Following a crushing electoral defeat in 2008, in which Democrats captured the House, the Senate and the Oval Office, then-66-year-old Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell drew out a roadmap for his GOP colleagues. The plan for the better part of the next decade? Obstruct, obstruct, obstruct.
This platform of negation took root quickly, radically changing what the GOP saw as its purpose. Asked in 2010 what his party’s priorities would be following a potential shift in D.C. power in the upcoming midterm elections, McConnell passed over sharing his vision for the country and instead promised to wield his power to nip President Barack Obama's agenda in the bud.
“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” McConnell told the National Journal.
McConnell kept his caucus in lock-step, putting up a fight on even the most popular Obama initiatives. Early signs showed the extent of his grip on the GOP. Not one Senate Republican voted in favor of the Affordable Care Act. Nearly the entire party voted against the 2009 Recovery Act, meant to bolster the reeling U.S. and lessen the pain of the market crash.
His ability to obstruct only got better with age. During the 118th Congress, a GOP-led House and cloture-happy GOP minority in the Senate led the legislature on its least accomplished session in decades.
McConnell announced his retirement from the upper chamber on Thursday, opting to bow out of the 2026 Senate elections. But his legacy is likely to live on in the dug-in heels of a new generation of obstinate MAGA Republicans. The senator from Kentucky's decades-long impact on legislation, the courts, and the fundamentals of congressional leadership itself make him perhaps the most divisive man on Capitol Hill.
“Gravedigger of American Democracy,” New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie proclaimed McConnell in a post to Bluesky, adding that the senator was “a more malign influence than John C. Calhoun," an antebellum Southern politician and infamous defender of slavery.
For McConnell’s acolytes, the Kentucky power broker kept the tradition of the “cooling saucer” Senate alive, keeping the bar for passing legislation high above a simple majority and preventing two Democratic presidents from enacting their agendas.
The Cloture Motion
The Senate may have a storied tradition of deep political divides, but McConnell called his ships and blockaded nearly a staggering amount of the Democratic Party's efforts to govern. As political scientist Bert Rockman put it in a 2012 paper, McConnell’s “opposition tactics in the Senate made it not so much the 'cooling saucer' as the deep freezer of legislation.”
Republicans in the Senate were outnumbered for the majority of Obama’s presidency, but that didn’t stop them from blocking hundreds of bills and nominations. Republicans utilized the filibuster and cloture procedures in the upper chamber. The de facto requirement of 60 votes to advance legislation from debate effectively killed majority-favored bills in Democrat-steered sessions.
Coupled with McConnell’s knack for whipping votes and halting in-party dissent, the filibuster-everything strategy made just about any dewy-eyed bipartisan efforts dead on arrival. The McConnell minority's ability to put the kibosh on laws was merely a teaser for their most radical and influential strategy. McConnell oversaw a historic effort to curtail the Obama administration’s appointment of federal officials and judges, turning the formerly bipartisan process into another front of a trench war.
By 2013, McConnell’s GOP had made nearly half of all cloture motions on presidential nominations in history, a Congressional Research Service study in 2013 found. Frustrated by McConnell's antics, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid amended the rules in 2013 to allow cloture by simple majority on nominations (Supreme Court justices, excepted).
McConnell lost that particular battle, but he won the war. Using the same logic, a McConnell-led Senate in 2017 augmented the rules further to allow a simple majority to break a filibuster on Supreme Court nominees.
Shaping the Supreme Court
When conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia passed away in early 2016, President Obama gained an opportunity to tilt the balance on an evenly split court. Obeying in advance to perceived conservative pushback, Obama nominated moderate Merrick Garland to the vacancy on the high court.
Garland, a man that Utah GOP Senator Orrin Hatch called a “consensus nominee” in the years before the nomination, never got close to the bench, though.
McConnell invoked an iffy senatorial precedent to stonewall Garland’s confirmation, claiming that the Senate shouldn’t confirm high court appointees in the final year of a presidency. Historical basis or not, McConnell’s chamber successfully stalled the vacancy until after the 2016 election, in which President Donald Trump was chosen to fill it.
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Confirming cross-party consensus was far from top of mind when McConnell’s party won power in 2016. With a chance to augment the judiciary for a generation, the Majority Leader abandoned his vaunted norms of prior sessions and helped Trump ram Justices Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett through the chamber. In a particularly brutal peeling back of McConnell's veil of norms, Barrett was nominated to the court less than six weeks before a presidential election.
McConnell and Trump were laser-focused on the lower courts as well, stacking the wider judiciary with 226 right-wing justices in just four years, rivaling the appellate appointment count of two-term presidents.
“100% of our focus is on stopping this new administration”
McConnell could have retired with a truly impressive legacy in 2021, having halted much of Obama’s second-term agenda and reshaped the Supreme Court. But he stayed at the helm of his party when Democrats won an even 50-seat split of the Senate, a majority with former Vice President Kamala Harris’s vote, hoping to hamstring the Biden administration.
In mid-2021, the then-Minority Leader again promised to obstruct.
"100 percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration," McConnell said. "We're confronted with severe challenges from a new administration, and a narrow majority of Democrats in the House and a 50-50 Senate to turn America into a socialist country, and that's 100 percent of my focus.”
While a few bills slipped through the cracks, with Senate Democrats getting crafty in budget appropriations packages that require a simple majority to legislate, McConnell’s party blocked most of the Biden agenda.
Former President Biden resorted to utilizing administrative power to achieve its goals. Many of the Biden administration’s flagship bureaucratic and regulatory wins were killed by the very judiciary that McConnell had pushed to the right. Relief for student debt, firearm and discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ Americans faced roadblocks in the courts.
Lying in it
McConnell leaves Senate leadership with few friends on the new right. In spite of the work he's done to instill Trump-friendly judges, President Donald Trump is loud about his disdain for the Kentuckian.
Votes against Trump’s anti-scientific and hair-raising Cabinet nominees proved unsuccessful and inspired Trump to call McConnell “not equipped mentally” for leadership from the Resolute Desk.
But McConnell chose to spare Trump at every pass. Endorsing the President in 2020 and 2024, and even sparing Trump in a Senate impeachment trial after he led a violent mob of supporters to stop the certification of Biden’s election win, McConnell tossed his most powerful critic a lifeline.
McConnell is the longest-serving party leader in Senate history. But that's unlikely to be the first thing anyone remembers about him. The senator's legacy lies in the now standard abuse of institutional guardrails to hamper political opponents — with the GOP holding Democrats to set-in-stone norms while in the minority and ripping up the bedrock when in power. His hard work grinding good-faith governance efforts to a halt will far outlive any other aspect of his storied career.
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