INSIDE THE MIND OF MITCH MCCONNELL
Sometimes you have to go to the future to understand the present….
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INT. HARVARD KENNEDY SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT CLASSROOM – DAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2022
DAVID GERGEN
Welcome to MLD-322, my course on “The Art and Adventures of Public Leadership.” We are so pleased to have with us today, at our first class of the semester, the Senate Majority Leader of the United States, the Honorable Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. I can think of no person who better embodies the themes of this course than Senator McConnell. I realize it might be difficult for those of you in the back of the room to hear the Senator, what with all the chanting and yelling going on outside. His visit has certainly stirred up a lot of….eeeerh…energy here on campus. Please give a warm Cambridge welcome to Senator Mitch McConnell.
McConnell rises from his chair and walks slowly, almost imperceptibly to the podium, where he and Gergen engage in an awkward elbow bump. McConnell carefully removes several pages of paper from his suit pocket and places them in front of him, looking down. Gradually facing the crowd of expectant students, McConnell flashes what some would call a version of a smile.
MITCH MCCONELL
Good morning, everyone. Let me make an obligatory joke about how my wife Elaine attended Harvard Business School and I went to Louisville.
Pauses for laughter that does not come.
MCCONNELL
It’s very nice to be here just one week before the conclusion what has been a very spirited primary contest between my good friend Chuck Schumer and that firebrand whippersnapper I call AOC. I consider the Gentlelady from New York to be my good friend as well, and come January, I suspect I just might be calling her something else: “Senate Colleague.”
I think we all agree that after the conclusion of that contest next Tuesday, it will be proper, according to American history and our important precedents, for the United States Senate to stop confirming any more Biden Administration nominees.
My good friend Joe Biden has been in office almost two years, during which time we have sometimes voted on his choices for the judiciary and executive branches. But with November, 2024 now only a little over two years away, tradition suggests all remaining open positions should be filled by the person the American people select as their 47th president.
So: “The Art and Adventures of Public Leadership.” Great topic. I will, as is my practice, speak briefly today and then I will be happy to not take your questions.
My role in the Biden years actually began before my good friend Joe even took office.
It was Tuesday, December 29, 2020.
Donald Trump was still the president and he was pretending on Twitter that he would do anything necessary to raise from six hundred dollars to two thousand dollars the direct payments Congress had just negotiated with his administration.
My attitude that day was the same as it was all four years of Trump’s presidency: He could tweet whatever he wanted and I would simply pay it no mind. Just more distractions that for some reason our friends in the media were just obsessed with.
I woke up that Tuesday winter morning with my goals clear in my head but absolutely opaque to the people of Kentucky and much of the media, but absolutely clear to Senator Schumer.
By the end of the week, I wanted to override the president’s veto of the defense authorization bill, always playing up our military personnel and patriotism while playing down the fact that we were about to override a Trump veto for the first time.
I wanted to get out of town without having raised the direct payment amount, since that is what most of the Senate Republicans wanted the outcome to be.
I wanted to do whatever was necessary to give political cover to the two Senators from Georgia, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, who faced runoffs in exactly one week from that day.
And I wanted to do all this without getting any real blame for thwarting what to my eye looked like a strange, unholy alliance of Trump-Pelosi-Schumer-Sanders-Hawley-and that guy from Connecticut whose name I can never remember. Oh, also your Mr. Markey.
I know “holy” is not a concept all y’all in Cambridge think much about. But “unholy,” well, that you get.
Now, I had one more important goal. I wanted to do all this without being accused of a political crime against those American families who were clamoring for the extra $1,400.
Any good Senate leader – your Bob Doles, your Tom Daschles – knows how to get away with a political crime without being charged.
Some might call it the “black arts” but what I did that day and that week truly embodied The Art and Adventures of Public Leadership. Not only was I not charged but most of the American public did not even know a crime had been committed.
By the end of the week, my good friend John Cornyn had disposed of the body, a new Congress had been sworn in, and I had achieved all of my goals.
The dynamic was both strange and familiar. The press corps was rooting for Schumer and the Democrats but also, just that once, for Trump. They really wanted the increase in direct payments to become law so much that they briefly sided with their enemy.
That Tuesday, everyone had waited days to hear how I was going to handle passage of the House’s clean direct payments bill. The media was playing up Marco Rubio’s just-announced support the night before and was on the hunt for more defecting Republican Senators.
So I practiced my art. The elements were simple. All I needed was to fuzz up the situation, run out the clock until the weekend and make sure that we never passed the exact legislation the House did.
