Campaign Action
Everyone loves, or maybe grudgingly respects, a winner. That's what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was until this week. Never mind that those "wins" were destructive—most importantly his successful year-long blockade of a highly qualified, non-controversial Supreme Court nominee—he achieved his objective of obstructing nearly everything President Obama tried to accomplish and therefore was lauded as a mastermind strategist. Never mind that he wasn't actually doing stuff, that he had no major legislative accomplishments. He got undeserved and unwarranted credit for being able to hold together a caucus already bonded together by one overriding thing—the hatred in their base for the nation's first black president.
Well, that's all over now. And his one massive failure—Obamacare repeal—is waking everyone up to certain realities. Including even Politico.
It’s a serious defeat for McConnell, and one that leaves deep bitterness among rank-and-file GOP senators, as moderates and conservatives blamed each other over who is at fault for the setback.
It’s also a blow to McConnell’s reputation as a master legislator and raises doubts in the White House about what Senate Republicans can actually deliver for President Donald Trump. McConnell, like Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), finds himself caught between the factions in his own party. And like Ryan, McConnell hasn’t demonstrated that he knows how to resolve the dispute. […]
When he faced reporters on Tuesday, McConnell bristled when asked about the lack of accomplishments for the GOP-run Senate. He cited Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation to the Supreme Court as the biggest Republican win, which likely ranks as the high point of McConnell’s tenure atop the GOP conference. […]
Yet McConnell has no one else to blame for the position he put himself in. Even as theories persisted in the Capitol that he might actually want the bill to fail, McConnell gamely tried everything during the past two months to reel in the necessary 50 votes.
Make Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump angry. Keep calling your senators at (202) 224-3121, and tell them DON’T REPEAL OBAMACARE. After the call, tell us how it went.
This actually isn't the first time McConnell has failed in an effort to bully his caucus isn't doing something they really didn't want to do. Go back to the Patriot Act debate in 2015, when McConnell desperately wanted to retain the NSA's dragnet surveillance on Americans, against the will of Democrats and a handful of members in his caucus. McConnell ignored the work of committees on the issue, ignored the bipartisan opposition to his position, and insisted on having votes in the middle of the night just hours before the authorization for NSA's work was set to expire. McConnell brought up vote after vote after vote trying to force his will. He failed. Spectacularly. So there is definitely precedence for what we saw this week.
But this is definitely bigger. Way bigger. This is the thing that Republicans have been running—and winning—on for seven years, and he couldn't close the deal. McConnell's leadership is likely to be permanently damaged now, the trust that his caucus had in his abilities and their willingness to go along with whatever dastardly thing he cooks up eroded. Hopefully too will be his reputation as the master legislator in the pundit world.