the only thing that mattered was if the
nominee was professionally qualified. In
2016, though, he said it made no differ-
ence how qualified Garland, a highly re-
spected moderate judge, was. Before then,
the Senate had never declined to con-
sider a nominee simply because it was
an election year. On the contrary, the
Senate had previously confirmed seven-
teen Supreme Court nominees during
election years and rejected two. Never-
theless, McConnell prevailed.
He has since vowed to fill any Su-
preme Court vacancy that might open
this year, no matter how close to the
election it is. Indeed, according to a for-
mer Trump White House official, “Mc-
Connell’s telling our donors that when
R.B.G. meets her reward, even if it’s
October, we’re getting our judge. He’s
saying it’s our October Surprise.”
McConnell has pointed to his ob-
struction of Garland with pride, saying,
“The most important decision I’ve made
in my political career was the decision
not to do something.” Many believe that,
in 2016, the open Court seat motivated
evangelical voters to overlook their doubts
about Trump, providing the crucial bloc
that won him the Presidency.
But McConnell’s predecessor as Ma-
jority Leader, the retired Democratic
senator Harry Reid, of Nevada, accuses
McConnell of destroying norms that
fostered comity and consensus, such as
the restrained use of filibusters. Although
the two leaders had at first managed to
be friendly, bonding over their shared
support for Washington’s baseball team,
the Nationals, they became bitter antag-
onists during the Obama Administra-
tion. “Mitch and the Republicans are
doing all they can to make the Senate
irrelevant,” Reid told me. “We’ve watched
them stand mute no matter what Trump
does. They have lost their souls. From a
policy perspective, it’s awful. It’s hurt the
Senate and damaged the country.”
T
he costs of the Senate’s dysfunction
stretch in all directions, and include
America’s vulnerability in the face of the
COVID-19 outbreak. For seven years after
Obama’s signature domestic achievement,
the Affordable Care Act, passed, in 2010,
Republicans in Congress tried at least
sixty times to repeal it. In 2017, McCon-
nell, who called it “the worst bill in mod-
ern history,” led the charge again and,
among other things, personally intro-
duced a little-noticed amendment to elim-
inate the Prevention and Public Health
Fund at the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, which provided grants
to states for detecting and responding to
infectious-disease outbreaks, among other
things. The fund received approximately
a billion dollars a year and constituted
more than twelve per cent of the C.D.C.’s
annual budget. Almost two-thirds of the
money went to state and local health de-
partments, including a program called
Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity
for Prevention and Control of Emerg-
ing Infectious Diseases, in Kentucky.
Hundreds of health organizations, in-
cluding the Association for Profession-
als in Infection Control and Epidemi-
ology, sent a letter to McConnell and
other congressional leaders, warning them
of “dire consequences” if the Prevention
Fund was eliminated. Public-health pro-
grams dealing with infectious-disease
outbreaks had never been restored to the
levels they were at before the 2008 crash
and were “critically underfunded.” The
letter concluded, “Eliminating the Pre-
vention Fund would be disastrous.”
In a column in Forbes, Judy Stone, an
infectious-disease specialist, asked, “Wor-ried about bird flu coming from Asia?
Ebola? Zika? You damn well should be.
Monitoring and control will be slashed
by the Senate proposal and outbreaks of
illness (infectious and other) will un-
doubtedly worsen.” The cuts, she wrote,
were “unconscionable—particularly given
that the savings will go to tax cuts for
the wealthiest rather than meeting the
basic health needs of the public.”
On July 28, 2017, a dramatic thumbs-
down vote by Senator John McCain
stopped Senate Republicans from elim-
inating the entire Affordable Care Act,
including money for the Prevention Fund.
McConnell and other Republicans sub-
sequently tried again to gut the C.D.C.
fund. Much of the funding survived, al-
though some of it was later shifted, with
bipartisan support, to cancer research and
other activities. McConnell’s attempt to
kill the fund was just a small piece of the
Republicans’ much larger undermining
of Obamacare. According to Jeff Levi, a
professor of public health at George
Washington University, one result of the
Republicans’ efforts is that many Amer-
icans who lack insurance “will likely avoid
getting tested and treated for COVID-19,
because they fear the costs.”
McConnell’s opposition to Obama