Bulwark Takes - Mitch McConnell Can’t Save Himself From His Legacy

Episode Date: February 15, 2025

Sarah and Sam break down Mitch McConnell's decision to vote against Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and RFK Jr. despite his history of enabling Donald Trump.

Hey guys, me Sam Stein here with Sarah Longwell. So RFK Jr. was just confirmed. We're actually not going to talk necessarily about that. We're going to talk about the one Republican senator who voted against him, Mitch McConnell. Mitch McConnell voted against RFK Jr., put out a statement noting that he is a survivor of polio and that he believes that people who question the efficacy of vaccines do not deserve the public's trust, especially if they're going to lead the biggest public health institute in the country. Now, Mitch has become the only Republican to vote against multiple cabinet nominees. He's voted against Tulsi. He's voted against Pete Hegseth.

He's now voted against RFK. Hegseth had a couple others, but everyone else has gotten almost unanimous support except for Mitch McConnell. What do you make of it? He's obviously getting up there, but frankly, no one else has done what he's done for Senate Republicans. Yeah. So I wanted to jump on and talk about Mitch McConnell because, you know, we've been seeing some reports about McConnell and sort of how he is now. He's in a wheelchair. He is much diminished. He's had some falls. He's had some freezing episodes. And it's interesting because he's a long way from sort of the cocaine Mitch that at his height, right. Was still in the early days of Trump, you know, Mitch McConnell did not care for Trump, but he saw, I think Trump is a short-term thing to navigate. Uh, and I've been, I've just been really, as he takes these votes and where he's the only one, like not Collins, not Murkowski, not Tillis, not any of the people you think. Mitch McConnell alone is refusing to say yes to these. Now, does that make him a tragic figure or an ignominious

figure, right? Is he worthy of our sort of, is it a disgrace? Is he disgraced now? And so he just, in his moment of disgrace, is he facing that by being the lone Republican vote? Or, or is it there's, or is there a tragedy to the idea that Mitch McConnell simply failed? It was a failure of imagination, right? He was the person, There were seven senators, seven Republican senators. Seven Republican senators, right. In 2020, after January 6th, who voted to convict. 2021. Sorry, 2021.

Sorry, after the 2020 election. In 2021, after the January 6th attempts to overturn the election, Democrats, who at the time were the majority in the House, voted to impeach. And you needed 17, I believe, total Republicans. They needed more than they had. Yes. So the situation is it's 50-50 Senate, and you need 67 for a conviction. So if you get seven, you're still 10 short. You're still 10 short. But those 10 were probably there. And the way that you would have gotten those 10 at the time is if Mitch McConnell had said, I'm whipping votes for this, like we're going to do this, we're all going to go down together.

And Mitch McConnell gave a somewhat famous speech at the time in which he said that Trump was morally and temperamentally responsible for the events of the day, but that he thought the legal system, the legal system was there to take care of Trump. Boy, was he right. They nailed that one. And I guess, you know, this is when Trump starts making racist attacks against Mitch McConnell's wife, Elaine Chao, who resigned from the administration. She was a cabinet member. And so I guess I'm curious, Sam, because I've been sitting here thinking about this ignominious or tragic as a man who sat at a hinge point in history, made the wrong call, and now has his legacy torched and is personally being humiliated on on basically a daily basis and is doing to me taking one flaccid protest vote after another that is

essentially meaningless because he's he let everybody off the hook for so long but tell me how you think about it oh i saw i i don't know if there's a good answer to this. There is a tragic element to this, if you look at it, but there's also a sort of a you made your bed element. I understand why people look at Mitch McConnell and say, too little, too late. This is your fault. You built this kind of Frankenstein's monster situation. And then I also understand people who look at what he's doing and say, at least someone, right? Because I think if we had truth serum,

or if we just sort of were being honest about it, McConnell's vote, his votes probably represent where, what? A quarter to a third of the Republican Senate caucuses. For sure. Spiritually, right? Like if they had no, if they had any spine, if they had no concern about, you know, being primaried, I think it would be very fair to say that we'd have no Robert Kennedy at HHS, no Kash Patel potentially at FBI, certainly no Hexup.

So it's, to a degree, it's at least, you know, important to have one person make this case, have the moral clarity to make this case. And if it has to be McConnell, so be it. Then again, you look at it and you say, this is your doing. If anyone is responsible for Trump, other than, you know, Trump himself and the voters who supported him, it's McConnell. I mean, it really is.

