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Mitch McConnell Reaches New Milestone as Longest-Serving Senate Leader
(Bloomberg) -- Mitch McConnell broke Democrat Mike Mansfield’s record as longest-serving Senate party leader on Tuesday when he began his 17th year as Republican leader — a mark of stability in a Capitol riven by chaos in the House.
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McConnell, 80, is now poised to serve as he did a dozen years ago: As a key negotiator and deal-maker with a Democratic president, a newly empowered but divided House Republican majority, and a Democratic Senate. In 2011, McConnell helped cut the crucial deal that put a straitjacket on government spending and raised the debt limit, with a similar deadline looming this year.
Mansfield served as Senate majority leader for a momentous and turbulent 16 years from 1961 to 1977, shepherding passage of sweeping legislation from civil rights to the creation of Medicare and Medicaid. The late Montana senator will still hold the record for most years as majority leader, but McConnell will top him as leader of his party.
McConnell lauded Mansfield at length Tuesday, praising his penchant for “discussion over dictatorship, and a winning record on his party’s key priorities, without attacking the institution to do it.”
The Kentuckian easily swatted away a challenge to his leadership late last year, with McConnell and Donald Trump trading blame for disappointing midterm elections that saw Democrats add a seat to their narrow Senate majority. Their relationship turned frosty two years ago, when McConnell refused to go along with Trump’s scheme to overturn his defeat, and after McConnell blamed Trump for the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection. (McConnell voted to acquit Trump in his impeachment trial, citing his status as an ex-president — a circumstance he himself had created by refusing to bring the Senate back to hold the trial while Trump was still in office.)
But in the Capitol, it’s McConnell, not Trump, who has long held the keys to passing legislation. Thanks to the Senate’s filibuster rule and his hold over his conference, few bills have become law without at least the acquiescence of McConnell in the past dozen years or so.
Late last year McConnell engineered a $1.7 trillion omnibus spending package built to his specifications, with his top priorities included: Record defense spending and a fresh injection of aid to Ukraine, without some Democratic priorities and spending he considered to be poison pills and excessive.
It was one of many deals McConnell reached with Democrats and President Joe Biden’s administration in the last two years, sometimes angering members of his party’s right wing. But McConnell’s strategy preserved his top priority: maintaining the Senate’s filibuster rule with its 60-vote threshold on most legislation — what he calls “the essence of the Senate” —— by successfully wooing moderates Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Ultimately that duo killed the bulk of Biden’s sweeping “Build Back Better” social agenda, and by preserving the filibuster they wiped out a slew of other Democratic priorities, including a proposed overhaul of voting and election laws.
In a highly unusual move, Biden and McConnell are set to appear together Wednesday in Kentucky to tout the bipartisan infrastructure deal that both backed in 2021 — with Biden touting bipartisanship with divided government returning to Washington. That package is set to provide key funding for a long-sought new bridge between McConnell’s home state and Ohio.
The two men served together for decades in the Senate and cut several budget deals together when Biden served as vice president.
“We’ve been friends a long time. I don’t — everybody is talking about how significant it is. It has nothing to do about our relationship,” Biden told reporters Monday. “It’s a lot of money. It’s important.”
Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader who became the longest-serving senator from New York, congratulated McConnell on the milestone. “We have a lot of work ahead of us, so I hope we can find some ways to come together and not succumb to gridlock,” he said.
McConnell, who called his autobiography “The Long Game,” still counts the conservative courts as his signature achievement. His moves as majority leader from 2015 to 2021 solidified a conservative Supreme Court for perhaps a generation, and has already led to the toppling of a number of precedents, including Roe v. Wade. McConnell also shepherded his party’s tax overhaul in 2017, including an end to the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, though his efforts to pass a more sweeping repeal of President Barack Obama’s health care law failed in spectacular fashion with then-Senator John McCain’s thumbs down earlier that year.
While there are several other Senate Republicans who could vie to succeed McConnell when he steps down, he’s given no indication he will do so soon. McConnell would next face voters in 2026 if he chooses to run for an eighth term.
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