U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell

Yesterday, U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that he is stepping down from his leadership post this November. McConnell said that he would remain as Senator from Kentucky until his term expires in January 2027. That may be an ambitious goal, however, as McConnell is 82 years old and in frail health, having suffered at least two public episodes in the past year where he froze and was unable to speak or communicate.

McConnell is the longest-serving U.S. Senate leader in history, having been either Majority or Minority Leader since 2007. However, his legacy may well focus on a short period of time, during the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, and involving two particular areas. The first is these presidents’ judicial nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court. In particular, McConnell made the controversial (and arguably unconstitutional) move of denying a confirmation hearing for President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, after the death of Republican Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. At the time, McConnell gave the flimsy excuse that no Supreme Court justice should be confirmed in an election year.

But just a short time later, not only did McConnell help confirm three Trump nominees to the Supreme Court, one of those nominees, Amy Coney Barrett, was confirmed just eight days before the 2020 elections. These nominees went on to help form the Republican majority that overturned the Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, ruling that there is no federal right to abortion. This ruling, in Dobbs v. Jackson (2022), is one of the most consequential events in U.S. political history and, ironically, has driven Democratic voter enthusiasm and turnout to the point where Democrats have flipped a couple of U.S. House seats from red to blue in special elections, and are in a much stronger position for the 2024 elections.