The president whom the Senate Republican leader helped elect has turned out to be the one thing he can’t control.
t sunrise, there it was: a red-tailed hawk, its gyre widening over the United States Capitol building in the Creamsicle-colored light, like the world’s least subtle literary reference. It was still there by midafternoon, drifting on the thermals over the mostly depopulated National Mall, wheeling occasionally past the window in the hallway outside the office where the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, sat on the 20th day of what would soon become the longest government shutdown in American history.
That morning, Jan. 10, Washington’s principal chaos agent, the president of the United States, had given a typically accusatory and free-associative news conference on the White House lawn, reiterating his demand for $5 billion in funding for a wall along the Mexican border and his intention to continue the shutdown without it. Then he decamped to the border for some photo ops with Customs and Border Protection officials. Republican senators spent the lunch hour shuttling back and forth between Vice President Mike Pence and McConnell, sequestered in different quarters on the Capitol’s second floor. Now the last speeches of the day were being made, the reporters had mostly gone and McConnell sat in his office, reciting an unfamiliar tale: that of his own powerlessness.
“I’ve been in the meetings,” McConnell, dressed in a pinstripe suit and a banker collar, said. “It’s just that I don’t have the votes that can consummate the deal.” Those votes could come only at the behest of Trump or the new House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, he insisted — and, McConnell continued, “it seems to me the principals, the only people who can make this deal, as of the moment we’re having this discussion, seem to both think they have a winning hand.”
McConnell went through the motions of fully blaming Pelosi, as he did on the Senate floor that morning, displaying a poster with two identical pictures of a Southern border wall, one labeled “PRES. OBAMA” and the other “PRES. TRUMP,” under a legend reading, “WHAT BORDER FENCING DO DEMOCRATS SUPPORT?” But he knew as well as anyone that he had in fact negotiated at least a temporary escape from the looming shutdown with Paul Ryan, then the House speaker, in December, which would have funded the government through February, before “the president, let’s just say, changed his mind,” Ryan told me this month, laughing ruefully. “I spoke to him and tried to get the plan back on track, but that just wasn’t in the cards. And here we are.”
Or here McConnell was, at least: marooned in a newly divided Congress, trying hard to stay out of the light. “He’s been very quiet,” Dick Durbin, the Democratic minority whip, who was in recent shutdown-negotiation meetings with McConnell and the Democratic Senate leadership, told me that afternoon, “and has said repeatedly that he’s not going to call any bill that the president doesn’t approve of. And that has basically been the sum and substance of his contribution.”
McConnell, who has represented Kentucky in the Senate for 34 years and, as of last June, is the longest-serving Republican leader in Senate history, is one of Washington’s most famously inexpressive creatures. “You’ve got to see the gears turning behind the eyes, because the mouth isn’t moving very much,” Ryan told me. Still, his statements about Trump during the 2016 campaign, as the future president gradually cowed into submission the party to which McConnell had dedicated his entire adult life, managed to simultaneously leave everything and nothing to the imagination. When McConnell endorsed Trump in May 2016, after the last of his plausible challengers collapsed, he did it with a terse written statement in which the gritting of teeth was practically audible: “I have committed to supporting the nominee chosen by Republican voters,” it read, “and Donald Trump, the presumptive nominee, is now on the verge of clinching that nomination.” Speaking to a reporter from USA Today later that month, the most enthusiastic vision McConnell would allow of a Trump presidency was that it “would be fine.”
“It would be hard to find two people by personality, or any inclination, that are more diametrically opposed than the president and Senator McConnell,” says Roy Blunt, the Missouri senator who heads the Senate Republicans’ policy committee. “Senator McConnell, very careful and thoughtful about what he says, deeply studied in the history of the country and how the federal government works. The president would not be offended if he heard somebody say he did not spend his time becoming that well versed in those things.” When I asked Elaine Chao, who is Trump’s secretary of transportation and McConnell’s wife of 26 years, if Trump and McConnell liked each other, she was silent for a full four seconds before replying, “You’ll have to ask the president that, and you’ll have to ask the leader that.” When I did ask McConnell, all he said was, “Yeah, we get along fine.”
All of this made it more remarkable that, by the fall of last year, McConnell had emerged as one of the few unambiguous winners of the Trump presidency to date. When I first spoke with him, this past November, he talked of the preceding two years with a faint air of mystified amusement at his own fortune: as if a minor meteor had streaked through the window of the majority leader’s office, narrowly missing his head before exploding against the two-century-old marble fireplace, and then also turned out to be filled with candy and hundred-dollar bills. “I think even though we’re pretty different in every way you can think of,” he told me, clearing his throat, “we’ve had a good sort of team effort here to accomplish as much as we can.”
He was the Trump administration’s indispensable partner in seating two Supreme Court justices and 83 lower-court judges: a generational remaking of the courts that has made McConnell, “in my view, the most consequential majority leader, certainly, in modern history,” says Leonard Leo, the conservative legal activist who serves as executive vice president of the Federalist Society and as an adviser to the Trump administration on the court appointments. Shortly after the midterm elections, McConnell’s longtime adviser J. Scott Jennings described to me how McConnell had “taken on this role as the principal enabler of the Trump agenda,” and he meant it as a compliment. There had been an improbable synergy between the two men: the president who covets power but has little sense or discipline in wielding it, and the legislator who has often seemed to consider the skillful exercise of power an end unto itself.
Two and a half months later, however, the bargain McConnell made stood in somewhat bleaker relief. Trump had fired his attorney general, Jeff Sessions. His secretary of defense, James Mattis, had resigned over disagreements with his foreign policy; his chief of staff, John Kelly, was now gone, too. For weeks there had been an accelerating drumbeat of Russia-related guilty pleas and filings from the special prosecutor Robert Mueller.
The shutdown distilled the essence of McConnell’s position in Trump’s Washington: a man of institutions and establishments whose own legacy was now tied to that of a president who seems hellbent on burning both to the ground. On Jan. 9, he stood stone-faced alongside Trump in a Senate hallway as the president suggested he would get his wall money by declaring a national emergency. “I don’t think much of that idea,” McConnell told me the following day. “I hope he doesn’t go down that path.” Still, he admitted, “I’m perplexed as to how this ends.”
When Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court on Oct. 6, after McConnell played a key role in ushering him through a month of arguments over and investigations into allegations of sexual assault, the scope of the majority leader’s influence on American governance snapped into focus. Before McConnell, the small handful of towering Senate majority leaders left their legacies behind in the legal code. Lyndon Johnson passed the first two modern Civil Rights Acts in 1957 and 1960; Mike Mansfield oversaw the third in 1964, and the construction of Johnson’s Great Society; Howard Baker passed Reagan’s tax overhauls that shaped future debates about financing government. All of these accomplishments contained within them a heroic, idealized image of the Senate itself: a chamber where men and women rose from their centuries-old desks to debate the very idea of America, negotiating their way to laws of sweeping import to the country.
McConnell is the first majority leader whose career has been built on the assumption that the Senate that could produce the great legislative works of his predecessors is a thing of the past — a fact that itself owes a great deal to McConnell. As minority and then majority leader during Barack Obama’s presidency, he fashioned himself as the essential impediment to Obama’s vision of a sequel to the Great Society, using tactics that were once the province of Senate factions as a strategic blueprint for the entire Republican caucus.
No comments:
Post a Comment