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President Donald Trump will leave Washington soon, but the most powerful Republican in the past four years is going nowhere. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says a former White House staff member who advised Trump during the first three turbulent years in office “was kind of a ‘Washington whisperer’ for Trump. silent advice and provided critical help on some very important things, “says the former staff member, who requested anonymity to speak frankly. “You could call him a kind of co-chair.”
Much of Trump’s legacy, at least when it comes to domestic politics, will be fleeting. Many of his flagship initiatives — building a wall on the Mexican border, restricting immigration, and implementing broad economic deregulation — were enacted by executive order, and many of them will be set aside by his successor. The transformative parts of Trump’s domestic record are largely McConnell’s work. The Senate Majority Leader took the political neophyte under his wing when he arrived in Washington four years ago, played a central role in his most important achievements and is now at odds with Trump in his final days in office.
The Senate Majority Leader’s achievements include the appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices, made possible prior to Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation by the Majority Leader’s implementation of the so-called “nuclear option,” the removal of the requirement of 60 votes to end a filibuster for superior court nominees. It also includes the appointment of 224 federal judges nationwide. (Since 1976, only Ronald Reagan, who served two terms, has appointed more.) McConnell got the 2017 tax bill through a narrow margin in the Senate, which Trump supporters attribute to the boost from a strong economy that they believe would have led to his re-election. if it weren’t for the Covid-19 pandemic. And he agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to vote on Trump’s criminal justice reform bill in late 2017, where it was passed by an overwhelming majority. McConnell’s only major failure came when the late Arizona Senator John McCain struck down a bill that would have repealed Obamacare, a central promise of Trump’s 2016 campaign.
The last major battle of Trump’s term, over the stimulus bill this week, highlighted the extent to which the president was no match for his own executor. Trump was already angry at McConnell before they clashed over the additional $ 1,400 in relief that Trump suddenly supported on December 22. A week earlier, McConnell had publicly congratulated Joe Biden on winning the presidency. That, say White House aides and Trump’s friends, infuriated the president; he saw it as an act of “disloyalty,” the cardinal sin in Trump’s world.
When Trump said he favored direct payments of $ 2,000 to Americans for Covid-19 relief, McConnell was shocked, say two Senate aides. Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin had drawn up a plan with both Houses of Congress that included a $ 600 payment. It was part of a $ 900 billion spending package that Trump signed into law on December 27. Cheerful Democrats in both the House and Senate immediately said they backed the president. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called for a unanimous vote of approval for payments of $ 2,000 in the Senate, after the House voted in favor. This put McConnell in a bind: His Republican Senate caucus contains members who are among the last in Washington to even pretend they are concerned about budget deficits and fiscal sobriety. John Cornyn of Texas and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania publicly expressed their dismay, even when others said they were in favor of the additional payments.
That included David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, the two Republican senators in Georgia’s crucial January 5 runoff that will determine who controls the Senate going forward. Polls show both races are extremely close. A Georgia pollster with a reputation for accuracy, Robert Cahaly of the Trafalgar Group, published a poll on December 27 that made many Republicans nervous: He had both Republican candidates slightly behind. The problem for Perdue and Loeffler is that both earlier this year had expressed skepticism about direct aid payments from Covid to virtually all taxpayers. His sudden change of opinion prompted by Trump allowed his Democratic opponents to denounce his “hypocrisy.”
The entire episode, says a senior Republican National Committee official who requested anonymity to speak frankly, gave McConnell heartburn. “The Majority Leader may like to focus on the” long game, “as he likes to say, but for him right now that game runs exactly one week, until the January 5 playoffs. With both Georgia seats, McConnell will be the minority leader for at least two years, an enormously frustrating position for someone who is widely viewed as a master tactician and who enjoys his role as one of the most powerful people in Washington.
But McConnell wasn’t going to betray his members who had backed the $ 600 checks, whether that angered Trump or not. He blocked Schumer’s call for a direct up or down vote, and on Wednesday introduced a bill that Democrats said was intended to block additional payments – it included, in addition to additional Covid relief, two other provisions. which are Trump’s Favorites: A waiver of liability protection extended to social media companies like Facebook and Twitter (which Trump and many conservatives believe undermined their election by censoring news about Hunter Biden’s foreign business investigation ) and the formation of a commission that investigates electoral fraud. Democrats oppose both and only want a direct vote for or against the additional $ 1,400 in Covid relief.
On Wednesday afternoon, McConnell played tough. “Here’s the deal: The Senate is not going to split the three issues that President Trump linked just because Democrats are afraid to address two of them,” he said. That meant that the current Congress will not accept the bill. The next Congress will be sworn in on Sunday, January 3. McConnell turned his attention to what will be the final act of the current Senate: a vote to override the president’s veto of the National Defense Authorization Act, another snub of Trump, and another sign of who’s boss.
McConnell, like the rest of his Senate colleagues, will focus on the January 5 election in Georgia. Just one Republican victory and he will remain the majority leader, albeit by the narrowest margin. That means it will be almost as influential in affecting what a Biden administration can do legislatively and which judges it can appoint, as it has been during the Trump years. He will not be a “co-president,” but he will remain by far the most powerful Republican in town.
