McConnell is the first majority leader whose career has been built on the assumption that the Senate that could produce the great legislative works of his predecessors is a thing of the past — a fact that itself owes a great deal to McConnell. As minority and then majority leader during Barack Obama’s presidency, he fashioned himself as the essential impediment to Obama’s vision of a sequel to the Great Society, using tactics that were once the province of Senate factions as a strategic blueprint for the entire Republican caucus.
Democrats, under the current minority leader, Chuck Schumer, have tried to use McConnell’s own playbook against him and Trump, but to lesser effect. This is in part because McConnell has expended less time and effort than previous Senate leaders on the legislative process that so bogged down Obama’s agenda and more on the Senate’s comparatively difficult-to-obstruct business of approving executive appointments. The unprecedented number of conservative-approved judicial nominees McConnell has waved through the Senate — a process for which he laid the groundwork before Trump was elected — stands to shift much of the burden of conservative policymaking away from an increasingly paralyzed Senate. In the coming years, battles over voting rights, health care, abortion, regulation and campaign finance, among other areas, are less likely to be decided in Congress than in the nation’s courthouses. In effect, McConnell has become a master of the Senate by figuring out how to route the Republican agenda around it.
