Where other aspiring politicians steeped themselves in the legends of the White House, McConnell had immersed himself in the lore of the legislative branch’s upper chamber. “He’s a great student of the institution,” says Dave Schiappa, who until 2013 served as McConnell’s chief aide on the Senate floor. “He loves the history, loves to read everything he can get his hands on.” This study wasn’t just sentimental; it was geared toward learning the precedents and procedures that governed the chamber, a command that had helped McConnell’s Southern forebears gain control over the institution. The lords of the Senate were his idols, and he wanted to be counted among them: “He’s made a whole career of being the master of [the] Senate—the Republican version of LBJ, without the physical attributes,” says Al Cross, a longtime political reporter with the Courier-Journal who now works at the University of Kentucky.
Partly, the drive to be majority leader was just a matter of ticking off the top item on the checklist. “There are things that he wants to accomplish in his career—while he’s been majority whip, he’s never been majority leader, and that’s something he wants to have on his resume,” says Lula Davis, a former chief aide to Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate leader. But one former Senate caucus leader notes that it goes deeper than that. Leadership in the chamber comes with its own kind of power high, one that seems to have held an especially strong allure for introverts like McConnell and his eventual counterpart, Reid. “The intensity, the extraordinary rush to be in those positions, it’s addictive,” the former caucus leader said. “It’s the extraordinary exhilaration that comes with having these positions. . . . The intensity is almost like a drug.”
McConnell had tried twice for the job of National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman, losing both times to Phil Gramm of Texas, before getting the post in 1997. As successful as he was at fund-raising and as much goodwill as he’d earned from his colleagues for leading the fight against campaign finance reform, his record at the helm of the campaign committee was mixed. In 1998, the Senate balance remained unchanged despite Democrats having to defend more seats, and in 2000 the Democrats gained a net total of four seats. In 2001, the Senate Republican caucus voted to replace him with Bill Frist, of Tennessee.
This setback did not dissuade McConnell from continuing his climb. He set about lining up votes for the next election for majority whip, the second-ranking spot in leadership. He had in his favor the gratitude for his stand against McCain-Feingold, and his performance in the 1995 sexual harassment investigation of fellow Republican Bob Packwood, of Oregon. In the role of Ethics Committee chairman, McConnell had come down hard on Packwood while taking the heat from Democrats for not making the investigation more transparent. Working against his ascension, though, was the fact that plenty of Republicans had not warmed to their tightly wound Kentucky colleague. Sure, there were occasional flashes of a dry, almost English sense of humor. That said, McConnell was, as his former chief of staff observed to the Atlantic in 2011, “the least personal politician I’ve ever been around.”
But McConnell had a wingman. Bob Bennett, the towering senator from Utah who had stood almost alone with McConnell in opposing the anti-flag-burning amendment in 1995, would head out into the Republican caucus, one by one, feeling out senators about whether they might be inclined to support his friend over Larry Craig of Idaho, the other aspirant for the spot, who had not yet seen his career ended by a flirtatious encounter with an undercover male policeman in a bathroom at the Minneapolis airport. “He would go through every Republican in the Senate and say, ‘This one doesn’t like me,’ ‘You go see this one, I’ve talked to him as far as I can go, if I push any further I’ll push him over, you go see him,’ ” says Bennett. “He knew every single one of them.”
The wingman would head out. “I would size up the opposition. Many times it was ‘I really don’t like Mitch that much, but I really don’t like Larry.’ You had to be careful—you can’t be blatant about it. You go up and say, ‘There’s a leadership fight coming up, how do you feel between the two of them?’ ‘Well, you know, Mitch has his strengths,’ and then you get them talking about Mitch’s strengths. . . . Then I get the things he doesn’t like about Mitch. Pretty soon I get the sense of how he feels about Mitch. I go back and say, ‘He didn’t like what you did here, you need to have a conversation about this, you need to do that.’ So when Mitch would go see him, he was fore-armed with the intelligence I’d given him: ‘Senator, you probably don’t like what I did on such and such, I owe you an explanation on that.’ So the door opened and Mitch would come back and say, ‘Okay, we got him.’ ” When necessary, Bennett would try to undermine the opposition—subtly, of course. For instance, Bennett says, “John Warner [the former senator from Virginia] would say, ‘It’s far too early, I don’t want to discuss it,’ and I’d say, ‘Okay, that’s not a no,’ and I’d keep at it: ‘John, did you hear this [about Craig]?’ and he’d say, ‘I didn’t like that.’ ” To which Bennett would respond, “ ‘Well, there’s always Mitch. . . .’ ”
McConnell and Bennett started this process with a year and a half to go before the vote would be held, a lesson McConnell told Bennett he had learned from Bob Livingston, the Louisiana congressman who had lined up all the support he needed to become House Speaker long before Newt Gingrich stepped down. “McConnell said, ‘Livingston didn’t get the speakership because he was the best candidate—he got it because he was the first.’ ” The early start paid off. By the time the summer of 2002 rolled around with the leadership elections looming later that year, McConnell sat down with Craig and presented him with a list of all the commitments he’d gotten. “Mitch was elected whip unanimously and Larry Craig decided he was going to do something else, because Mitch had it all lined up,” Bennett says.
