YYou would think it’s exactly this Mitch McConnell research. McConnell, the 83 -year -old Kentucky senator – who announced last week He will retire in 2026 And not looking for an eighth term – is one of the most influential Republicans in party history. But he has expressed in recent weeks. Republican party. He voted against some of the Donald TrumpThe people appointed by the cabinet, refusing, for example, to vote for the confirmation of the anti-divide activist and the alleged rapist and drunk Pete Hegseth.
He also expressed a lukewarm and late opposition to the extremist agenda of the Republicans, citing his own experience as a survivor of infantile polio as a reason for his opposition to republican attacks on vaccines. But the republican party on which McConnell is now shaking his head is the one he created. He has only to blame himself.
On his 40th anniversary in the US SenateWith almost two decades as a republican leader in the Chamber, McConnell has become one of the most influential senators in the country’s history, radically reshaping the congress and its party, in the process. Few have done more to erode the conditions of representative democracy in America, and few have done more to allow the rise of the oligarchy, autocracy and reactionary governance and isolated minorities of electoral control. McConnell has redone America to its own image. It’s a ugly view.
In the end, McConnell will be remembered for one thing: his authorization of Trump. In 2021, after trump refuse to respect the results of the 2020 election and feel a violent mob of his supporters to the capitol to stop the certification of the results by violent force, mcConnell had an opportunity to put a stop to trump’s authoritarian attack on the constitutional order.
McConnell never liked Trump, and at that time, he didn’t even need him: he had already won what would be his last mandate. He could have voted to condemn Trump during his second dismissal; If he had done it, it is likely that other Republican senators would also have been willing to do so, and that Trump could have been condemned and prevented from returning to power. He didn’t do it. McConnell voted to pay and allow Trump to go up. If the next four years of Trump’s restoration are something like the first 30 days, then it will prove to be the singularly significant decision of McConnell’s career.
But McConnell had worked against American democracy long before Trump sent the crowd to ransad the Senate Chamber and coated the excrement on the walls. It was McConnell, after all, which is the most responsible for the financing regime of the current campaign, which allowed unlimited amounts of expenses of dark money to infiltrate politics – make the elections more influenced, and politicians are favorable to the interests of the people and to those of the class of the billionaire boss.
These funding and favors’ provisions do not comply with democracy; They change the loyalty of politicians, decrease the influence of voters, decrease voters and their needs to a simple problem after the fact or to communications in the minds of elected representatives. It was by design, and that’s how McConnell liked. In Washington, he operated at the center of a large funding network, moving millions and millions of dollars towards the Republicans who made his auctions and far from those who have shaken his authority.
It is partly its control on this network of spiders of rich funds which allowed McConnell to exercise such control over its caucus. It is difficult to remember today, when the Republicans choose so many fights with each other, that the party was once feared for their discipline. McConnell was able to stifle any significant dissent and public policy difference among republican senators with the threat of his deep friends, always ready to finance a main challenger. The locking of the Republicans allowed McConnell to pursue what he considered his twin objectives: to stop any democratic program in the congress and promote the conservative capture of the federal courts.
As a republican leader of the Senate during the Obama years, McConnell continued a maximum procedural obstructionism strategy. His mandate was that no republican in the Senate would vote for an article of Obama agenda – that there would be no compromise, no negotiation, no negotiation of horses, no debate, but only a rejection total on all democratic initiatives. It has become the singular way that the Republicans operate in the Senate; It was McConnell who did like that.
The underlying hypothesis of McConnell’s strategy on total opposition and the refusal was that Democrats, even when they earn the elections, do not have the legitimate right to govern. In practice, the authorities of the presidency or the majorities of the congress develop and contract according to the part of power: the Republicans can achieve much more in the White House, or with the control of the Congress, that the Democrats do not it can.
This is partly due to the procedural approach of McConnell, which applies by folding the rules according to republican interests when they are in power and applying the rules to the point of functionally stopping legislative affairs when democrats take the majority . This is also contrary to democracy: constitutional powers cannot be limited for one party, and expanded for another, so that voters are only fully represented if they vote in a sense. The strategy of obstructionism has put an end to the congress as a legislative organ in all the most extreme circumstances. Which was most the most representative, most sensitive and important branch of the federal government fell to the status of a slightly actor, and the power to develop policies was abdicated to the executive and the courts . It is also McConnell.
Perhaps it was part of McConnell’s indifference to the integrity of democracy meant that he refused, at the time of Obama, to confirm one of the president’s judicial candidates. The vacant posts on the federal courts have accumulated, with empty seated seats and cases accumulating for the overworked judges who remained. But the seizure of McConnell of the power of judicial appointment of the executive was only in force when the president was a democrat; When the Republicans were in power, he blocked the courts full of far -right judges.
When Antonin Scalia died in 2016, under Obama, McConnell held the Supreme Court of the United States open for almost a year, hoping that Trump would win the 2016 elections and would have the possibility of appointing a replacement on the right . When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, just a few weeks before the 2020 elections, McConnell scrambled by the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett. His trends have therefore always been authoritarian: power, in his opinion, did not belong to those whom the people chose to represent them. It still belonged to the Republicans – no matter what the voters had to say about it.
Mitch McConnell is an old man. In 2026, when he finally left his duties, he will be 84 years old. He will not have to live in the world he has done, the one where what remained of American democracy is finally torn off. But we will do it. Each time you see a horror of the anti -democratic rule – whenever the cronyism is rewarded by competence, whenever cruelty is inflicted on dignity, each time the Constitution is flouted, mocked or treated like a simple embarrassment to ignore by men without respect for the law or for you – remember Mitch McConnell. You have to thank it.