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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell entered his powerful new job as the voice of reason and reassurance. He just didn’t want Americans to think a Republican-run Washington would be “scary.” That’s all.
“I don’t want the American people to think that if they add a Republican president to a Republican Congress, that’s going to be a scary outcome,” the soon-to-be majority leader told the Washington Post just before Christmas. “I want the American people to be comfortable with the fact that the Republican House and Senate is a responsible, right-of-center, governing majority.”
Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., a key member of McConnell’s leadership team, explained the timetable in January: “I think it really becomes important to appear to want to be a governing party rather than a complaining party. My belief is we have about six months before the American people check that box one way or the other.”
Now this: As the six-month milestone of the Republican-led Congress arrives in a few weeks, the seemingly rock-solid Republican Congress has been more rocky than solid.
Republicans are being led by an unexpectedly dueling duo, McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner. Meanwhile, both the House speaker and Senate leader have struggled more not with Democrats but with their party’s rebellious members who have tea party persuasions and libertarian inclinations. Some also have a cunning ability to stab their leaders in the back while staring them in the face.
McConnell’s main adversaries turned out not to be the Senate Democrats, but two schemers from his own party who are all about enhancing their own 2016 presidential campaign profiles: Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and McConnell’s fellow Kentuckian, Sen. Rand Paul. Each has used McConnell as his personal political foil — to grab a headline here or there.
Boehner’s House began the year by voting for the 56th time since 2011 to repeal Obamacare. Rebellious Republicans also threatened a return to scary non-governance in the form of another government shutdown. In a burst of truth-telling, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told The New York Times: “Isn’t that the definition of insanity? Voting for the same bill over and over again?”
Meanwhile, McConnell had abandoned his Mr. Reasonable Governance pose. He allowed Senate Republicans to use a human trafficking measure to score points with the party’s evangelical base by sneaking in language prohibiting funds to be used for abortions in certain circumstances. Republicans broke a time-honored Senate convention by not telling Democrats about the change. Democratic staff didn’t see it, so Democratic senators approved it with unseeing ayes. Embarrassed and furious Democrats then delayed the bill (never mind that they’d accepted the same wording in other bills.)
More GOP mayhem: McConnell spitefully refused for months to allow the full Senate to confirm new Attorney General Loretta Lynch, even as U.S. cities erupted in violent reactions to police killings of blacks.
This week, a clearly befuddled McConnell committed a series of blunders as he was outmaneuvered and outwitted by his Rand Paul. (In a mindboggling subplot, McConnell had already endorsed Paul for president in 2016). Paul caused the National Security Agency’s phone-monitoring surveillance of terrorists to temporarily shut off because its authorization expired and wasn’t renewed by midnight Sunday.
Many Americans may find it scary that for several days this week, America couldn’t gather metadata to search for terrorist phone numbers — for the first time since the 9/11 attacks.
That could have been avoided if McConnell had been willing to accept the bipartisan compromise Boehner’s House had forged with President Barack Obama’sWhite House. But McConnell miscalculated. He first allowed voting on a trade bill that had no deadline. Then tried to get his own fixes into the Patriot Act, but couldn’t — and ran out of time.
He’d led his GOP parade down a dead-end street. Republicans were privately furious that McConnell had no alternate way out. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., a solid centrist who, like McConnell, backed extending the Patriot Act, said: “This should have been planned on over a week ago.”
But the most stinging benediction was delivered on the Senate floor by a conservative Republican, Sen. Mike Lee, of Utah: “The American people deserve better than this. Vital national security programs … should not be subject to cynical, government-by-cliff brinksmanship. If members of Congress, particularly Republican members of Congress, ever want to improve their standing among the American people, then we must abandon this political habit of political gamesmanship.”
So the Senate’s once-promising leader is getting preached at with the same empty promises he was making last Christmastime. Now that’s scary.
