The Daily - What Motivates Mitch McConnell?

Episode Date: February 5, 2019

Over the past decade, the Senate Republican leader has emerged as a skilled legislative warrior, obstructing President Barack Obama’s agenda and enabling President Trump’s. But what does Mitch McConnell himself actually believe in? Guest: Charles Homans, the politics editor for The New York Times Magazine. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. Over the past decade, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has emerged as a skilled legislative warrior, obstructing President Obama's agenda and enabling President Trump's. But what does McConnell himself actually believe in?

It's Tuesday, February 5th. It's February 2016. Mitch McConnell is on vacation. He's just arrived at the airport in St. Thomas with his wife, Elaine Chao. The Senate is on vacation. He's just arrived at the airport in St. Thomas with his wife, Elaine Chao. The Senate is on recess. It's Valentine's Day or thereabouts. They get off the plane and he gets the news on his phone that Judge Antonin Scalia has died on this quail hunting trip in Texas. So we went to the hotel and checked in. And I began to think about our interaction with each other over the years. You know, we were not fast friends, but we would So Mitch McConnell has a tremendous amount of power in this situation.

Charles Holmes is the political editor of the Times Magazine. He's the Senate Majority Leader, and one of the things that the Senate majority leader controls is the calendar for appointments. So he can use his power as Senate majority leader if he wants to, to keep President Obama from filling the seat. If you're someone like me and most of my colleagues who would rather see America right of center than left of center, at the top of the list, if you want to have a long-term impact, would be lifetime opponents to the courts. And he knows, you know, the Supreme Court has been

just astronomically important to conservatives for the better part of a generation. And he knows there's going to be a huge amount of attention on his decision here. And, you know, whether he's going to sort of let the normal process

run its course, or whether he's going to do something more extreme here that nobody in his position, you know, really has done. And the first thing I thought was, if the shoe was on the other foot, would a Democratic Senate confirm a Supreme Court nominee of a Republican president in the middle of a presidential election? Here, I knew the answer would be no. And so I've sent out

a statement saying the next president should fill the vacancy. And he makes this decision that he is going to keep President Obama from filling the seat, not only through the end of his term, but also through the end of the election. In the hopes that a Republican will win and that he will have deprived a Democrat, Obama, from having appointed a Supreme Court justice. Exactly. And I think that's the most consequential thing I've ever done. I think he viewed this really as sort of the culminating act of his work as Senate Majority Leader.

So if McConnell sees this as his crowning moment, I wonder what that tells you about his motivations, especially in his role as a Republican leader in this moment. I was really curious about those motivations, too, because they're a lot less apparent with McConnell than they are with a lot of other politicians. I think it's always important to remember that unless you win the election, you don't get to make a policy. You know, winners make policy and losers go do something else. And he plays his cards very close to his vest and isn't really a demonstrative figure in any way. He's very Sphinx-like in a lot of his vests. Very unknowable. Yeah, very unknowable.

Have the photo session go. Who knows? My view of that is given what they have to work with, I'm always just hopeful. I spoke to him for quite a long time. We had several interviews that ran over the course of several hours and talked to a lot of people around him and a lot of his many opponents over the years also. Well, I had sort of a very random question to begin with, which came out of the conversation I had with him. And where does the story for you, and I guess for him, begin?

Well, he grew up in the rural South and moved to Louisville as a boy for his father's work. He was an only child. And he grew up, I think, kind of by his own admission, a somewhat lonely kid at first in Louisville. And he was really into baseball as a kid and realized he wasn't ever going to be that great at it. And at a really kind of alarmingly young age, switched his interest over to politics.

I just was fascinated by the Senate from an early age and hoped that I might have an opportunity to serve here sometime. By the time he was in high school, he had really sort of discovered an aptitude for politics and an interest in politics. And he ran these incredibly premeditated, carefully orchestrated campaigns for student government, even. He was basically a pretty full-fledged politician, I think, by the time he graduated from college and had decided this was the thing that he wanted to do. At this point, what were McConnell's politics?

