Have I mentioned lately what a shit Mitch McConnell is?

As he was lecturing Democratic reformers on the folly of voting rights expansion, McConnell was crippling the basic operations of government to assuage the bigoted vanity of the Republican president [by backing the government shutdown]. Recall that the continuing resolution to finance the government without wall funding at the end of the 115th Congress passed overwhelmingly in the chamber he leads, and that he vigilantly squelched successive House versions of the same funding plan throughout the monthlong shutdown drama for no reason except that he didn’t want to be the person to end it. [...] At one critical juncture in the shutdown negotiations, Lindsey Graham, the Trump White House’s key Senate liaison, left a conference with the Senate majority leader to blurt the quiet part out loud to CNBC producer Karen James Sloan. Leader McConnell, Graham explained, is “going to let the White House figure out what move they want to make. . . . The Leader is waiting . . . to see what the White House wants to do.”

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Something of a journalistic cottage industry has sprung up around the recondite question of just what makes Mitch tick, but the uninspiring, mundane answer is hiding in plain sight. Mitch McConnell is the great avatar of the decades-long enclosure of our public life by money. He does not offer a stirring vision of conservative national greatness or even ends-justify-the-means rationales for Senate horse-trading that depart from the disheartening transactional version of our politics that reigns in the Citizens United age. In Mitchworld, you simply pay—and pay, and pay—to play.

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The fabled small-government, evangelical base of Republican national politics has always distrusted—and indeed, often hated​—Mitch McConnell. This was brought home to me forcefully at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, as I watched, from the press seats, Reince Priebus introduce the Senate majority leader as the temporary chairman of the convention. From the floor, the boos outweighed the cheers.

And the Mitch McConnell they were booing was pretty much peak Mitch McConnell. At that moment, he was in the middle of the greatest stand of his career: refusing to allow a Democratic president to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, based on an obscurantist reading of Senate appointment protocols that he was all but making up as he went along.

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But if they recognize that McConnell isn’t truly one of them, what is he? Political journalists have been asking versions of this question since basically the day he became the top Republican in the Senate despite a conspicuous lack of charisma, friends, or big ideas. [...] He’s basically just what he looks like: a man serenely unbothered by anything he’s done to get his power or anything he’s done with it, having few friends but many allies.

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To do his job, Mitch McConnell doesn’t need anyone to like him. He just needs enough money to keep winning elections.

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The best account of Mitch McConnell’s life and political career comes, unsurprisingly, from a representative of the avowedly (as opposed to accused) liberal media, the former New Republic reporter Alec MacGillis, whose aptly titled McConnell biography, The Cynic, was published in 2014. MacGillis writes that McConnell was a liberal Republican as a young man in the 1960s, when that was a perfectly normal thing to be. He was even pro-choice (which, again, would have been the natural position of any moderate, non-Catholic Republican at the time). Reagan, according to MacGillis, was McConnell’s fourth choice for the 1980 Republican nomination for president. But after Reagan’s victory, it became clear which side had won the internecine war over what the GOP was going to be from now on. So McConnell simply became a Reagan Republican.

After his long career in the Senate, it may be impossible now to convince anyone he’s a Tea Party conservative or a MAGA Republican, but he’ll be perfectly comfortable working with members of both factions so long as they don’t harm his fundraising hauls or reelection chances.

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[T]he nice thing about defining your political project so narrowly [is it] makes it easy to get along with figures as diverse as Donald Trump and Susan Collins, each of whom only needs a little flattery now and then to believe McConnell’s on their side.

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But once you realize McConnell has already achieved his life’s dream [of being Senate majority leader], and ascended to the limits of his ambition, his behavior suddenly starts to make more sense. He’s not trying to cap off his career with a legislative masterstroke, because he doesn’t care about legislation. He already won. He’s the Senate majority leader, his parliamentary prowess is regularly feted, and he has already left his legacy indelibly inscribed on the highest court in the land.

Being a Senate majority leader who doesn’t care about almost any particular outcome to any particular political issue not directly related to making sure your funders can fund you actually seems to take quite a bit of pressure off, job performance–wise. Why go to bat to try to end a government shutdown when you don’t actually care if the government is shut down?

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“I think what I have to do, my goal, and depending upon what the numbers are, and what’s achievable, is always to get as right-of-center an outcome as possible.”

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“I mean, at the risk of sounding like I’m patting myself on the back, who would have ever thought with Barack Obama in the White House you could get something like the Budget Control Act in August of 2011, which actually drove down government spending for two years in a row?” McConnell said. “To me, given the numbers, and if you prefer America right of center, that’s my definition of success.”

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This is an extremely funny answer to anyone who remembers recent political history. The Budget Control Act of 2011 was a temporary compromise [...] which called for the creation of a bipartisan deficit-reduction “supercommittee” to propose a truly bipartisan austerity package within a few months. If Congress failed to pass it or a similar package, a series of automatic budget cuts would go into effect.

