Hello, I am Kevin Kosar, host of the Understanding Congress podcast.
The topic of this episode is a new book on Senator Mitch McConnell, a Republican who served as his party’s chamber leader for the better part of two decades.
The book was written by Associated Press reporter Michael Tackett, and its title is The Price of Power: How Mitch McConnell Mastered the Senate, Changed America, and Lost His Party. It was published by Simon & Schuster in November of 2024.
It is a fine book, and I certainly enjoyed reading it. I learned a lot about Senator McConnell. For example, who knew that he dated a lot when he was a single guy? Who knew that he had a role in transforming Kentucky from a Democrat-controlled state to one with a vibrant Republican party? And who knew that Senator McConnell recruited a Rep. Tom Cotton of Arkansas to run for the Senate?
Capacious as this book is, I could have read one twice its size. Mitch McConnell is fascinating figure, and a historic one.
So let’s get to it—the story of Mitch McConnell.
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it. But Congress is essential to our republic. It is a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be.
The day after the November 2024 election, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) stood before assembled reporters. “Good morning, everyone,” he said with a slight smile on his owlish mien. “It is certainly a happy day for the GOP.”
He congratulated President-elect Donald J. Trump and commended the 45th and soon-to-be 47th commander-in-chief’s winning campaign over Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump’s campaign, McConnell said, ran a “sharper operation this time”. McConnell moved to a matter dear to his heart: the Senate. His super PAC spent $425 million and won back a majority for Republicans. They had flipped three seats in Ohio, Montana, and West Virginia, and were well on their way to victory in Pennsylvania is likely to go red as well – making for a 53-47 majority over Democrats in the 119th Congress.
It was classic McConnell – three minutes of punctilious remarks delivered in a matter-of-fact tone that conveyed a few big points to the media in no uncertain terms.
During the subsequent question and answer period, he returned to a perennial past time – tweaking the Democrats. Trump won because “people were just not happy with this administration,” McConnell said of retiring President Joe Biden and Vice President Harris, the late-in-the-game replacement of the incumbent as Democratic nominee. The GOP majority would ensure the legislative filibuster endures, and that Democrats would not be able to pack the Supreme Court or the Senate by adding Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia as states.
The moment also was bittersweet. McConnell is the longest serving Kentucky senator, having first won his seat in 1984. McConnell also is the longest serving Senate party leader, since January 2007. It’s a tenure that includes eight years as minority leader, six years in the majority during the final two years of former President Barack Obama’s administration and the entire first Trump presidency, and then four years more with his party out of power in the chamber during the Biden years.
McConnell loves leading his party, but this victory was not for him – it was for the next GOP Senate majority leader, which turns out to be South Dakota’s John Thune, who was elected to the leadership post by his Republican colleagues in a Nov. 13 secret ballot. Earlier this year, the 82-year old McConnell revealed he would not stand for re-election by his colleagues, in an uncharacteristically emotional speech from the well of the Senate. This post-election presser was his last one.
McConnell’s rise to the pinnacle of power is a remarkable story. Nothing came easy, according to Michael Tackett’s new book, The Price of Power: How Mitch McConnell Mastered the Senate, Changed America, and Lost His Party.
Addison Mitchell McConnell III was born on Feb. 20, 1942, in Sheffield, Alabama. His father worked at the McConnell funeral home in Athens, and his mother stayed at home to care for Mitch. At age two, young Mitch was stricken with polio. It was a tough, lonely time for the lad. Money was tight. His father was overseas in the war, and Mitch spent many months confined to bed. His mother would haul him from his little room for physical therapy sessions. One of his legs atrophied and she worried he might die. Tackett suspects that suffering polio sparked McConnell to overachieve. It’s not uncommon among those who survived the disease.
Whatever the wellspring, McConnell showed his lust for politics and leadership at an early age. He sought the role of the king in a school pageant when he was in first grade. By age 10 he was sporting an “I like Ike” button in support of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s bid for the presidency. The McConnell’s left Alabama when he was 14 after his father landed a better job in Louisville, Kentucky. Despite being the new kid at the high school, he became the class’s vice president. Then he set his sights on being president of the school student council. Through coalition-building and relentless campaigning McConnell beat a more popular kid. At the University of Louisville, he won campus elections and told a girlfriend he wanted to be a senator one day.