It's interesting. I mean, they are kind of difficult to untangle. He notes his early admiration for Goldwater, but he also— Very conservative. Yeah, very conservative. But at the same time, he was considered an ally by abortion rights activists in Louisville at the time. His first wife was a feminist scholar who later ran a feminist archive at Smith College

and collaborated with Gloria Steinem. He had also spoken on behalf of civil rights in college. But when I was young, that was the issue of our generation. Sort of dealing with America's original sin. So at the start, it seems like he's a pretty moderate to even progressive Republican. I think you could classify him as a moderate Republican early in his career. By the time he himself was elected to the Senate in 1984, the Republican Party had changed dramatically. was elected to the Senate in 1984, the Republican Party had changed dramatically. At this point,

the real gravitational center of the party had shifted towards the conservative movement that had been empowered by Reagan's candidacy. And you see McConnell's politics very much sort of changed to match the times. He was someone who was very ambitious and wanted to get somewhere in the Republican Party. And I think he understood then he had been very much from the sort of old moderate wing of the party. And that party he understood then he had been very much from the sort of old moderate wing of the party, and that party was no longer in a position of power in 1985. So with that in mind, what does McConnell do once he settles into the Senate? So he spends his first couple of years kind of trying to find his footing, as I think most freshman senators do. And it's around this time that a handful of Democratic senators have started

really agitating on campaign finance reform. One of these days, the American people are going to wake up and they're going to ask themselves, has it been good for this country that the cost of running the United States Senate has gone from $600,000 to $3 million in 10 years? All these questions are sort of in the air at this point during McConnell's first term. And McConnell realizes that this is an opening for him. I think he understood it as an issue that people in his party, and often Democrats also in Congress, felt like they had to be behind campaign finance reform, but didn't necessarily really want to be behind it. It's been interesting to listen to some of the speeches on the other side that equate money with evil in politics. It seems to me that

in a capitalistic society like ours, money is not necessarily evil. And so McConnell very shrewdly, for a first term senator, understood that standing up against this idea of campaign finance reform was going to win him a lot of friends in his caucus in the Senate. And at the same time, it was going to get him beaten up, but in a way that wasn't going to leave a lasting impression on his career. He would be lambasted by editorial pages. And voters, if you asked them, all said they favored campaign finance reform. But it wasn't something that they were going to vote somebody out of office on. And so he rightly calculated that he could make himself the face of the opposition to campaign finance reform. At the same time, he would be earning the face of the opposition to campaign finance reform.

At the same time, he would be earning the gratitude of many people in the Senate who really didn't want to see these bills passed into law. So McConnell thinks to himself, I could be the guy who says the thing everybody else wants to say, but is afraid to say, which is that I'm opposed to real changes to the campaign finance system. And in the process, I will win over Republican colleagues in a lasting way that will probably benefit me. Exactly. So did this plan work? Yes and no. I'd like to welcome you to this evening's programming for about the next 45 minutes or so. We'll be discussing campaign financing, which has been discussed on the floor of the U.S. Senate the last few days. Our guest is Senator Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky.

He was on TV a fair amount. Does it concern you that candidates for Congress spent $450 million running for office last year? Not particularly because... He was being attacked in editorials, but he was also being profiled by newspapers. You've been described as humorless. Well, I...

Have you heard that before? Once or twice. Why there's no bipartisanship? Because you've got Darth Vader on the Senate side, Mitch McConnell... He earned the nickname Darth Vader from a number of people, and he kind of leaned into this role as the sort of villain on campaign finance reform. He would appear with a lightsaber occasionally in public. He...

Look, I think... Does that ever bother you? No, it doesn't. Why not? Let me tell you why. I think you have to accept the fact that you can't make everybody happy. And meanwhile, while he was doing this, he was learning a lot of these things about how the Senate worked and how a small number of senators or even an individual senator could really slow down the process by which bills move through the Senate. So this driest of senators, Mitch McConnell,

not at all that charismatic, is slowly figuring out how to manipulate the Senate and win over his colleagues by doing something that they won't, which is to essentially take the heat, take one for the team, on a major issue like campaign finance. Exactly.

I think he was willing to play the villain if that was what was required at the moment. And in this moment, that was what was required to advance his party's agenda. In the long run, campaign finance reform did pass. You know, there was this bill, McCain-Feingold, that was this landmark campaign finance bill that did pass into law in 2002,

you know, a decade and a half after this battle began. But the reason the battle took a decade and a half was very much because of Mitch McConnell. And along the way, he really made himself into a name in his party. And it's only a few years after that that he becomes the Republican leader in the Senate. New Republican leaders this morning. Leadership elections held on the Hill. Mitch McConnell there, the new minority leader. What does he decide to do with that power?