Soon afterward, McConnell and Bennett started using the same tactics to ready a run for the final rung, Republican leader—which at that point, in 2005, was also majority leader. They were well aware that Bill Frist had imposed a two-term limit on himself and would be gone after 2006—more aware than anyone else, says Bennett. “I don’t think anyone else was thinking about what to do when Bill Frist leaves. Well, Mitch was thinking the first day Frist was chosen [as leader in 2002], what do we do when Frist leaves. We were talking about it. He knew exactly what he had to say to each senator, what he had to do to neutralize the ones opposed to him.”
This calculus was rooted in McConnell’s acute political instincts. Even if he wasn’t close to that many of his colleagues, he knew where they were coming from, what they worried about, what they needed. “He knows what people are going to do long before they themselves see it,” says Judd Gregg, the former Republican senator from New Hampshire. On Election Night in 2004, when Lincoln Chafee—whose father had stood with McConnell and Bennett in opposing the flag-burning amendment—saw George W. Bush holding on for a second term, it occurred to him that his reelection campaign in 2006 as a Republican in Rhode Island was going to be a whole lot tougher with Bush, who’d lost Chafee’s state by 20 points, still in the White House.
The next day, McConnell called his liberal colleague to reassure him about his prospects two years hence—and to make sure he wasn’t toying with switching parties, as his fellow liberal New Englander James Jeffords of Vermont had done three years earlier. “I was considering options—do I change parties, what do I do here, and he called me right away and said, ‘Linc, I know what you’re thinking. We want you to stay a Republican.’ He was a mind reader that way. We all know you’re going to have a rough race, and we’ll get you the money we need.’ ” And they did. Asked by McConnell what sort of assistance he could use in Rhode Island, Chafee mentioned the hulking old bridge from the mainland to Jamestown, which the cash-strapped state had been meaning to take down for a dozen years. It cost $15 million. McConnell “immediately got it for me,” and the bridge was detonated at last. There was a road project in Warwick that had run out of money, which required another $9 million. McConnell go
t that, too. It irked many in the party, going to such lengths for a Republican who had voted against Bush’s tax cuts, the invasion of Iraq, and Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, and had even refused to support Bush’s reelection in 2004. “There are many that would rather just purge the party, but he knew it was all about the math—he was going to need a Republican to keep the majority,” Chafee says.
So determined was McConnell to hold the Senate majority in 2006, regardless of the cost, that in September of that year, with polls looking bleak for Republicans, he sought out Bush in a private meeting in the Oval Office to ask him to withdraw troops from Iraq to improve the party’s chances in that fall’s midterm election. Publicly, McConnell had been staunchly defending the war, but according to Bush, McConnell was so focused on the coming election cycle that he was willing to challenge Bush on the primary mission of his presidency. As Bush recounts in his memoir, McConnell told him, “Mr. President, your unpopularity is going to cost us control of the Congress.” Bush said he responded: “Well, Mitch, what do you want me to do about it?” McConnell, in Bush’s account, answered: “Mr. President, bring some troops home from Iraq.” Bush’s answer, as he recalls: “Mitch, I believe our presence in Iraq is necessary to protect America, and I will not withdraw troops unless military conditions warrant.” He would, he told McConnell, “set troop levels to achieve victory in Iraq, not victory at the polls.”
In the end, though, it was to no avail. Chafee lost his reelection, one of six incumbent Republican senators to lose that fall, giving the Democrats control of the chamber by a single vote. With his and Bennett’s groundwork laid, McConnell would be elected Republican leader, but not majority leader.
And as diligent as his pursuit of his party’s top spot had been, the effort required to attain it suggested that he would be able to rely less on sheer collegial affection to feel secure in his place than some of his predecessors had. It was a vulnerability that, if felt keenly enough, would have implications for managing the burgeoning right wing of his caucus, whose loyalties would come at a cost far greater than scattered millions for an old rusting bridge.
* * *
There was a taut silence in the room that day in the summer of 2007 as the Senate Republican caucus absorbed what their leader had just said. Mitch McConnell had assembled the caucus behind closed doors to address a major setback, the passage of a sweeping ethics reform package with barely any input from Republicans. The Senate had passed an ethics bill that did contain plenty of points of agreement between McConnell and Harry Reid, the new majority leader, but that bill had never made it to a conference committee, where it could be melded with the version passed by the House. The reason? Jim DeMint, the first-term, hard-right Republican from South Carolina, had placed a hold on the appointment of conferees, claiming that he could not trust the committee not to water down provisions he had gotten into the Senate bill requiring much greater transparency for earmarks. So House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Reid had figured out a way to pass a bill on their own, based primarily on the House version, and written to the liking of the Democrats.
Without naming DeMint, McConnell alluded to the hold and faulted it for leaving the Republicans in the lurch. It was an opaque allusion, but not so opaque that many members did not realize that McConnell had just called out DeMint in front of his colleagues. DeMint flared up and denied that he had forced the bad result, recalls Bob Bennett.
In a quiet but “very cold” voice, McConnell replied to the effect of: Yes. Yes, you did.
