It’s the end of the Mitch McConnell era, or at least the end is finally in sight. The Senate Republican leader has announced that he will step down from that leadership role in November (he will serve out the rest of his Senate term until 2027). McConnell’s scorched-earth leadership in the Senate is behind much of what ails America today, from the legislative underpinnings of a new Gilded Age to the extremist Supreme Court majority that yesterday did former President Donald Trump an enormous favor to the rise of Trumpism itself. Can the damage ever be repaired?
As America considers what McConnell’s departure means, we look back at Anand’s retelling of the Mitch McConnell story.
This is the story of a little boy who caught the virus.
Addison is the boy’s name. From Alabama. Just two years old when he caught it.
He has the familiar symptoms, and he even loses the function in his left leg.
But then he finds a little luck.
Turns out there’s a facility not far from where his family lives which treats people with the virus. Little Addison’s mother brings him in for treatment as often as she can for two years. He receives extensive care. Eventually, Addison is cured.
The virus was polio. It was the middle 1940s. The facility was the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation, established by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had suffered polio himself and had been inspired by his pain to heal the pain of others — first with this private facility, then, as president, through the power of government.
In treating his polio, Roosevelt had found himself among the poor and dispossessed, and that encounter transformed a rich man who would help transform America into a country kinder to ordinary people by building robust public institutions.
As F.D.R. said in 1940, “Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.”
And what about the little boy? Addison McConnell, who came to be known by a shortening of his middle name of Mitchell, grew up to be a man singularly committed to destroying the legacy of institutionalized compassion that F.D.R. built. Someone who has helped transform America into a country at the service of big corporations and the rich, and of public institutions too paralyzed to make a difference. A place where the cruelties of life meet a shrug of “tough.”
Sometimes two people can experience the same phenomenon very differently. For F.D.R. the suffering of polio taught compassion towards others, turning him, in the words of biographer James Tobin, from “a callow aristocrat” into an “energetic, determined statesman.”
For Mitch, the same virus was an education in learning that every man was for himself. As Jane Mayer has observed in The New Yorker, it was for him “the first in a lifetime pursuit of hard-fought ‘wins.’” In his memoir, Mitch describes being lifted out of the general pool of polio sufferers through his own extraordinary persistence. “The disease was paralyzing or killing more than half a million people around the world every year,” he writes, “and nobody had any reason to believe I wouldn’t be among them. But I beat it.”
Mitch, for the win.
And so when he began his early bids 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 to ‘win” against his opponent at the time. He did a quick about-face once elected, when these positions were no longer necessary…for winning.
In the 1990s, when he ran against a Democratic opponent who was a physician, Mitch spoke about his experience with polio and how it led him to support healthcare for all.
“When I was a child and my dad was in World War II, I got polio. I recovered, but my family almost went broke. Today, too many families can’t get decent, affordable health care. That’s why I’ve introduced a bill to make sure healthcare is available to all Kentucky families, hold down skyrocketing costs, and provide long-term care.”
Of course, by 2017, McConnell was pursuing the win by stopping the government from helping those who couldn’t afford health insurance.
He was so desperate to enact a repeal-but-not-replace bill that would cut back protections given to people by the Affordable Care Act that he rushed the measure through the Senate, locked out Democrats, and refused to meet with patient groups — including, get this, the organization that had grown out of the rehab center that helped him as a boy — the March of Dimes.
If he is not easily roused to fight to ease the pain of families like the one he was born into, what can rouse him?
It turns out, there is something that Mitch does care about: the pain of corporations. Corporations that care as much about him as he does about them.
While 1970s Mitch was calling for money to be removed from politics, by 1984, he adopted the idea that, to win in politics, you had to pay to play. A long-shot for the Kentucky Senate at the time, and facing a charisma 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, “I never would have been able to win my race if there had been a limit on the amount of money I could raise and spend.”
And what has McConnell done with all that money that is now allowed to flow freely, including to him?
He’s used it to obstruct the passage of legislation that he opposes, by buying the support of his fellow Republicans who might otherwise occasionally go bipartisan. And the upshot of his career of obstruction isn’t just that Mitch has killed the Democratic agenda or bipartisan compromise.
He has killed the very idea that Congress can, like, do stuff.
You see, inaction is a consequential act. In Mitch McConnell’s America, your pension is more likely to be raided, your children are more likely to meet a gunman in their classroom, you are more likely to face sexual violence with impunity, your home is more likely to flood as the seas warm and rise.
When Mitch boasts of himself as a “Grim Reaper” killing attempts to do things, he is selling himself short. He is very much doing things. He is transforming your life.
When it comes to the Republican Party, we may think of ourselves as living in the era of Trumpism. But in many ways Trump is merely living in Mitch McConnell’s world. In which compassion is extended to corporations, not people. In which even those whom we elect to office who might carry some of that FDR spirit in their hearts, have their hands tied in being able to alleviate other people’s pain. A country where millions of people suffering just like young Addison McConnell did are denied the help they desperately need — because that would mean Mitch not winning.
The above was adapted from a monologue originally aired on Vice TV.
Photo by Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
This post was originally published on The.Ink.