Well, he really kind of comes into his own when Obama becomes president. Because suddenly he's in a massively diminished Republican minority in the Senate, facing a very popular incoming Democratic president. But he does have a few of these lessons that he's learned from the campaign finance fight. One is that if you keep your entire caucus together in a very disciplined way, you can accomplish a lot. The other is that the just very workings of the Senate offer all sorts of opportunities to slow things down. And he started to use those against the Obama agenda,

most prominently the Affordable Care Act. We have already documented a record of Republicans attempting to sabotage the Affordable Care Act. Senate Republicans made it clear that they will continue to fight to kill this bill. They would spend weeks negotiating language for some of these provisions in the bill with the Democratic committee chairs. And then when it's time for an actual vote, the support would sort of magically melt away.

And meanwhile, several weeks of negotiation is gone. The other thing he does during the Obama years is he starts holding up all these appointments that the president gets to make that have to be confirmed by the Senate. So pretty soon there are all these vacancies cropping up all over the Obama administration. There are ambassadorships that haven't been filled, board appointments that haven't been filled, but especially judges. This Republican minority under Mitch McConnell has used the filibuster over and over again, day in and day out, time and time again, to block a record number of executive and judicial appointments. Ordinarily, presidents appoint these judges sort of as a matter of

course, but that suddenly becomes very difficult. To the point where it was affecting the functioning of government. They turned the Senate executive calendar into a nomination obituary column for 30 other judicial nominees. The obstruction in the Senate is completely unprecedented. This is McConnell's second turn in the public eye, really, as a sort of villainous figure. To Democrats, he becomes this sort of arch nemesis. Generally, when I've been involved in obstruction, there was a point to it. He sort of supersized these sort of obstructive tendencies of the Senate and made it the thing that you do when you're in the minority.

these sort of obstructive tendencies of the Senate and made it the thing that you do when you're in the minority. So, Charlie, it seems like McConnell's strategy is to paralyze the Senate under a Democratic president until the country might elect a Republican president who would then enact legislation and nominate judges that would serve the Republican agenda and that McConnell would sign off on. Exactly.

And that's why 2016 becomes incredibly important. You know, at the beginning, he tries to really stay out of it. I think he favored Marco Rubio in the Republican primary, but he's looking at how he can hold on to the Senate and finally become majority leader under a Republican president, he hopes. But then at first, early in the cycle, Donald Trump comes on the scene. I am officially running for president of the United States. And we are going to make our country great again. Donald Trump is winning some of these early primaries and has established himself as something more than a sideshow to this election. It's 8 p.m. in New Hampshire. Polls are now officially closed across the state. And Fox

News can now project that Donald Trump will win the Republican presidential primary. And it's against that backdrop that Scalia dies and McConnell has to make his decision about what he's going to do with the seat. The presidential candidates turn their focus on discussing the Supreme Court. On the campaign trail, candidates on both sides have reframed the presidential election as a referendum on the high court's future. And the day that Scalia dies, that evening there's this presidential debate and there's half a dozen Republican candidates still competing for the presidential nomination. Before we get started, candidates, here are the rules. And at that debate, there's a question.

First, the death of Justice Scalia and the vacancy that leaves on the Supreme Court. The question of what to do with this seat comes up. And only one candidate gives the sort of weirdly specific answer about who he would appoint to the Supreme Court. We could have a Diane Sykes, or you could have a Bill Pryor. We have some fantastic people. That's Donald Trump, who names two judges who are very popular among conservative legal activists. I think it's up to Mitch McConnell and everybody else to stop it. It's called delay, delay, delay. This is sort of the moment where a lot of conservatives think

that maybe this is a guy that we can work with. Maybe there's a partnership to be had here with Donald Trump. So it sounds like because of his vacancy on the Supreme Court that McConnell orchestrated after Scalia's death, Trump now has an opportunity to give something very valuable to conservatives that they want and that they covet, which is the judges that they want on the Supreme Court and lower down courts, and that that would become a huge factor in convincing those conservatives that Trump was their guy. I think that's right. This is a really crucial point in Trump's sort of convincing a lot of the people that matter on the right that he's ultimately going to be a conventional Republican president in ways that matter to them. I wonder how McConnell feels about the fact that this decision that was designed to help the Republican agenda broadly ends up helping Donald Trump during the campaign, someone

who's not all that mainstream, a Republican. Yeah, well, he was not an early adopter of Trump. He was not clearly an enthusiastic fan of Trump, and he endorsed him sort of obligatorily when it got to the point where he really had to. But once Trump was the nominee, he became very much invested in this candidate with whom he had very little in common, because this candidate was going to be the vessel by which this judicial appointment project that he'd been setting the stage for was going to be realized. He didn't think Trump was going to win. The judges thing was sort of a long play that he was running in the case that Trump did win. And it made him invested in Trump's victory in a way

