64 THENEWYORKER,APRIL20, 2020
of his career. And, if you want to con-
trol Congress, the best way is to con-
trol the money.”
Between 1984, when McConnell was
first elected to the Senate, and today, the
amount of money spent on federal cam-
paigns has increased at least sixfold, ex-
cluding outside spending, more and more
of which comes from very rich donors.
Influence-peddling has grown from a
grubby, shameful business into a multi-
billion-dollar, high-paying industry. Mc-
Connell has led the way in empowering
those private interests, and in aligning
the Republican Party with them. His staff
embodied “the revolving door,” as they
went from working for one of America’s
poorest states to lobbying for America’s
richest corporations, while growing rich
themselves and helping fund McCon-
nell’s campaigns. Money from the coal
industry, tobacco companies, Big Pharma,
Wall Street, the Chamber of Commerce,
and many other interests flowed into Re-
publican coffers while McConnell blocked
federal actions that those interests op-
posed: climate-change legislation, afford-
able health care, gun control, and efforts
to curb economic inequality.
McConnell, like L.B.J., used fund-rais-
ing to help allies and punish enemies.
“What he’s done behind the scenes is
apply the thing that speaks louder in
Washington, D.C., than anything else—
money,” Wilson, the former Republican
consultant, said. “Suddenly, Susan Col-
lins gets a bridge in Maine. Lisa Mur-
kowski suddenly gets a harbor. Oh, what
a coincidence!” McConnell has a brilliant
grasp of his caucus members’ needs, and
he helps them protect their seats with
tens of millions of dollars in campaign
donations and federal grants, some of
which come through Chao’s Department
of Transportation. (A department spokes-
man says that there is no political link-
age, and that every state gets some money.)
McConnell also lets his caucus members
take the spotlight, and, when he can, he
allows them to skip votes that will be un-
popular with their constituents. In pri-
vate, McConnell can be bitingly funny,
as well as sentimental—he has been
known to tear up over an aide’s depar-
ture—but he is shrewdly guarded, report-
edly subscribing to the maxim “You can’t
get in trouble for what you don’t say.” He
takes care to cover his tracks, putting pri-
vate notes in his pocket rather than toss-
ing them into Senate wastebaskets. And
he protects his allies. In 2013, McCon-
nell’s lieutenants—who are known as
Team Mitch—established a policy of
blackballing anyone who works against
an incumbent member of his caucus. Re-
cently, in a Georgia Senate race, consul-
tants working for the Republican con-
gressman Doug Collins were warned that
they would be frozen out for helping him
challenge Kelly Loeffler, the incumbent,
who is McConnell’s choice in the pri-
mary, despite recent accusations against
her of insider trading. (Loeffler denies
wrongdoing.) Insubordination can result
in what a former Trump White House
official calls the Death Penalty: the Pres-
ident is told that the miscreant will not
be confirmed by the Senate for any Ad-
ministration job.
McConnell’s iron control has won
praise from other Republicans. Chris
Christie, the former governor of New
Jersey, told me, “He’s the most talented
Majority Leader since Lyndon John-
son. He knows how to count the votes,
when to push, and when to pull. He’s a
real technician who knows the rules and
knows his caucus.”
Caro said, “In a way, McConnell and
Johnson are very similar. They both used
the rules and procedures of the Senate
with great deftness. But, in a more
significant way, they couldn’t be more
diametrically opposite. Johnson, for all
his faults, in his later years used the rules
and procedures to turn the Senate into
a force to create social justice. McCon-
nell has used them to block it.”U
nder McConnell’s leadership, as
the Washington Post’s Paul Kane
wrote recently, the chamber that calls
itself the world’s greatest deliberative
body has become, “by almost every mea-
sure,” the “least deliberative in the mod-
ern era.” In 2019, it voted on legislation
only a hundred and eight times. In 1999,
by contrast, the Senate had three hun-
dred and fifty such votes, and helped
pass a hundred and seventy new laws.
At the end of 2019, more than two hun-
dred and seventy-five bills, passed by
the House of Representatives with bi-
partisan support, were sitting dormant
on McConnell’s desk. Among them are
bills mandating background checks on
gun purchasers and lowering the cost
of prescription drugs—ideas that areoverwhelmingly popular with the pub-
lic. But McConnell, currently the top
recipient of Senate campaign contribu-
tions from the pharmaceutical industry,
has denounced efforts to lower drug
costs as “socialist price controls.”
Longtime lawmakers in both parties
say that the Senate is broken. In Febru-
ary, seventy former senators signed a bi-
partisan letter decrying the institution
for not “fulfilling its constitutional du-
ties.” Dick Durbin, of Illinois, who has
been in the Senate for twenty-four years
and is now the second-in-command in
the Democratic leadership, told me that,
under McConnell, “the Senate has dete-
riorated to the point where there is no
debate whatsoever—he’s dismantled the
Senate brick by brick.” McConnell was
the Minority Leader from 2006 to 2014.
After Barack Obama was elected in 2008,
McConnell used the filibuster to block
a record number of bills and nominations
supported by the Administration. As Ma-
jority Leader, he has control over the
chamber’s schedule, and he keeps bills
and nominations he opposes from even
coming up for consideration. “He’s the
traffic cop, and you can’t get through the
intersection without him,” Durbin said.
Norman Ornstein, a political scien-
tist specializing in congressional matters
at the conservative-leaning American
Enterprise Institute, told me that he has
known every Senate Majority Leader in
the past fifty years, and that McConnell
“will go down in history as one of the
most significant people in destroying the
fundamentals of our constitutional de-
mocracy.” He continued, “There isn’t any-
one remotely close. There’s nobody as
corrupt, in terms of violating the norms
of government.”
The most famous example of Mc-
Connell’s obstructionism was his auda-
cious refusal to allow a hearing on Mer-
rick Garland, whom Obama nominated
for the Supreme Court, in 2016. When
Justice Antonin Scalia unexpectedly died,
vacating the seat, there were three hun-
dred and forty-two days left in Obama’s
second term. But McConnell argued that
“the American people” should decide
who should fill the seat in the next elec-
tion, ignoring the fact that the Ameri-
can people had elected Obama. As a
young lawyer, McConnell had argued in
an academic journal that politics should
play no part in Supreme Court picks;