That’s not fair, protested DeMint.
No, Jim. You’re the one who did this, McConnell continued. You’re responsible for this outcome. . . . We did this to ourselves.
There had never been anything like it. “It was the only time I have ever seen Mitch McConnell deal with a colleague in that kind of manner,” Bennett says. “It was just a single sentence, but it left the whole room in stone-cold silence, because it was, ‘All right, this is a rebuke that really matters.’ ”
The confrontation helped cement the rivalry between McConnell and the South Carolinian who had arrived in the Senate in 2005 burning to take on not only Democrats but Republicans complicit in deficit-widening travesties such as the Medicare drug benefit supported by McConnell and signed by President Bush. DeMint was at the helm of a small but vocal group of senators who interpreted their party’s loss of the Senate as punishment for the party’s drift from budget-cutting orthodoxy. They had little patience for institutional niceties, among them deference to leadership.
What was most notable about the confrontation, though, was what Bennett stressed in recounting it—its singularity. McConnell was willing to give DeMint opaque reprimands behind closed doors on matters of institutional prerogative—senators’ right to award earmarks, or relying on seniority in making assignments to the influential Appropriations Committee, another issue where McConnell resisted DeMint. (“Jim, you can’t change the Senate,” he chided, according to DeMint.)
But when it came to the big issues, what McConnell would project to the public was the spectacle of a leader submitting to the gravitational pull of DeMint and the wing of the party he represented. Back home in Kentucky after the 2006 election, McConnell had predicted a productive session ahead of a meeting of the Farm Bureau. “Gridlock is not my first choice,” he said. “My first choice is to accomplish things for the country. You all didn’t send us up there just to play games and engage in sparring rounds.” To his national audience, though, McConnell was sounding a more defiant tone, as if already seeking to mollify the DeMints within his caucus. “It takes sixty votes to do just about everything in the Senate. Forty-nine is a robust minority,” he told the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. “Nothing will leave the Senate that doesn’t have our imprint. We’ll either stop it if we think it’s bad for America, or shape it, hopefully right of center.”
Of course, it takes sixty votes to do just about everything only if the minority opts to use the power of the filibuster for, well, just about everything. And McConnell held true to his promise to Hewitt to do just that. He led his caucus to block Democratic efforts to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25, forcing them to add business tax breaks to the bill. They blocked Democratic legislation to start drawing down troops in Iraq. They blocked bills to make it easier for unions to organize workers, to provide in-state tuition at public universities for undocumented students, to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. In 2008, McConnell forced Senate clerks to read the entirety of a 492-page Democratic bill to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a process that took ten hours. Harry Reid linked this tactic to a Republican memo, given him by a lobbyist, that outlined the Republican plan to delay the bill before killing it to stoke voter upset at the Democrats about high energy prices. “You couldn’t make anything up more cynical,” Reid said on the Senate floor.
McConnell’s prominence in leading the opposition to all these measures made it all the more conspicuous when, on the legislation most important to President Bush, he vanished. Back in 2006, McConnell had supported the comprehensive reform of the nation’s immigration system that Bush had been seeking as part of his effort to salvage some “compassionate conservatism” and build his party’s appeal among Latino voters. Now, in 2007, Bush was making another try, this time with Harry Reid and John McCain as bipartisan allies. McConnell pronounced the bill an improvement over the 2006 version, but implacable immigration opponents, led by DeMint, did not agree, decrying the bill’s “amnesty” for illegal aliens. When the bill came to the floor the crucial vote to open consideration of the legislation, McConnell’s second and third in command, Jon Kyl of Arizona and Trent Lott of Mississippi, both from states with strong anti-immigrant sentiment, voted to allow consideration. So did Lindsey Graham, who was facing reelection the year following in DeMint’s home state, South Carolina.
McConnell waited until enough votes had been cast to make it clear that the bill was going to fall short of the necessary sixty, and then voted aga
inst it as well. In an unusual withdrawal, the Republican leader did not even speak on the floor until after the bill’s fate was known. He was, Roll Call reported, “a virtual no-show.” Conservative columnist Robert Novak went further, calling it a “truly major failure of leadership.” McConnell might have been willing to stand up to DeMint in private on a matter of importance to congressional insiders, but here, on an issue of far greater visibility and with his own reelection looming, he buckled to the wave DeMint and his camp had generated.
The stakes were even higher a year later, in 2008, when McConnell faced off against DeMint yet again. World financial markets were in free fall and Bush’s Treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, readied a massive, $700 billion bailout for the banks to cushion the collapse. Once again, DeMint rallied opposition. His conservative counterparts in the House blocked the package, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunging by 778 points. This market gyration helped drive home the gravity of the situation, and the rescue would pass on a second try. Over in the Senate, McConnell opted to stand against DeMint. But his willingness to act responsibly and get the package passed was grudging. Democratic staff knowledgeable about the negotiations say that McConnell’s contribution to the talks was, essentially, “How many votes do you really need?”—the implication being that, even with a Republican president making the request for the rescue and with crisis looming, he did not want to make any more members of his caucus go along with it than necessary. A third of Senate Republicans voted against the rescue.
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