that he wouldn't have been otherwise. But he was mostly concerned with like minimizing drama that would blow back on his Senate candidates at that point. And you saw that with the Access Hollywood tape. Big breaking news this afternoon in the presidential race. The Washington Post released a video from 2005 where Donald Trump is boasting to Billy Bush of Access Hollywood. And he's speaking Paul Ryan came out with a relatively forceful statement condemning the tape. Paul Ryan saying he's sickened by what Donald Trump said on that Access Hollywood video. And so now Paul Ryan and Reince Priebus will not be joining Donald Trump at an event in Wisconsin tomorrow because Donald Trump is no longer invited.

McConnell did not make that decision. He sort of sat there and thought about what this really meant. And he called a strategist of his who I spoke with who said that McConnell asked him, you know, what have you seen in the polls? And his strategist said, nothing yet.

And McConnell decided to call some vulnerable Republican Senate candidates who were in closely contested races. One of them was Roy Blunt, who I spoke with, the Missouri Republican, who said McConnell called him and basically asked him if he was seeing a lot of blowback to the Access Hollywood tape among rally goers at his campaign events. And Blunt said, basically, not really. The crowds were as big and as pro-Trump as they'd ever been. And so McConnell had a few conversations like this. And in the end, he decided to put out his own statement

denouncing what Trump had said, but also really leaving it up to all the Republican Senate candidates to sort of figure out what they wanted to do about this. So he focused groups and poll tests and anecdote gathers his way through what everyone else is having an extremely visceral response to. He's thinking about strategizing for the party when everybody else is genuinely shocked that the president is talking about grabbing women, assaulting women. Yeah, and I think this is very McConnell. He saw this as essentially a political question.

Whatever he may have thought about Trump and whatever he thought about Trump's statements, where his mind went very quickly was, what were the various scenarios stemming out from this incident? And which of the scenarios would be the most politically damaging for the Republicans in the Senate? And that feels really telling about the kind of core moral compass and motivations of Mitch McConnell? I think it is. I think in the way that he discusses this and the way this came up when we talked about any number of these sort of moments that he'd been at where he was facing real moral crossroads,

that he prides himself on being an extremely practical politician. His view of the Senate, and this sort of spreads out into his view of politics, I think, is that really the worst thing that you can do is commit a sort of futile gesture. You know, set up a mission that can't possibly be accomplished, no chance in the world. Make it a point, but not a difference. I'm in the business of trying to achieve as much as I can

for our team, right of center, which means getting an outcome, not just calling attention to yourself, but trying to actually get an outcome. And it's sort of the way that he talks whenever you bring up whether it's Access Hollywood. I just choose not to engage in that. I don't think it's my job to. Whether it's Russian election meddling. Really, I don't have anything to say about that whole investigation. Whether it's action on the part of the Senate to protect the Mueller investigation.

I don't have time for that kind of futile gesture, particularly when there's no threat. The place that McConnell goes to is basically, it's not my job. And in the cases where he feels like there really are lines being crossed, sort of his mode is to often make a pretty concise statement of denunciation and then move on very quickly. I think there's blame on both sides, and I have no doubt about it, and you don't have any doubt about it either. Charlottesville was a great example of that.

You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. McConnell puts out a very forceful statement. Today, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a statement saying we can have no tolerance for an ideology of racial hatred. There are no good neo-Nazis. And he stops short in that statement of naming Trump himself. I asked him about that.

You didn't name him in the statement. What was your thinking in not naming him? The way I expressed myself was the way I thought I ought to express myself. And what does that mean? I don't know if it means anything. I think he's sort of marking off the limits of what he feels like is his job, really, in this situation. And as we were talking about it, he kind of pivots to talking about the Republican Party's standing with black voters more generally. the Republican Party is standing with black voters more generally.