I knew that we wouldn’t ever have 60 votes for Speaker Pelosi’s legislation but I couldn’t just say that. I also couldn’t say there were in fact 50 votes for it.
So throughout the day, I teased out various bits of cloudy language and ideas, starting with my floor speech to open the Senate at noon, both to use up time and to see what the traffic would bear.
My unlikely allies in all this?
President Trump, whose calls for a congressional investigation into the conduct of the 2020 election and the regulation of Harvard grad Mark Zuckerberg allowed me to pretend to prioritize all three issues together, threatening to roll them into one package, which could likely never pass the Senate, let alone the House, that week – or, really, any week.
Amazingly, much of the media treated my efforts almost as a legitimate attempt to legislate, rather than a pure Kentucky game of two card monte.
The media was in that way my ally too. Sure there were some headlines suggesting “McConnell Blocked the $2,000 Payments,” but I knew those would be little noticed by people out in the country – and that the passing parade would soon move on.
The Capitol Hill press corps loves process process process and drama drama drama -- and I gave them plenty of both to chase that Tuesday. After I teased my three-part mirage in the morning, I teed up a bill in the afternoon that rolled all of President Trump’s alleged goals into one package, and pretended they were my goals too!
I remember laughing at lines like these from the newspapers the next day, that I read in hard copy:
Democrats immediately assailed as a political gambit that would prevent the checks from ever being approved….
Democrats said Mr. McConnell’s decision to attach the checks to contentious issues was designed to sink the effort for bigger payments…
A decision by Mr. McConnell to link all of Mr. Trump’s demands together could sink the legislation.
“D’ya think?” I asked myself.
The funniest “analysis” – and I say that in what I think you younger people call “air quotes” — came from the New York Times.
The so-called “paper of record” – there are those “air quotes” again! — wrote
Mr. McConnell’s move came as he faced growing pressure from Republicans to increase stimulus payments to struggling Americans.
I assure you, I was under no pressure, especially and including from Republicans.
My favorite newspaper editorial that day came from an unlikely source. It said that the House payments were “a bad idea” and “wasteful policy.” I chuckled as I silently thanked my friends from, of all places, the Washington Post.
I didn’t schedule a vote on my own bill and I said the most McConnelly thing maybe ever: “This week the Senate will begin a process to bring these three priorities into focus.”
As muddy as Churchill Downs after a monsoon.
Then I sent Senator Cornyn out to throw a bunch of stuff against the wall, meant to appease and confuse Trump and his coalition — and the news people. We should focus on the law that the president just signed, with plenty of money for the American people. This House bill is a dangerous vehicle. We have a big deficit. Let’s bring back our COVID liability reform idea and pair it with the House bill. Etc.
Even Senators like my Republican colleagues Susan Collins and Deb Fischer, who seemed to back two-thousand-dollar payments, expressed countless reservations and caveats. The media was wrongly suggesting that they were with Mr. Hawley in demanding a clean up or down vote on the House measure. Didn’t bother me.
There were no signs of grassroots uprisings, no folks that the communications staffs of Speaker Pelosi and Leader Schumer call “real people,” holding well publicized sit-ins on the Hill (thanks, COVID), or at my homes in the DC area or back in Kentucky. I might not be the world’s most articulate or warm-and-fuzzy spokespeople, but in a battle confined to floor speeches, media statements, and press conferences, I can hold my own against a guy from Brooklyn and a lady from San Francisco.
Most ironically, Senator Sanders, a New Englander, was my ally too. His demand that we vote on the House bill before we moved to the defense override was doomed to fail in the end, but it would create more process for the media to cover AND chew up a lot of time spent not voting on the House bill. I don’t know what you call that at Harvard, but in Lexington, we call that irony.
I let Senators Perdue and Loeffler say they were for the two thousand dollar payments, but made sure they didn’t join the calls to insist on a clean up-or-down-50-votes-will-do chance to consider the House bill on the Senate floor. (The coverage in the Atlanta paper played very well for us, with little focus on this distinction.)
Again, I knew there were 50 votes for the Pelosi bill. But I also knew there weren’t 60 votes for it, and that was my north star.
Schumer’s gaffe from several weeks before about winning the Georgia races and changing America had hurt him with his donors and also with the media. He just didn’t have the juice he would otherwise have had that day, especially after failing to win the majority in November.
So even though he decoded exactly what I was doing, the media coverage did not truly reflect the reality.
The Washington Post wrote that day that Schumer said my efforts, and I quote, were an
[A]ttempt to package all these items into one bill …to poison the bipartisan effort to deliver larger checks and would be opposed by Democrats. In a statement, he called it “a blatant attempt to deprive Americans of a $2,000 survival check….”
