The D.C. Brief
Time|March 25, 2024
TO LIBERALS, MITCH MCCONNELL IS a master of the political dark arts, willing to do anything to serve his conservative aims. He enabled multiple GOP White Houses to play the long game.
Philip Elliott
The D.C. Brief

The Kentucky Republican puppet master into reality a regulatory regime that allows unchecked corporate and secretive individual cash back into politics, picking the scabs of what remained in campaign finance law until there was nothing left.

In the liberal worldview, not only did McConnell steal a Supreme Court seat from Democrats in 2016 and clear the way for the conservative bench that dealt the death blow to federal abortion rights, he also stacked the decks in lower courts. And, when the opportunity arose to finally purge the Republican Party of Donald Trump for good with a history-making second impeachment trial, McConnell looked the other way.

Well, those same liberals who profess nothing short of loathing for McConnell might be about to find how much worse things can get without the Senate chieftain keeping his Republican Caucus in order.

McConnell on Feb. 28 announced that he was putting an end to his record-setting 17 years atop the Senate Republicans' hierarchy. Only one other incumbent Republican90-year-old Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa-has experienced Washington before McConnell began pulling major levers of power. And just seven incumbent Republicans have served in a Senate where McConnell was not in the party's top job. That longevity did little to mask McConnell's evident disappointment in his own news.

"Believe me: I know the politics within my party at this particular moment in time," McConnell said in the well of the Senate. "I have many faults; misunderstanding politics is not one of them."

Diese Geschichte stammt aus der March 25, 2024-Ausgabe von Time.

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