For a moment, it looked like his face was going to fall off. At a press conference at the Capitol last July, Mitch McConnell, a senator for Kentucky since 1985 and the Senate Republican leader since 2007, abruptly stopped speaking, mid-sentence. He curled his lower lip inward, like a small child about to cry, and his eyes drifted to the side. He gripped the podium tightly and seemed to sway, as if uneasy on his feet. A few seconds later, he recovered, and began answering press questions again, without acknowledging the episode.
A few months prior, McConnell, now 82, had suffered a fall, and had been concussed as a result. He’d been away from the Capitol for six weeks. Once, in 2020, he’d appeared with dramatic purple blisters on his hands and around his mouth, which were never explained. There had been rumors of other falls, but that’s all they were – rumors. Maybe, the thinking went, the episode at the press conference was just the after-effects of McConnell’s recent concussion. But then again, maybe not.
That was the first time. The second time, McConnell was at another press conference, this one in Kentucky. On 30 August 2023, a reporter asked McConnell for his thoughts on running for re-election; if he were to run again and win an eighth term in 2026, he would be 90 by the end of that term. McConnell at first seemed not to hear the question. When the reporter repeated it, he chuckled, then went quiet. He gaze again veered to the side; his lips curled in.
Aides rushed to McConnell and stood closely around him at the lectern, partially obscuring the view of the news cameras. His office later said that he had felt dizzy, and simply paused. A vaguely worded report from a doctor indicated that he was safe to continue working. But neurologists from Yale and UCLA each independently told Slate that they believed that in both incidents McConnell had been having seizures; another, from NYU, also diagnosed seizures in the New York Times.
When McConnell announced on Wednesday that he will step down, the move was momentous, historic, a mile marker in the transformation of the Republican party that has played out before our eyes. But no one was probably surprised. It does not seem to have surprised Kentucky Republicans, either: faced with a Democratic governor in Andy Beshear, Republicans in the Kentucky statehouse worked last year to weaken the governor’s customary authority to fill Senate vacancies. It is a move that McConnell would likely have approved of.
In one of his first political jobs, when he worked in Gerald Ford’s justice department in the 1970s, McConnell was known as a moderate. He supported abortion rights and labor unions; he had a reputation for a certain compromising pragmatism. As time went on, his pragmatism became less compromising – more hard-nosed and Machiavellian.
His party moved steadily rightward, and so did he. By the time he became Senate Republican leader in the 2000s, he was presiding over an upper chamber that was losing its aura of deliberative dignity and becoming rowdier, more partisan, and more acrimonious, like the House. McConnell’s leadership accelerated that trend.
He was willing to break legislative norms, alter Senate rules and undermine the spirit of representative democracy in order to get what he wanted. He focused particularly on the federal judiciary: throughout the Obama administration, McConnell organized a blockade of federal judge confirmations. Later, after the 2016 death of Antonin Scalia, he delayed filling the open supreme court seat for months, making a nakedly pretextual claim that Scalia’s death occurred too close to an election.
When Donald Trump came into office, McConnell eliminated all remaining filibuster requirements for judicial confirmations in order to cram through Trump’s archconservative judicial nominees, rapidly filling the backlog of vacancies that he had deliberately created during the Obama years. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died just weeks before the 2020 election, he ensured that Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed, brakes-screechingly-fast, in the final days before voters went to the polls to expel Trump.
Before McConnell, judges nominated by Democratic presidents could conceivably be confirmed by a Republican-controlled Senate. After McConnell, Senate Republicans no longer acknowledged presidential appointment power, at least not in the instances when the president in question was a Democrat. The result has been a warped and extremist federal judiciary, one stuffed with rightwing partisans and scandal-courting careerists. It is a federal bench that we will have to live with for decades, and it is one crafted in McConnell’s image.
For those of us who have watched people we love be robbed of their dignity by the ravages of old age, the visible sight of McConnell’s decline could give us, even in spite of ourselves, pangs of pity for the man. For those of us who grieve what McConnell has made our country into, his succumbing to mortality even from the heights of malignant power can feel like a certain kind of ironic justice, an Ozymandias-like contrast between how much he was able to hurt people and how weak he has been made.
To me, there was something in McConnell’s visible decline that recalls the final years of his fellow conservative stalwarts Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who in their old age both reportedly descended into dementia so acute that they could no longer remember having been the leaders of their respective countries.
What are we to do with these contrasts – between the contemptible evil of McConnell’s career, and the pitiable frailty of his age? Mostly, I think, we can direct our attention to those victimized by the impact of McConnell’s leadership – who do not have the comfort or the money to receive the quality of healthcare he did, or the opportunity to indulge their vanity by staying in power long after it was time to go.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
