There was more of the fallout to come. In September, Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski lost her state’s Republican primary to a highly conservative challenger. Instead of stepping aside, Murkowski opted to stay on the November ballot—as a write-in independent candidate. This decision brought the party’s civil war to the doorstep of the Republican Senate caucus, in the form of a concrete question: what to do with a Republican member now running against someone who had won the party’s primary? Murkowski resigned her caucus leadership position, but there remained the question of whether to strip her of her rank as the top Republican on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, a crucial slot for a senator from Alaska who relied on the support of energy industry lobbyists. There was a “big fight” within the conference, says Bob Bennett, with DeMint leading the charge to punish Murkowski. McConnell initially suggested that Murkowski be replaced with an acting ranking member on the energy committee, but after a debate, the conference voted—in secret ballot, with the tally undisclosed even to the conference—in favor of keeping Murkowski in the top spot. McConnell instructed members not to discuss the fight beyond a one-line public statement: “Lisa has stepped down from her position on [the NRSC] and we took no further action.”
This result did not sit well with DeMint, who, Bennett recalls, “gets on the Internet and puts out an email denouncing all of us and screams and yells and tries to create fund-raising for Miller.” (“The good ol’ boys Senate club, which always protects its own, prevailed,” DeMint wrote.) The result, says Bennett, was that “every member of the conference comes out furious at DeMint and completely supportive of Mitch.” As Bennett concludes: “That’s the way Mitch gets to be leader and maintains people’s respect and backing. . . . No one remembers that it was his proposal that wasn’t adopted—they just remember that DeMint was a real pain—and Mitch came out unscathed.”
McConnell was unscathed within the conference, perhaps, but he was unable to avoid the ultimate consequence of the insurgency. Despite a historic triumph for Republicans in the 2010 midterm election—sixty-three seats gained in the House, plus a surge in state capitals—McConnell came up four votes short of a Senate majority. Almost certainly, he would have achieved his life’s goal had the conservative uprising not left the party with fringe candidates in eminently winnable races, in Nevada, Colorado, and Delaware, where the party’s nominee took to the airwaves late in the race to address her previous admission to having “dabbled in witchcraft.” It was a classic example of blowback: standing by as the party cast Barack Obama as the devil incarnate, and winding up with an ex-sorceress on the Republican ballot.
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By 2011, the DeMint wing of the Republican caucus had grown larger. Privately, McConnell was losing his patience with them. As one longtime associate of his recalls, McConnell cut loose once in the associate’s presence: “He said, ‘Those idiots, those people come up here and have never been in office and know nothing about being in office. . . . They don’t sit and learn, they just decide they’re going to take away every law that’s been on the books for fifty years. They want to create chaos—and it worries me a lot.’ ”
Indeed, chaos arrived halfway into 2011, in the form of the refusal by congressional Republicans to raise the nation’s debt ceiling in the absence of deep spending cuts, thus hastening the possibility of a market-shaking credit default. But if McConnell worried about that chaos, he didn’t let on—for weeks he deferred to the Republican House leaders driving the confrontation with Obama. When he did speak out, it was to express hope that a deal could be reached—not for the sake of the economy, but to deprive Democrats of a campaign talking point: “If we go into default, [Obama] will say that Republicans are making the economy worse,” he said. “All of a sudden we have co-ownership of a bad economy. . . . That is very bad positioning going into an election.”
Only in the final moments did McConnell help negotiate a deal that infuriated many Democrats—no new tax revenues and the threat of big future spending cuts. With the crisis averted, McConnell seemed to gloat about the episode, casting it as a clever use of leverage. “I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting,” he told the Washington Post. “Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this—it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming.” He promised that when it came time for another debt ceiling increase a few years later, “we’ll be doing it all over.”
