Sen. Mitch McConnell announced this week he is leaving his leadership post in November and will serve out his current term, which ends in 2026.  However, he may be planning to leave earlier than that.

With the SCOTUS probably delaying Donald Trump’s federal trials for the remainder of the year, The Trumpster has an excellent chance to win the presidential election.  Mitch has no interest at this point serving another Trump administration.

Remember also, for many reasons only Mitch knows, that he previously had the Republican Legislature pass a convoluted Senate vacancy law in 2021.  However, Democrat Governor Andy Beshear was re-elected last year and has made it known that he will try to circumvent this law, to appoint his own person.

Now Kentucky Republicans are moving through H.B. 622, which mandates an immediate special election for any U.S. Senate vacancy, just as we have in U.S. House elections.  No appointments for anyone.

This bill would become law in June.  It may be a simple precaution by Republicans to cover all the bases.  Or the senator may already have the wheels in motion to get his successor picked this summer and timed the voting for the November general election, when Trump will easily carry along any GOP nominee.

As Mitch McConnell fades into the sunset, I might point out that he was neither the genius Hugh Hewitt seems to think he is nor the evil genius Howard Fineman imagines.  (Fineman, by the way, worked many years here in Louisville, on our Democrat-cheerleading daily newspaper, where he stood out even then as the most partisan hack of all their writers.)  Rather, McConnell is just one of those people who knew from an early age what he wanted to do; and had a good idea how to go about it.  But rather than something like professional musician or medical doctor, etc., Mitch was determined to be a U.S. senator, like his hero, the liberal Republican John Sherman Cooper.  Working for Cooper and later for his mentor, Sen. Marlow Cook, Mitch saw up close the vicious Senate race in 1974 waged by Democrat Wendell Ford to unseat Cook.  Mitch then took a job with the Gerald Ford DOJ, impotently watching the Democrat Sen. Ford place holds on Republican judicial nominees.

When Mitch followed Marlow Cook, first as Jefferson County judge/executive and then in the U.S. Senate in 1984, he was all too happy to rejoin the confirmation battles with Ford and other Democrats like Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer.

As one of the last liberal Southern Republicans in the Reagan Era, Mitch eventually understood that he had to be pro-life and get on board, if unenthusiastically, with the rest of the modern conservative agenda.  What became his pet causes in the Senate, however — judicial appointments and protecting the fundraising ability and free speech rights of politicians — proved popular with the GOP base and with Senate Republican colleagues.  The campaign fund laws were of particular interest to the burgeoning network of conservative legal foundations, starting with the landmark 1976 case Buckley v. Valeo. 

In his many decades in office, McConnell has always been a reliable Republican partisan, because that’s who he is — but not a promoter of conservative ideas, because he was never a true believer.

McConnell is best remembered for stopping Justice Scalia’s replacement in 2016.  This was great, but let’s face it: it was a no-brainer.  Conservatives around the country were demanding this.  If he had not done so, Republicans in Kentucky would have tarred and feathered him.

I remember, a few minutes after Scalia’s death was announced Saturday morning, Feb. 13, I was texting Republicans around our state to contact McConnell’s office to demand No Obama Replacement.  This was a good time to do this, because it was right in the middle of the presidential primary, and all my buddies with the Trump, Cruz, and Paul campaigns were thinking the same thing.  By that afternoon, national bloggers were posting the idea as well.  McConnell, after all his battles with Harry Reid, was happy oblige us later that day.

McConnell would go on to shepherd a record number of conservative justices onto the court, thanks in large measure to Harry Reid ending the appointments filibuster when the Democrats ran the Senate.  McConnell would never have changed the Senate rules by his own volition, but Harry Reid crossed him with the Nuclear Option.  McConnell was then only too glad to repay the Democrats with their own rules when the GOP took back the Senate.

So the most consequential SCOTUS appointments in 80 years came about, not because of ideology, or grand strategy, or intellectual brilliance, but mere partisan tit-for-tat.  That’s how a lot of things happen in DC.   And it explains how the least popular politician in America was also the longest serving Senate leader in history.

Frank Friday is an attorney in Louisville, Ky.

Image: Mitch McConnell.  Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.