It’s the end of the Mitch McConnell era, or at least the end is finally in sight. The Senate Republican leader has announced he will step down from that leadership role in November (he will serve out the remainder of his Senate term through 2027). McConnell’s scorched leadership in the Senate is behind most of America’s problems today, from the legislative foundations of a new Gilded Age to the extremist Supreme Court majority that yesterday overwhelmingly endorsed former President Donald Trump to the rise of Trumpism. Can the damage ever be repaired?
As America considers what McConnell’s departure means, we look at Anand’s retelling of Mitch McConnell’s story.
This is the story of a little boy who got infected with this virus.
The boy’s name is Edison. From Alabama. He was just two years old when he caught it.
He has the familiar symptoms, and his left leg also loses function.
But then he gets a little luck.
It turned out that there was a facility just a short distance from where his family lived that treated people suffering from the virus. Little Addison’s mother continued to bring her to treatment as often as possible for two years. He receives comprehensive care. Eventually, Addison recovered.
This virus was polio. This was in the mid-1940s. This facility was the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation, founded by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who himself suffered from polio and was inspired by his pain to heal the pain of others – first with this private facility, then , as President, of government through power.
In his treatment of polio, Roosevelt found himself among the poor and the disenfranchised, and that encounter transformed him into a wealthy man who would help transform America into a country kinder to ordinary people by building stronger public institutions.
As FDR said in 1940, “Human kindness has never weakened or softened the stamina of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.”
And what about the little boy? Edison McConnell, better known by the abbreviation of his middle name Mitchell, grew up to be a man determined to destroy the legacy of institutional compassion built by FDR. Someone who has helped turn America into a country in the service of big corporations and the rich, and public institutions are incapable of even bringing about change. A place where the cruelties of life come across as “hard.”
Sometimes two people can experience the same event very differently. For FDR, suffering polio taught him compassion for others, which transformed him, in the words of biographer James Tobin, from “an aristocrat” into an “energetic, determined politician.”
For Mitch, the same virus was a lesson to learn as every man was to himself. As seen by Jane Mayer the new Yorkerit was for him “The first ‘victory’ of a lifetime of hard work.” In his memoir, Mitch describes standing out from the general group of polio victims through his extraordinary perseverance. He writes, “This disease was crippling or killing more than half a million people worldwide each year, and no one had any reason to believe that I would not be among them. But I beat it.”
Mitch, for the win.
And so when he launched his initial bid for office in the 1970s, he ran as a pro-choice, pro-labor, pro-civil-rights Republican. Why? Because that’s what he needed to do at that time to ‘win’ against his opponent. Once elected he quickly reversed course when these positions were no longer necessary to win.
In the 1990s, when he ran against a Democratic opponent who was a physician, Mitch spoke about his experience with polio and how it inspired him to support health care for all.
“I got polio when I was a kid and my father was in World War II. I recovered, but my family was almost broke. Today, many families can’t get decent, affordable health care. “That’s why I introduced a bill to ensure that health care is available to all Kentucky families, control skyrocketing costs and provide long-term care.”
Of course, by 2017, McConnell was winning by blocking the government from helping people who couldn’t afford health insurance.
He was so desperate to enact a repeal-but-not-replace bill that would cut protections given to people by the Affordable Care Act that he shepherded the measure through the Senate, ousting Democrats, and meeting with patient groups. Refused to – InvolvedGet this, the organization that evolved from the rehab center that helped him as a boy – the March of Dimes.
If he is not easily inspired to fight to alleviate the pain of the families where he was born, who can inspire him?
It turns out, there’s something Mitch cares about: the pain of corporations. Corporations that care about them as much as they care about them.
While in the 1970s Mitch was calling for the removal of money from politics, by 1984 he had adopted the idea that, to win in politics, you have to pay to play. A long shot for the Kentucky Senate at the time, and facing a charismatic gap with his opponent, Mitch learned that nothing hides a lack of personality like stacks and stacks of cash from deep-pocketed contributors. Reflecting on his first Senate race, McConnell wrote in his autobiography, “If there had been a limit on the amount of money I could raise and spend I would never have won my race.”
And what has McConnell done with all that money that is now allowed to flow freely, including to him?
He has used it to obstruct passage of legislation he opposes by buying the support of his fellow Republicans, who might otherwise sometimes be bipartisan. And the result of his career of obstruction isn’t just that Mitch has dismantled the Democratic agenda or bipartisan compromise.
They have destroyed the very idea of what Congress can do, to work,
You see, inaction is a consequential action. In Mitch McConnell’s America, you are more likely to have your pension raided, you are more likely to meet a gunman in your kids’ classroom, you are more likely to face sexual violence with impunity, the oceans are more likely to get warmer. There is a greater possibility of your house getting flooded due to. Rise.
When Mitch claims himself as the “Grim Reaper” who kills attempts to do something, he is underestimating himself. He is doing a lot. He is changing your life.
When it comes to the Republican Party, we can consider ourselves living in the era of Trumpism. But in many ways Trump is simply living in Mitch McConnell’s world. In which mercy is shown not to people but to corporations. In which the people we elect to office, who carry that FDR spirit in their hearts, their hands are tied to being able to ease other people’s pain. A country where millions of people suffering like young Addison McConnell are denied the help they so desperately need – because it would mean Mitch wouldn’t win.
The above was adapted from a monologue originally broadcast on Vice TV.