That was hardly the sort of language that was going to restrain the hostage takers McConnell was privately criticizing. And they were not about to be restrained. In the spring of 2012, they claimed another of his few confidants in the Senate—Richard Lugar, who had done McConnell the favor of renominating him as leader just a few years earlier. McConnell had, more recently, been keeping his distance from Lugar, who noticed that McConnell had not exactly been jumping up to support him in his push in 2010 and early 2011 to get their fellow Republicans to vote for the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty, which Obama was seeking with Russia. “Some of the positions I took were not necessarily ones he wanted to support, and sometimes if he did want to support it, he was very quiet about it,” says Lugar. That was the case with New START, which McConnell barely mentioned at the caucus’s weekly luncheons. “I understood where he was,” says Lugar, “and that I had to go about getting the votes on my own.”
McConnell was more willing to lend Lugar assistance behind the scenes, as he urged his friend to play rough with his primary opponent, state treasurer Richard Mourdock. Lugar was reluctant to take the advice. “Hitting hard has usually been very effective for Mitch, and he’s found it to be so effective that he’s been impatient with others who . . . are not willing to sock it to somebody,” says Lugar. “He knew I was working hard at [the campaign] but was not being supercritical [of Mourdock] and he’d say, ‘You really have to sock it to him.’ ” Lugar chose not to do so, and was overwhelmed by the same archconservative anger as Bob Bennett had been, losing by 20 percentage points. McConnell was open with Lugar about who was to blame: the outside groups whipping up a frenzy on the party’s far fringe. “In private conversation, he very well understood what was happening with Freedom Works and Club for Growth and the Koch brothers and whoever else you wanted to talk about,” Lugar says. But hadn’t McConnell spurred that wave in his own right with his whole approach to the Obama presidency? “Mitch has been so successful that I’m not going to argue with it,” Lugar says.
By McConnell’s own terms, he hadn’t been successful: that November, Obama was elected to a second term—and Republicans were left with two fewer seats in the Senate, including Lugar’s. Rather than preparing for a Republican administration, McConnell was left reckoning with another precipice created by the brinkmanship his anti-Obama strategy had encouraged, the “fiscal cliff ” the country was facing at end of 2012 with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, and the arrival of the deep sequestration cuts that had been part of the 2011 debt-ceiling deal. With his talks stalling with his Democratic counterpart, Harry Reid, McConnell called up Vice President Joe Biden, his longtime Senate colleague. “Does anyone down there know how to make a deal?” he demanded to know. He and Biden hashed out a deal that, once again, upset many Democrats—making permanent the Bush tax cuts for all income under $400,000, a far higher threshold than Obama wanted, and delaying the spending cuts by only two months. “You could argue persuasively, that—in a government controlled two-thirds by the Democrats—we got permanency for ninety-nine percent of the Bush tax cuts,” McConnell said in persuading his fellow Republicans to vote for the package, according to the Washington Post.
Those who benefited from McConnell’s preservation of so many upper-end tax cuts did not need persuading. Back in Kentucky, McConnell won great gratitude from the likes of Bill Stone, the owner of a large glass manufacturer in Louisville and former chairman of the Jefferson County GOP. Stone especially appreciated that the deal had prevented a big increase in the estate tax—t
he tax-free exemption stayed above $5 million, and the top rate went to 40 percent, far less than the exemption of only $1 million and rate of 55 percent that would have gone into effect without the deal. “Mitch is a hero—every small businessman and farmer with a ranch who’s got a small fortune ought to kiss his feet,” Stone says. As soon as the deal was struck, a tired McConnell got on a plane to New Orleans for the Sugar Bowl, where Louisville was playing Florida. Waiting for him was Stone, who thanked McConnell for his work keeping the estate tax in check. “Mitch staggered into a brunch with the president of Louisville and dropped into a chair and said, ‘Bill, given the position we were in, we did the absolute best we could,’ ” Stone recalls. Stone assured McConnell that he had done more than enough. “I got to be the one that thanked him. He gave that smile of understanding, that knowing smile.”
