Mitch McConnell To Step Down As Senate Republican Leader In November

UPDATED: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that he is stepping down as the Republican leader in the Senate, ending a tenure longer than anyone else in that position.

McConnell, 82, said on the Senate floor, “This will be my last term as Republican leader of the Senate.” He said that it was “time to move on,” although he said that he intended to remain in the Senate through the end of his term, which runs through 2027.

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Elected in 1984, McConnell has served as Senate leader longer than anyone else, but his future in that position has increasingly been in doubt after a couple of incidents last year when he froze up as he was speaking to reporters. He had been hospitalized earlier in the year after suffering injuries from a fall.

McConnell also has seen increasing fissures in his party on issues that were once a given for Republican support, including providing further funding for Ukraine. McConnell has been the leading Republican champion for aid to Ukraine, but a bipartisan national security supplemental has stalled in the GOP-led House as speaker Mike Johnson has yet to bring it to the floor.

That has also been a reflection of the party’s transformation under Donald Trump, with whom McConnell often has sparred. He has yet to endorse Trump, the presumptive nominee, in the election. Trump has labeled McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, with the racist and demeaning term “coco chow.” Chao served as Trump’s secretary of transportation, but left that post in the wake of the January 6th attack on the Capitol.

In his speech, McConnell said, “Believe me, I know the politics within my party at this particular moment in time. I have many faults; misunderstanding politics is not one of them.”

McConnell served as his party’s Senate leader since 2007, but served as majority leader from 2015 to 2021.

With a reputation as a master tactician, McConnell made the unprecedented decision to refuse to consider President Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, after the death of conservative Antonin Scalia. McConnell’s reasoning was that the Senate shouldn’t shepherd through a nomination during an election year, but he reversed course after the death of liberal Ruth Bader Ginsberg just weeks before the election of 2020. Then, McConnell raced through the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, giving the right a solid 6-3 majority on the high court. That paved the way for the court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade, long a conservative priority.

The shift of the federal judiciary to the right has been one of McConnell’s signature accomplishments, but he saw his party shift further into Trump-ism. McConnell had at times offered criticisms of the penchant of the Republican party to select Trump-backed nominees in Senate races, only to see them lose in the general election. McConnell also was highly critical of Trump’s role in inciting the January 6th attack on the Capitol, although he declined to vote to convict the former president.

McConnell’s departure sets up a battle to succeed him, with a strong chance that the GOP will once again have a Senate majority. Attention quickly focused on the Senate Minority Whip, John Thune, and the former majority whip, John Cornyn. Also likely in the running is Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), chair of the Senate Republican Conference.

In his speech on the Senate floor, McConnell recalled being a new senator and being called “Mitch O’Donnell” by then-President Ronald Reagan. But McConnell also invoked Reagan’s legacy at a time when the GOP’s robust defense of NATO is running up against an isolationist strain in the party.

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