And oh, what a difference McConnell has made. He will go down as one of the most consequential Senate leaders in history. But his legacy isn’t defined by bills passed or pacts struck. McConnell’s legislative record, in terms of both his accomplishments and those he’s shepherded through as leader, is meager. He has passed tax cuts, cut regulations, and confirmed judges. He failed to repeal Obamacare, shrink or restructure entitlements, or pass infrastructure or immigration reform. Historians will not linger long over the laws McConnell passed. As McConnell himself has said, his most consequential decision was an act of negation: blocking Merrick Garland from being appointed to the Supreme Court. [...]
Under McConnell, the Senate has been run according to a simple principle: Parties should use as much power as they have to achieve the outcomes they desire. This would have been impossible in past eras, when parties were weaker and individual senators stronger, when political interests were more rooted in geography and media wasn’t yet nationalized. But it is possible now, and it is a dramatic transformation of the Senate as an institution, with reverberations McConnell cannot control and that his party may come to regret. Indeed, McConnell’s single most profound effect on the Senate may be what he convinces Democrats to do in response to his machinations. [...]
It worked that way because the parties, and their Supreme Court nominees, were different than they are now. The parties were ideologically mixed rather than ideologically polarized, and Supreme Court nominees were ideologically unpredictable rather than heavily vetted and ideologically consistent. From the 1950s through the 1990s, knowing the party that nominated a justice told you little about how that justice would vote. All of that lowered the stakes on each nomination. [...]
What Democrats now believe is McConnell won’t let them govern if they win, and in the aftermath of Garland and of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, he won’t show them any quarter if he wins. Republicans, to be fair, believe the same about Democrats. Compared to the Senates of yore, both sides are right. McConnell has gone further, faster, than the Democratic leaders in torching old precedents and making the realpolitik principles of the new era clear. But in doing, he’s potentially done something that liberal activists and pundits were never able to achieve: convince Senate Democrats that the Senate is broken, and that new rules are needed.
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