Mitch McConnell’s first taste of U.S. Capitol politics came with a college internship in the office of Rep. Gene Snyder, one of the few Kentucky Republicans in Congress. He traded up to a spot in Sen. John Sherman Cooper’s office, a centrist Republican who was elected in 1960, and then joined the staff of freshman Sen. Marlow Cook (R-KY) in 1968. He developed expertise on Senate consideration of judicial nominations when he had to help his boss contend with President Richard M. Nixon’s Supreme Court nominations of Clement Haynesworth and G. Harrold Carswell, both of which tanked. McConnell saw the difference a justice could make when Harry Blackmun made it on to the Court, and soon thereafter wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade (1973).
McConnell enjoyed being a staffer, but it was not enough. He plotted a long course to become a senator. He returned to Kentucky and won election to county office in 1977, where he suffered the slings of the majority Democrats and crafted ways to work with them and to build a springboard to the Senate. He got scant support from the national Republican party’s leaders, who gave him little chance to win a seat in a traditionally Democratic state. After seven years of disciplined toil and cold-blooded and brilliant maneuvering Mitch McConnell squeaked out a victory and in January 1985 was sworn into the Senate as the junior senator.
McConnell quickly showed himself to be both an utter partisan who would do anything for the Grand Old Party and a bipartisan dealmaker with many centrist positions. One of his early votes, for example, was to join Democrats in supporting sanctions on South Africa’s apartheid regime, which passed over President Ronald Reagan’s veto. McConnell learned that real power in the Senate could be had by mastering its legislative procedures. He hard bargained with presidents and colleagues alike by holding up legislation and nominations. Sen. McConnell developed into a tremendous fundraiser and used the money to build a network of support within his party and to recruit new members. Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Todd Young (R-IN), to cite only two examples, were lured to the Senate by McConnell in recent years from their safe House seats.
And while his rise to become leader of the GOP conference took 22 years, it looks almost inevitable in retrospect. Not only did he love his work, but McConnell developed the exact skills needed to get things done in a notoriously balky legislative body. He is patient, listens more than he speaks, and has a steely reserve and calculating mind that takes a long view. Additionally, one Democrat told Tackett, McConnell “has a preternatural sense of when an issue has arrived and [he] capitalizes on that. He also doesn’t care what anybody thinks about him.”
Thus, if McConnell could use the filibuster to stop campaign finance legislation, he did it, even if it enraged other senators. If he thought he could rein in an activist judiciary by stymying then-President Obama’s nominations and then ramming Trump’s picks, he did it. And if growing the ranks of GOP legislators could best be done by creating his own super PAC to fund good candidates, Mitch McConnell was all in.
For all his winning, Leader McConnell has struggled with the rise of populism in his party, which offends his pragmatic Reaganism. He never liked Trump, whom he saw as a reckless and feckless “sleazeball” who backed bad candidates that cost the party legislative seats. When Trump derided him as an “old crow” McConnell laughed it off and handed out special edition bottles of Old Crow Bourbon (made in Kentucky, of course) to senators and favorite donors.
Trump and populist senators like Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) were complicit in the worst day in McConnell’s career, Jan. 6, 2021. The invasion of the U.S. Capitol appalled McConnell, and the subsequent impeachment put him in a terrible dilemma. He could be a good team player and defend his party’s leader, or he could whip his troops to help the Democrats ensure Trump never held office again. He did not wish to drive Trump’s millions of fervid supporters from the party, so he condemned Trump, voted to acquit him, and hoped Trump would fade away.
McConnell’s term runs through January 2027. He told the pst-election press gaggle he will spend it fighting for a strong national defense and robust American role in the world to counter the machinations of Russia and other malevolent regimes. It was an implicit rebuke to incoming President Trump and the anti-interventionist wing of his party.
It might only be the first shot across the bow. Unencumbered from the duties of party leadership and in the twilight of his magnificent career, McConnell is free to do what he thinks is right.
Well, there is so much more that could be said about Mitch McConnell. But for today, that will be all.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you for listening to Understanding Congress, a podcast of the American Enterprise Institute. This program was produced by Jaehun Lee and hosted by Kevin Kosar. You can subscribe to Understanding Congress via Stitcher, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and TuneIn. We hope you will share this podcast with others and tell us what you think about it by posting your thoughts and questions on Twitter and tagging at AEI. Once again, thank you for listening, and have a great day.
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