescence that followed, they became postsurgical kindred spirits. Day after day, they walked up and down the hallways together to regain their strength. And they spent a lot of time talking, about, as Graham recalls it, “our families, what had brought us into politics, what we hoped to accomplish in politics.”

  Somewhat to his surprise, Graham liked his fellow patient. “I developed a very warm feeling toward Mitch,” he says. “Mitch is by nature a little aloof—he doesn’t have what some in politics have, that natural affinity and warmth for people. When I got to know him, I found him to be a more open and sympathetic and friendly person than under previous circumstances.”

  Yet that week away from the Sturm und Drang on Capitol Hill was not transformative in the broader sense. Both senators returned to a Senate more riven with every month. The upper chamber of the legislature had long prided itself on being less defined by partisan markers than the House of Representatives. The smaller size of the Senate gave it a clubby solidarity that the House lacked, its members served for longer terms and typically longer tenures than their counterparts in the House, giving them more time to get to know each other. They also represented entire states, encouraging a broadness of perspective that a House member representing a narrowly defined district might be less likely to have.

  That singularity had been fading for some time, though. The parties had been sorting themselves out geographically and ideologically. One was far less likely than three decades prior to encounter a Northern liberal Republican senator or a conservative Southern Democrat. The increased cost of campaigning meant more time spent fund-raising and catering to party leaders or deep-pocketed funders who did not look so kindly on cross-aisle forays. Cable news had not helped matters. And the growing hegemony of the thirty-second ad as the ultimate campaign weapon had spurred senators to offer irrelevant amendments on bills to force the opposition to cast votes on hot-button issues that could be construed in unflattering ways in an eventual negative ad.

  The evolution of the chamber could be traced in institutional increments, notably to the rise in the use of the filibuster—which in the past had been resorted to almost exclusively for the rare historic conflict, as on civil rights legislation—to stall or block routine legislation and nominations, to the point where it became necessary to have sixty votes to accomplish even the most rudimentary business. And it could be traced in episodes where the breakdown in comity was on display, from the judicial confirmation hearings for Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas to the ads run in 2002 against Georgia Democrat Max Cleland, a triple-amputee Vietnam War veteran, by his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss, that linked Cleland to images of Osama bin Laden and declared Cleland did not have the “courage to lead” because he voted against Republicans on the structure of the new Department of Homeland Security. Chambliss won Cleland’s seat, only heightening the partisan ill will in the chamber to which McConnell and Graham returned after their bipartisan recuperation in January 2003.

  And it would get much worse. In 2007, after Democrats reclaimed majorities in both chambers in 2006 and Mitch McConnell ascended to become his party’s leader in the Senate, the use of the filibuster soared—when Democrats were in the Senate minority during the Reagan years and George W. Bush years, there were, respectively, about 40 and 60 “cloture motions” to break or preempt filibusters filed per session, one commonly used measure of obstructionism. With the Republicans back in the minority in 2007 under McConnell’s leadership, cloture motions spiked to 140 per session. By 2009, when the Democrats gained back the White House, the use of the filibuster spread, far more than ever before, to block presidential nominees of even the most pedestrian offices. “The idea of a filibuster as the expression of a minority that felt so intensely that it would pull out all the stops to block something pushed by the majority went by the boards,” wrote Ornstein, the congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, in 2014. “This was a pure tactic of obstruction, trying to use up as much of the Senate’s most precious commodity—time—as possible to screw up the majority’s agenda.”

  By 2011, the Senate and the rest of the gridlocked government found themselves on the brink of a national credit default, a brink reached again in another partisan standoff two years later, with the added bonus of a two-week-long shutdown of the federal government.

  Bob Graham left the Senate in 2005, two years before McConnell took the helm of the Republican caucus. And from the vantage of southern Florida, Graham struggled to understand why the veteran senator whose company he had enjoyed in the hospital hallways had allowed Senate politics to come to this pass—in particular, why he had allowed the ideological wing of his caucus, a camp with so little regard for custom and comity that it often bordered on the gleefully nihilistic, to acquire such sway in Washington.
Graham remembered other Republican leaders he had served alongside, and found it hard to believe they wouldn’t have responded differently.

  “I don’t think that if the leader were of the ilk of a Bob Dole, if he had a sense of history and used history as a guide, that it would have happened like this,” Graham says. “I don’t know why they have fallen into what may bring short-term gains and maybe even some pleasure, but which maybe on a longer view of history is going to be very damning. . . . He is accommodating his hottest members, and they have not demonstrated any responsibility to the future or to how their actions are going to be seen in that long procession of time. I guess Mitch has made a decision that this wasn’t a battle that he was going to take on.”

  * * *

  The only thing Mitch McConnell wanted as much as winning elections for the Senate was winning elections within the Senate. Let other senators dream of running for president. For him, the dream was running the institution he had been revering since he was a boy. In this ambition, he was following the example of countless Southern politicians who had made the Senate their home in decades past, capitalizing on their own longevity in safe seats and the Senate’s seniority system to dominate the institution well into the twentieth century. The Senate, wrote veteran New York Times congressional correspondent William S. White in the mid-1950s, was “peculiarly Southern both in flavor and structure,” so much so that it had become, essentially, “the South’s unending revenge . . . for Gettysburg.” With its very Southern emphasis on courtliness and decorum—all those rules that “imposed a verbal impersonality on debate to ensure civility and formality,” as LBJ biographer Robert Caro puts it—the Senate was the one political venue where McConnell’s detached manner was not only not a hindrance, it was an asset. Here, formality conveyed authority, not discomfort.