McConnell’s success in closing the deals on the debt-ceiling crisis and fiscal cliff was a reminder of his skill as a negotiator. (Chris Dodd jokes that working with McConnell on the 2002 bill to repair the country’s broken voting system put him in mind of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s line that negotiating his peace deal with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin was the “most dreadful and most beautiful thing I ever did.” McConnell, Dodd says, is “the toughest guy—every article, semicolon is a wrestling match, and that was the dreadful thing. When I was done I slept like a baby because I knew it was golden—I knew it was going to happen. . . . Every penny of that four billion dollars got through the appropriators.”) But the deals also pointed to the way in which McConnell was learning to capitalize on the Tea Party element within his caucus that he privately deplored. After all, his bargaining hand was strengthened by that faction’s extremism, its willingness to press its case to the point of threatening real harm to the national and world economy—with Republicans so willing to risk a credit default in 2011, the White House had had to settle for a deal in which it got almost nothing it wanted except for being spared a credit default. If McConnell was not doing more outwardly to restrain the far wing of his party and his caucus, even now that the goal of preventing a second Obama term had been dashed, this dynamic was perhaps one reason why. As unrealistic as their demands were, the insurgents were an effective weapon in his showdowns with the administration he had set out to defeat.
It was hard to see how even McConnell was supposed to capitalize on the next showdown, the government shutdown forced by congressional Republicans’ insistence on defunding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare.” McConnell made no secret that he found the gambit foolhardy, but instead of trying to quash it, he absented himself even more than he had done in the early stages of the prior crises. His most notable appearance, as the shutdown ticked on and eight hundred thousand federal workers were furloughed, was a private exchange with Rand Paul, picked up on a hot mike, in which the two discussed the shutdown in purely partisan, tactical terms: “We’re gonna win this, I think,” said Paul. Predictably, McConnell once again made his last-minute arrival to negotiate a conclusion to the shutdown with Harry Reid.
As Judd Gregg, McConnell’s former ally in the Senate, sees it, McConnell’s handling of the shutdown episode exposed his caucus’s archconservatives, such as Texas’s Ted Cruz, for the self-aggrandizing extremists they were, without requiring a confrontation by McConnell (DeMint himself had already departed for a high-paying job running the Heritage Foundation, which, awkwardly enough, was also where Elaine Chao was now installed). “He handled it in true Mitch style—give them enough rope so they self-destruct,” Gregg says, embarking on a mixed-metaphor riff. “Mitch gave them the running room to do what they needed to do. It’s Mitch’s management style—he lets the cards play out until he plays his cards and then he wins. . . . It would’ve been whistling in the wind to step in at an earlier point.”
Perhaps so—but McConnell’s “win” had come at a major cost, not least what economists estimated was the shutdown’s $24 billion setback for the national economy. It’s not hard to imagine another approach by McConnell in handling his caucus’s right wing, says Merkley, the Oregon Democrat: “There was no apparent effort by senior leaders . . . to convey the destructive nature of this paralysis . . . to pull in members who had come here with ‘Government is the enemy and we’re going to melt down the Senate as part of hatred of the government,’ ” he says. “It would have taken senior members to say, ‘That doesn’t work here. We are here with a constitutional responsibility and we have an obligation to address the issues and are not going to tolerate folks unilaterally melting this place down.’ ”
Far from it. Post-shutdown, McConnell showed no sign of a break in approach. In what Reid called a “breach of faith” with an informal earlier agreement to let more nominations through, McConnell led his caucus to block three of Obama’s nominees for the influential D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, to keep the president from tilting the court’s ideological direction, just as he had led a filibuster of Obama’s nominee to lead the new Consumer Finance Protection Bureau to keep that agency, a creation of the financial-reform law, from functioning.