“There’s a major difference in saying you support $2,000 checks and fighting to put them into law,” he said. “The House bill is the only way to deliver these stimulus checks before the end of session. Will Senate Republicans stand against the House of Representatives, the Democratic majority in the Senate and the president of their own party to prevent these $2,000 checks from going out the door?”
“Blatant.” Yes, but detected? No.
There was a lot of other news that day from around the country and the world and the Capitol Hill circus was not the lead of too many newspapers or newscasts.
The Washington Post also reported of my legislative strategy:
McConnell started the process for moving to votes on two bills later in the week. One would be the House-passed bill for approving $2,000 stimulus checks. The second measure would combine the $2,000 checks with the establishment of a commission to study election fraud and a repeal of liability protections for technology companies and other firms.
The truth was, I hadn’t decided yet if I would allow a vote on the House bill. It didn’t really matter. All my Republican colleagues – including the two from the Peach State – would get to vote however they wanted on some number of bills.
Whatever we ended up voting on by the conclusion of the week, six things were already clear that day.
First, the Wall Street Journal editorial board – and, not coincidentally or incidentally, the donors – would be with me, no matter what I did.
Second, we would override the president’s defense authorization veto. I wouldn’t have said we couldn’t fail on that if I didn’t already know we had the votes. I knew then what I know now: how to count.
Third, my Georgians would be protected.
Fourth, Trump couldn’t say I didn’t try to accommodate him. Well, he could say it, but no one would much care.
Fifth, history would record that Bernie Sanders and I both supported legislation that included higher direct payments for working class Americans. We just displayed that support in different manners.
And finally, the House’s two-grand bill would have as much chance of becoming law as a mint julep has of surviving undrunk at a Derby party. That’s my only other attempt at humor.
Good afternoon.
McConnell, without making eye contact with Gergen, departs.
FADE TO BLACK
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READINGS
* Associated Press: “President-elect Joe Biden criticized the Trump administration Tuesday for the pace of distributing COVID-19 vaccines and predicted that ‘things will get worse before they get better’ when it comes to the pandemic.”
* Reuters: “The first known U.S. case of a highly infectious coronavirus variant discovered in Britain was detected in Colorado on Tuesday… a man in his 20s with no recent travel history who is currently in isolation in Elbert County, a semi-rural area on the outskirts of the greater Denver metropolitan area..”
* Bloomberg: “Texas posted a record 26,990 new Covid-19 cases on Tuesday, shattering the previous all-time high established less than a week ago.”
Alabama, long one of the unhealthiest and most impoverished states in America, has emerged as one of the nation’s most alarming coronavirus hot spots.
Its hospitals are in crisis as the virus rages out of control in a region with high rates of obesity, high blood pressure and other conditions that can make COVID-19 even more dangerous, where access to health care was limited even before the outbreak, and where public resistance to masks and other precautions is stubborn.
* Leana Wen’s Washington Post op ed on the vaccine goals not being met and what should be done about it.
* Politico: “Rep.-elect Luke Letlow (R-La.) has died from the coronavirus, multiple sources confirmed Tuesday evening. He was 41.”
* Louisville Courier-Journal: “The Louisville Metro Police Department is seeking to fire two more officers in the police shooting of Breonna Taylor — one who sought the ‘no-knock’ search warrant for her apartment and a second who fired the fatal bullet.”
* Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “Catching up with U.S. Sen. David Perdue is no small feat lately. Although the senator is on what he describes as a 125-town statewide bus tour, for all but the largest events with other Republicans, his campaign alerts only GOP supporters and a few local media outlets in advance. The general public and most reporters learn about them through Perdue’s Twitter feed later.”
* Washington Post: “The Manhattan District Attorney's Office has retained forensic accounting specialists to aid its criminal investigation of President Trump and his business operations, as prosecutors ramp up their scrutiny of his company's real estate transactions, according to people familiar with the matter.”
* Politico:
President Donald Trump has come out on top as Americans’ most-admired man for 2020, according to Gallup’s annual survey, ending former President Barack Obama’s 12-year run with the title….
Former first lady Michelle Obama still ranks as the most-admired woman in 2020, earning the title for the third year in a row, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris in second place.
The chief judge on Delaware’s Court of Chancery has announced that he is resigning from his post early next year.
Chancellor Andre Bouchard sent a letter to Gov. John Carney on Monday announcing that he plans to retire from the bench effective April 30, roughly seven years after he was sworn into a 12-year term of office in 2014.
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