He laid the groundwork for the Republican Party to embrace this. And at any point he could have, and he did have the power to, you know, push them towards an off ramp. And he didn't take it because power was ultimately too alluring for him. And now in a weird Shakespearean way, he's without power and he's frail and he's at the last chapter of his public career, at least. And he's casting these largely ineffectual, but morally clarifying votes. And, you know, maybe it makes him feel good. And maybe it makes him feel like he's made up for some past sins that he committed. But again, they're ineffectual, right? Like, it's just a vote, and we'll forget it, and the damage is done.

Yeah, I guess I want to both, I both want to recognize the tragedy of it all and sort of acknowledge that – Well, I guess – hold on. Let me ask you. Do you think – how do you think he feels about it? Like I don't want to play too much of like a psychoanalyst here. I'll put him on the couch. But like do you think he looks at this and says, I need to repent? Or do you think he's just feeling liberated because he's no longer in leadership?

Is it a mix of both? Is he angry because of Trump's attacks on Elaine Chao? Is he worried about his legacy? I think he is somebody who is humiliated, who is grappling with his life choices. I suspect that he's 82, I i believe and starting to suffer real uh health challenges um and if i were him i think you know looking at rfk like looking at what he helped to unleash and not helped like in the oh i was a republican one you know like at a again i want to he's a hinge point figure historically he he did this in a way that

he was uniquely suited to right have have have taken us down a different path and chose not to and so um i think that uh yeah he's he is doing this now not as like not as a liberated person again i i would refer to them as sort of flaccid attempts to say, to just register, probably a despair register, the idea that this is wrong and he doesn't think it's the right way to go. But I, here's the thing, I do not like, and I push back against myself all the time. One thing I try to remember or a rule I try to live by is it's never too late to do the right thing. And so when somebody does the right thing, I do not like to jump on them reflexively

and say, yeah, but if you had done things this way or whatever, okay. I guess I just, I don't think that's helpful. And I don't think it's a good way to incentivize people to do the right thing. Right. However, in this case, I've been thinking about this in this particular case of Mitch McConnell. I do think he is ignominious. I do think that the disgrace that he feels is deserved and not because he couldn't have seen this coming. I understand sort of not being able to see this coming. But you said something earlier that I think is at the heart of it, which is a lust for power. And I think that Mitch McConnell was well known for

being a tremendous tactician. But he in his own way, in his own lust for power, did a lot to break down the norms of sort of civility of the body of the Senate, you know, not confirming Merrick Garland and doing some of the things. And look, the Republicans and the Democrats, I could point both ways, like Republicans will take you all the way back to Bork about how unfair that was. And, you know, you could litigate this thing. It gets very Israel-Palestine, very fast. You're back into the into the early days of who did what when. But Mitch McConnell made a series of bad choices for power that he knew were wrong for the Republican Party, that he knew were wrong for the country. And I do think he's going to sort of live out the rest of his life looking at what he's sort of what he wrought and regretting it deeply. And I think he should regret it deeply.

And I think there's the other irony here, which is, I don't know if this is true, but he's always described as an institutionalist. And I think a lot of people kind of found that to be ridiculous because they don't view him that way. He's critics, but he viewed himself that way. And his institution that he cared about the most was Congress and the Senate. And he leaves or will be leaving office with the institution of Congress greatly diminished, right? Like here we have a situation where uh donald trump has basically decided he doesn't really care what congress does and he's basically browbeat congress to his submission and he's going to take back like the the ability of congress to determine

appropriations and you know he's going to stuff these terribly unqualified nominees for federal agencies down the throat and say hey screw you if you. If you don't do it, I'm going to primary you or I'm going to do this in a recess appointment. And so this whole idea of McConnell as an institutionalist, that was his North Star, which I don't believe. I believe Power was his North Star. But if you think of him as an institutionalist, he will have presided over the great diminishment of his institution. And I think that has to hang over his head a little bit, that he will leave, you know, office with the presidency never having been more powerful. Yeah, I think that is true. And I but I guess I'm also

it's not that I'm going to resist giving him credit for being the lone Republican vote here, because once again, he's not using his power to whip any other votes or any, I mean, in his power, you know, and still because he has these like weird quirky ways in which he cares about the institution, like he doesn't want to get in Thune's way. And like, you know, and who knows what just like in just a general what his energy level is for a fight and whatever. But I do think from a historical perspective, I think a lot about what it took for us to get here with Trump. And I think if you went to Mitch McConnell before he decided to vote on impeachment and you showed him the future and you said, even Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are going to vote to add RFK to the cabinet. And if you don't vote for impeachment, like he gets. He'd be like, the fuck, RFK?