As always, McConnell and his closest allies in the Senate argued that these tactics were only ripostes to Reid’s domineering ways, notably his limitation on Republicans’ ability to offer amendments on bills. Democrats, of course, countered that it was the Republicans’ predilection since 2007 for troublemaking amendments and for the filibuster that had forced Reid’s hand. “It’s a question of chicken and the egg, and to me it’s abundantly clear what came first. What came first is Republicans using the filibuster,” says Conrad, the former senator from North Dakota. Norman Ornstein, the congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, says there is simply no question who had done the most to explode long-standing norms. Under McConnell, he says, Republicans had regularly used filibusters on motions to proceed, not just on legislation, and had insisted, after a successful sixty-person vote for cloture, to use the full thirty hours allotted for debate—not to actually debate, but simply to chew up time. Yes, Reid was limiting amendments, but even that rationale for obstructionism fell away when it came to using the filibuster and “blue slips” to block lower-level administration nominees and federal judges. “The use of the filibuster to deny the president his team, or to block judges when there were no real quibbles about qualifications or ideology, is a major breach of Senate norms, and Mitch McConnell is responsible,” Ornstein wrote in 2014.
Some Republicans seemed to agree: When Merkley tried in late 2012 to coax some Republicans into a deal to limit filibusters, he says the response from several was: “The ideas you’re putting forward are reasonable, but there’s no way I can be out there . . . out of sync with McConnell and his agenda of paralyzing this place.” When McConnell told his fellow Republicans in a closed-door meeting in July 2013 that he could’ve done better than the deal they negotiated without him to approve some of Obama’s nominations, an exasperated Bob Corker, the Tennessee senator, called “bullshit” loud enough for the room to hear, reported Roll Call. Ira Shapiro, a former Senate staffer, Clinton administration trade official, and author of a history of the Senate, argued in a May 2014 opinion piece that the Senate would be functioning better with just about any other Republican in McConnell’s place. “Virtually every serious observer thinks that the Senate would be a far different place if the Republicans were led by someone else, such as Lamar Alexander, Rob Portman, Susan Collins or Bob Corker,” Shapiro wrote.
At one point, McConnell and Reid had enjoyed the modicum of a working relationship. They had in common their affection for Washington’s new baseball team, their avoidance of the Beltway social circuit, and their devotion to the Senate, an institution that they, unlike many of the chamber’s presidential wannabes, were content to spend their careers in. The breakdown of the Obama years, though, had frayed whatever tenuous bond there had once been. Reid was still smarting over the intensity of the Republican leadership’s push against his reelection in 2010 (in on
e particularly personal attack, the NRSC ran ads ridiculing Reid for staying at a condo unit in the Ritz-Carlton while in Washington). Their meetings on major legislation and the various fiscal crises too often ended with the more blunt Reid having made his position clear but being left with no idea of where the more reserved McConnell stood—McConnell would insist on running everything past his kitchen cabinet and caucus before making a counteroffer. Their regular Monday meetings sputtered to a halt, leaving their brief exchanges on the floor after convening the Senate each day as the extent of their communication. The low point for Reid may have come in June 2012, when, after much haggling to build broad support for a flood insurance bill, Reid brought it to the Senate floor only for Rand Paul to demand to hold it hostage until the Senate allowed a vote on an unrelated “personhood amendment,” giving legal protections to fetuses right at fertilization.
Reid’s payback gathered over time. In the summer of 2013, a SuperPAC run by his close allies started running ads attacking McConnell, eighteen months before his next election. In September, Reid held a reunion dinner in the Senate for all of the living Senate majority leaders—a category defined to exclude McConnell. The break was made final, though, with Reid’s announcement in late 2013 that the Democrats would vote by simple majority to undo the filibuster for most presidential nominations—the oft-threatened “nuclear option” that McConnell had warned would make Reid the “worst Senate leader ever”—and thereby fill long-vacant slots in the judiciary and administration. Republican indignation followed: “The Senate is being destroyed as an institution,” says Gregg. In January, McConnell gave a lengthy floor speech deploring what Reid had done to the Senate: “What have we become?” he said. “The Senate seems more like a campaign studio than a serious legislative body. . . . We’ve gotten too comfortable with doing everything we do here through the prism of the next election, instead of the prism of duty. And everyone suffers as a result.”
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