Jay Newton-Small: What to make of a more cooperative Mitch McConnell

Recently, over coffee with New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich, I was lamenting about how political dysfunction had driven me from Washington and how broken Congress seemed to be.

In his quiet way, Heinrich corrected me.

“If you look at the last session in the Senate, it’s been one of the most productive in history,” he noted, “filled with bipartisan bills.”

He later added, “It’s an underreported fact that the past two Congresses have been among the most productive in recent history. Democrats and Republicans worked together to advance some of the most significant pieces of legislation ever — these new laws tackled the COVID pandemic, and they are rebuilding our infrastructure, fighting climate change, boosting American manufacturing, and addressing gun violence. We can do good work for the American people when we push partisan politics aside and focus on real solutions for the real challenges facing families today. The last few years are proof of that.”

That made me wonder: What has changed Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell? You may remember that at the dawn of the Obama era, McConnell made a vow: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” he told the National Journal in 2010.

Which led him to quash any bipartisan support for the Affordable Care Act, climate change, immigration and much more of President Barack Obama’s first-term agenda — many of which died on the vine for lack of support.

So, here we are again a dozen years later with another first-term Democratic president and McConnell literally spent the summer and fall campaigning for Biden initiatives — specifically funding for the wars in Israel and Ukraine, the latter of which is hardly a conservative darling. McConnell has also let through with bipartisan votes massive infrastructure bills, the Deficit Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, which incentivizes the development of computer chips at home rather than abroad, and the first tranches of war spending.

So, what has changed?

Yes, it’s well known that McConnell and Biden, a 36-year Senate veteran, have been friends for decades. But Biden was Obama’s vice president, and that hardly made a difference during Obama’s first term.

What has changed has less to do on the Democratic side as it does the Republican one. McConnell has never been much of a fan of former President Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. Even from the get-go, McConnell’s staff fretted about what a Trump presidency might do to the Republican Party.

On the balmy July night in 2016 when Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination for president at what is now Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in Cleveland, I was grabbing a last-minute bite at the nearby CNN Grille. I was surprised to spy then-Senate Majority Leader McConnell’s former chief-of-staff Josh Holmes at the bar with a group of McConnell staffers dug in deep, just minutes away from Trump taking the stage.

“Not attending the main event?” I inquired.

Holmes and his crew looked glum. “What’s the point?” Holmes said. He believed the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton would win and if she didn’t, then things would get really bad, he said. His worst-case scenario: Republicans win the White House and retain control of both chambers of Congress.

How can your party winning an outright victory and control of government be your worst-case scenario? I asked.

“Because then imagine the pressure Mitch McConnell will be under to get rid of the legislative filibuster,” Holmes replied.

I thought of that conversation many times over the ensuing four years, as Trump repeatedly tweeted at the majority leader to get rid of the filibuster. But McConnell resisted those calls, de facto protecting minority power in the Senate. And, as a byproduct, blocking easy passage of many of Trump’s initiatives such as the border wall, immigration ban and further tax cuts.

The Senate is known as the deliberative chamber, a little more removed from the House, whose democracy lies closer to the ground. In this era of smart phones and instantaneous gratification, voters want to see much of the same from Washington. Unfortunately, changing Washington is like turning an ocean liner, Obama used to say; you can only do it in incremental degrees. The only thing politicians can do quickly is kill their own leaders, something House Republicans are getting very good at, {span}having dispatched two of their own speakers in the past few years.{/span}

In the chaos, McConnell’s priorities might simply be closer to home: With West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin declining to seek reelection, control of the Senate is tantalizingly within McConnell’s grasp.

“I think McConnell’s top priority, by far, is recapturing the majority in the Senate,” says Norm Ornstein, a longtime political expert and author at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank. “And I am sure he is worried about the Republican brand given the lunatics running the House. So he is doing what he can to shore up his own members, and to be able to bring the best case he can against vulnerable Democrats.”

If a byproduct of that is facilitating Biden’s reelection, McConnell does not seem troubled. Somebody, after all, has to show that “that his GOP is not run by the crazies,” Ornstein adds. After all, McConnell would control the Senate in that scenario — and would provide the checks and balances he so dearly loves.