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Let's do a thread on the big @chashomans profile of Senate Majority Leader McConnell in @nytimes. It's worth reading, for several reasons already remarked on by other journalists. With that said, a few thoughts... nytimes.com/2019/01/22/mag…
2. An odd sensation accompanies reading a piece by a smart, experienced, self-aware journalist who knows his sources are trying to spin him, recognizes how they are trying to do it, and gets spun anyway. This is one such piece.
3. We have to start with "Mitch McConnell, the man of institutions and establishments" hoo-ha that appears to be the price of admission for anyone wanting to write about the guy. This is a Senate Majority Leader who has trashed the Senate: comprehensively, deliberately.
4. As @chashomans notes, accurately, McConnell has ought to "...shift much of the burden of conservative policymaking away from an increasingly paralyzed Senate" to courts packed with judges picked by the Federalist Society and waved through by compliant Republican Senators.
5. This is how McConnell, the self-described man of the Senate, serves the institution to which he has devoted the better part of his adult life. Homans sighs regretfully about a Senate that can no longer legislate as it once did, but this is a house McConnell built himself.
6. Of course the Senate can legislate; @senatemajldr decided some years ago the Senate would not legislate: not if he could prevent it, not if it complicated campaign strategy, risked inconveniencing large Republican donors or caused difficulties w/Republican constituencies.
7. Other Majority Leaders -- Baker, Dole, Byrd, Mitchell -- after the era of permanent large Democratic Senate majorities got legislation passed, including timely passed appropriations bills, without gutting procedures and precedents. More recently, though,...
8... particularly in after McConnell became Majority Leader, the Senate declined as a functioning legislature in direct proportion to the increased control over content as well as scheduling of legislation by the Majority Leader's office. The Senate's loss was McConnell's gain.
9. Let's move on to two words that appear nowhere in the @chashomans profile of McConnell. The first is Corruption. @chashomans appears not to have sought out any large Republican donors for his profile, nor did McConnell suggest any to him. This was a regrettable omission.
10. Large donors are a key Republican Party constituency. They respond to a unified Party message. They were the single greatest beneficiary of the major legislative achievement of the last Congress, a large tax cut in a peaking economy; they benefit most....
11...from hobbling regulatory agencies and packing the courts with compliant Republican judges. They support the GOP in funding the campaigns of weak men -- it is still mostly men -- who vote as they are told, who can be bought and are eager to advertise this.
12. The fetid stink of corruption that pervades the GOP pervades the Capitol too. McConnell has enabled it. Only the most gullible observer would read @chashomans' account of McConnell's war on the Federal Elections Commission and conclude it was a product of ideology.
13. McConnell wanted those able to give a lot of money to Republicans to give more, and more. He promoted legislation to give them a return on their financial investment, and promotes judicial nominees who will use their authority to gut regulatory agencies that impose on them.
14. The second word @chashomans does not mention is Race. The optics, to use that wretched phrase of the trade, of a white Southern Senator contemptuously refusing to meet with a black President's Supreme Court nominee could not have been clearer.
15. Homans dutifully reports how important McConnell's trashing of precedent in what became the Garland nomination was to exciting large elements of the Republican "base," the same elements who went over the moon for Trump. He does not think to make the connection...
16... with the other thing that excited the "base" about Trump, especially in Southern states including McConnell's own -- Trump's overt racism. McConnell's circle (he would have treated managing a major @nytimes profile as a team project) seems to have thought hard about this.
17. What they came up with to throw @chashomans off this particular scent was ingenious, if strained -- the text of McConnell's maiden Senate speech, delivered more than 30 years ago when his priorities were, well, different, protesting Reagan's policy toward South Africa.
18. Electoral politics, including base mobilization in low-turnout elections, is central to McConnell's strength in the GOP. Racial resentment, and worse, is a mobilization multiplier. No discussion of McConnell's legacy omitting his encouragement of it is close to complete.
19. The last thing I'll say about the @chashomans piece involves McConnell's relationship with Trump. In brief, McConnell is now Trump's servant. He can have sources emphasize to reporters his lack of enthusiasm for Trump's vulgar side and wilder ideas till the cows come home.
20. But cows do come home eventually. We are now into the second month of a partial government shutdown begun when Trump recoiled from criticism he got from some talk show hosts he admires. McConnell has protected himself, his united Republican caucus, and his President,
21... refusing to take responsibility for the most basic function of government in the Senate. There are not the votes for Trump's stupid wall, but Trump is the Republican Leader, he wants to keep the government closed, & FoxWorld and Trumpers around the country are excited.
22. So McConnell, the "man of institutions and establishments," does what he is told. @chashomans even describes how McConnell has learned to flatter Trump with attention as his other courtiers do, calling him several times a week with praise and gossip.
23. The choice to be Trump's boy in the Senate, like the others, is a choice McConnell made freely. It was not the only choice available. McConnell didn't have to trash the Senate, enable corruption, or join hands with the GOP's racist element either.
24. But those were the choices McConnell made, and they are already his legacy. They are what he is. [end] nytimes.com/2019/01/22/mag…