If you're talking about the, you know, kind of the electoral consequences, we already do very poorly with African-American voters. You know, it's been a real weak spot for the party for quite a long time. But this isn't really a new thing, which to me was an interesting turn because it's sort of the lens that he, I think, instinctively or conveniently sees so much of this through is the lens of politics. And he does not seem to want to grapple with them. I mean, it's fascinating that his mind goes so directly to the electoral consequences of any kind of statement on something as consequential as Charlottesville, rather than a chance to assert moral authority

for the greater good of the country. Exactly. Yeah. Somebody who's not an elected Republican official looks at some of the things that have been unleashed in the Trump base since the 2016 election as a real concern in terms of the broader social fabric of the United States and really looks at alarm at the fact that this is sort of tolerated to some degree by one of the major political parties. McConnell clearly views as futile gestures are what lots of other people would call moral leadership. But he clearly doesn't, from your telling, from what he said to you, see that as his role as majority leader of the Senate. I think that's right. I think he sees certain bright lines that he needs to police. Beyond that, I think he is really of the view that the best thing for him to do is keep his head down and just kind of keep running the program. There's this history of politicians who are essentially, you know, fancy themselves as pragmatists,

making these deals, these sort of devil's bargains to get their agenda passed. And I asked him about one of the more kind of extreme comparisons that had been made to him by a Holocaust historian who had compared him to Paul von Hindenburg, the president of the Weimar Republic in Germany who brought Hitler to power sort of unwittingly as chancellor as a sort of bulwark to shore up his conservative coalition in the government. And I'm curious, I mean, just what you, you know, what you make of that.

To expect Republican elected officials not to try to achieve as much as they possibly can, that they've always been for, at a peak over presidential behavior, is nonsense. He got elected. So critics like that expect us all to just join them in a huff and do nothing? Really? That was his response to you asking whether he was someone akin to a Weimar Republic leader who ushered in the era of Hitlerism. Exactly.

I mean, that's kind of a stunning response. It was a stunning response, I thought, because it really kind of confirmed the criticism of him in a way. The criticism that can be leveled against these politicians who fancy themselves the grown-ups in the room is that they are myopic, and they don't see the sort of bigger picture consequences of the shorter term bargains that they're striking. And he was essentially, you know, copping to having struck one of those bargains. I mean, he was saying that, of course, we're not standing on principle against Trump. Look at all this stuff that we need to get done. I mean, he sees his agenda as something crucial to the country to pursue, and he's willing

to put up with a lot to do that. And he's sort of included Trump's behavior in the sphere of things that he's willing to put up with. I think now he's in a position where his party is the party of Trump right now. You're talking about somebody who got into the Republican Party at a time when it was helping pass the Civil Rights Act. And he's now finally ascended to this position of real authority in the party at a time when you have its president out there, you know, defending people at a white supremacist rally. But I think if people are waiting for Mitch McConnell to take a real stand against Trump, it's going to be a very long wait. At the end of the day, he is really a party guy. Is this the Republican Party that he wanted to have at this point in his career? I don't think

it probably is. But it's still his party and he's going to stand with it and he's going to do what he has to do to see it through this presidency. So if McConnell's ultimate goal is to implement this Republican agenda for this party he loves above all other things, has he been effective at that? I think he's been extremely effective. So we now have a new U.S. Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch. He's 49 years old. He's very likely to be on the Supreme Court for several decades. They have two Supreme Court justices. Democrats view this as the heist of the century, that President Obama was denied the opportunity to nominate a judge for nearly a year. One of which they would not have had without McConnell. The heist of the century. Wow. The nomination of Brett M. Kavanaugh of Maryland to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States is confirmed.

of the Supreme Court of the United States is confirmed. Another day, another judicial nominee getting Senate approval. They have all these other judicial appointments. These will be the 11th and 12th Court of Appeals nominees that we will have confirmed this year. A modern day record. Winner is Mitch McConnell. Last night, he got Senate Democrats to capitulate and give him 15 more judges. He has now put two Supreme Court justices and 84 federal circuit and district court judges, the most in history. The total of 85 federal judges have already been appointed since the president's taken office and 2019 is expected to bring even more. They've

gotten the sweeping tax bill passed. The nearly one and a half trillion dollar bill is viewed as a major victory for President Trump and is the largest tax overhaul in more than three decades. This has been a very good two years for the Republican Party. This has been the best two years in the 34 years I've been here. But the question for McConnell is really, at what cost? But the question for McConnell is really, at what cost? Charlie, thank you very much.

Thanks for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, President Trump announced his choice to lead the Department of the Interior, a former oil industry lobbyist who, during his short time in the administration, has overseen the rolling back of conservation rules. The nominee, David Bernhardt, has spent the past two years opening up millions of acres of public land to oil, gas, and coal exploration as the number two in the Interior Department. Bernhardt will replace Ryan Zinke, Trump's first Secretary of the Interior,

who resigned in December amid a series of investigations into his conduct and spending. that's it for the daily i'm michael barbara see you tomorrow