Yeah, like he's like, I just, but I just went through a whole term of this. How could we be? I'd like, no, you're insane. No, you're crazy. This will never happen. This is an AI simulation. What are you talking about? That's right.

I think that if you could show Mitch McConnell where we are right now, like the ghost of Christmas past or whatever goes and visits him and says – It would be the ghost of Christmas future. It would have been the ghost of Christmas future, but back then. Right. And so if that had happened, I think he would have 100% been like, all right, guys, we're all doing this together. We're going to impeach this guy and he's never going to be able to do this again. No way.

Yeah. Of course he would have. He would have thought it insane to think of this. And it was insane. Six months ago, this was totally insane. And this is why I won't let him off the hook. I won't let him off the hook because he should. The guy just tried to overthrow the government and the response was, I'm going to do nothing. I'm going to do

nothing about it. And so I think ultimately that's it, right? This just comes down to January 6th. It's like some horrible, horrible trauma happened to our body politic. Nothing like we've seen before. And everyone knew it was bad. And the who is a mcavillian uh obsessed with power decided in that moment he was not going to use his power that's right and that was that and that was that's why we're here and that's why we're here nobody we can get mad and i think there is right now i also want to be careful of like i'm very a lot of us have a place we're looking to put sort of our anger at what is currently happening. And I hesitate because I think, you know, there's a lot of places you could put it there on fair or where you would be dramatically overstating what they could have done about it.

Right. That's not true of Mitch McConnell. It's not true. Right. I have more Merrick Garland. That was a really those were some pretty tough calls. I get very frustrated that they moved so slowly. I think they should have proceeded on the January 6th case and the documents case, you know, like much, but like, I can understand why as an institution, you go fromconnell's failure was so clear and so wrong and it is his fault like putting the anger on mitch mcconnell is fair i think it's totally fair and even if even if he couldn't have whipped 10 extra votes uh it there is sort of a uh a question of more of

personal character to not have tried right Like, he should have tried. And I think if you're right that the ghost of Christmas future came to him in that moment, he would have gone back and said, yeah, you know, I don't want this future and I don't think this is the right future. And frankly, I was wrong to assume that the justice system would have taken care of this guy. Anyways, we'll see. We still have the Kash Patel full Senate vote next week or maybe this weekend. I don't know. I'm not, I don't, I assume he'll get through. We're in a weird place. It is what it is. I will say Mitch is an interesting, at least with McConnell, there's a interesting debate around what he's thinking. With some of these

other senators, it's very clear some of these other other senators. It's very clear that they're just protecting themselves. So, you know, and we talked about this a little bit on the next level, but just for people who haven't gone through the whole show to get to the end, I would like to restate for this. The fact that Murkowski and Collins, like it actually shouldn't be that hard to muster for Republican votes against these guys. But the fact that Murkowski and Collins, like it actually shouldn't be that hard to muster for Republican votes against these guys. But the fact that Murkowski and Collins and Tillis, Cassidy, some of these others are all confirming people who are by any objective measure, totally unqualified, if not outright

dangerous. I would like to say like moderate Republicans aren't good for anything anymore. Like I used to be a big defender of them. dangerous, I would like to say, like, moderate Republicans aren't good for anything anymore. Like, I used to be a big defender of them. And I just I want to say, because I thought there was it's important to have those people represented. Not anymore. We should absolutely defeat Susan Collins. Like Susan Collins. She should needs to lose her next Senate race. She'll be tough to be with the RFK one that would be RFK one, especially we can, we don't have to go much further than this, but in that case, it's not that it was, you know, you can make the case that it's not even like, he's not a crank and a conspiracist, that all this stuff that he wants to do with health, which I personally support, but it wasn't so long ago that Republicans said, why is the government telling us what we can and cannot feed our kids? There are ideological ways to oppose him and

maintain your conservative credentials. All the conservative press outlets were opposed to the guy. And yet, you know, like you said, the so-called moderate block in the Senate of Republicans just did not show at all. And so there's no there's no there's no difference then. Like if you're not going to use your your sort of maverick card on Kash Patel or on Tulsi Gabbard or on RFK, then like, what's the point of having you there? You're not, if that's not, if that's not, if your limiting principle doesn't stop you at those, like then who cares? Yeah. Like if you're just going to stand up for a few EPA grants in your state, like you're kind of missing the boat here. I think that's right. The high stakes are the most important. All right, Sarah, thanks so much. Really appreciate you doing this. Thank you guys for tuning in. Thank you.

Subscribe. We gotta get that pizza. Take care. I get that pizza. Bye bye.