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Congress delayed the punitive spending cuts for a while and then just let them go into effect. They are, in fact, still in effect—but now Congress votes every few years to temporarily cancel some of the automatic cuts to discretionary spending. In other words, all this high-stakes procedural confrontation simply produced another pointless artificial cliff. And far from achieving some golden-mean version of sober, fiscally restrained governance, it only increased the likelihood that the framework of budgeting-by-extortion would be used to extract demands from some future president or Congress—say, over a feckless plan to erect a wall to contain a nonexistent threat of rampaging immigrant criminality pouring across the Mexican border.

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And while it did cut spending for a few years, it did so at the expense of something President Obama was, at various points in his presidency, practically desperate to sign into law with Republican support: a package of massive permanent spending cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and other programs. Republicans had a Democratic president who wanted to help them achieve one of their supposed signature policy goals, and they simply refused to allow him to do it. McConnell’s great victory was that he came in at the last minute to sign off on a deal designed to extort major policy outcomes that he and his party were solemnly pledged to support, but that his party then capsized out of pique and incompetence.

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Does Mitch McConnell really care if government spending rises or falls? Does he truly care if Social Security is privatized? [...] [A]ny issue without direct relevance to McConnell’s political fortunes is, for him, negotiable. Prior to the 2006 midterms, which were not looking good for the Republican Party, McConnell even advised President Bush to withdraw from Iraq to save the election. That’s how much he cares about the conservative project, as opposed to electoral success. The neocons wanted power in order to use it to shape the world. McConnell wanted to shape the world into one in which he continues to have power, and he did.

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But he was consistent—or rather, consistently inconsistent in one strategic direction—about one issue: campaign finance, on which he very quickly developed a reputation as an expert. He knew fundraising was his primary political strength and probably the only reason he was even in office to begin with.

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When McConnell felt he wasn’t getting enough support from PACs, he wanted PACs banned. When he thought Democrats were outperforming Republicans with “soft money”— contributions from corporations and unions to parties, not individual candidates— McConnell wanted soft money banned. By the end of the ’90s, when it was clear how much Republicans were benefiting from soft money, he was vociferously defending it from the attacks of his Republican Senate colleague John McCain, who’d made it his mission to rein in political spending.

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When you spend so much of your time asking rich people for money, it does help to have a lot of it yourself, so you have something in common. Curiously, McConnell’s own personal fortunes are frequently left out of his profiles, perhaps because it appears vaguely unseemly for reporters or editors to just come out and say the plain truth: He married into money, which had enormous political benefits. This is not to make any unsavory insinuation about the nature of his relationship with Elaine Chao—it is, however, to note that she was a wealthy shipping heiress when they married, and he was effectively a lifelong politician who’d barely sniffed the private sector. Even before the marriage, Chao’s wealthy father had been a large Mitch McConnell donor; after, he became an even more enthusiastic one. He also gave the couple at least one reported gift of millions of dollars. In 2016, Mitch McConnell was estimated to be worth around $27 million.

  New Republic

I have no problem making unsavory insinuations about why he married Chao (his second wife). Or she, him.  She gave him money; he gave her power.

[In 2007] McConnell’s Senate colleagues elected him minority leader in a blaze of powerless compromise. The remaining moderates thought they had chosen someone who’d have their back as the party continued to lurch rightward.

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This is where the story of how Mitch McConnell saved the GOP begins. The infamous strategy that McConnell dreamed up and put into action to throttle any putative accomplishment of the Obama White House, no matter how nugatory, has become the stuff of right-wing parliamentary lore. We know the quote about his main priority being to make Obama a one-term president. It’s easy to forget now, though, the long odds he faced.

The GOP after Bush should have been finished for a generation. It was utterly defeated, and a Democratic president had just been elected—via the Democrats’ fourth popular vote victory of the last five presidential elections—in a near-​landslide. Massive Democratic majorities were installed in both houses, and the Senate Democratic caucus flirted with the true golden ring of power: an actual filibuster-proof majority. The economy was in ruins, and everyone knew who was to blame for that: Republicans. The signature policy of the Bush administration, the Iraq War, was acknowledged by all to be a catastrophic failure. [...] But they surged back into power almost immediately.

There are a lot of interconnected reasons for this, including but not restricted to: Barack Obama’s early decision to move on from further investigation (let alone prosecution) of Bush administration officials; political choices made to prioritize stabilizing Wall Street over providing relief to homeowners; and the Democratic Party’s long-term inability or unwillingness to treat the Republican Party as an extreme and malign force that must be defeated, instead of negotiated with.

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In 2009, Republican senators, like most senators in the old days, were still driven to cut deals and negotiate compromises to make themselves feel important. Democrats hungered to give them opportunities to have input into major legislation. [...] And McConnell, as a political nihilist, always has an advantage over people determined to prove things work: It’s much easier to simply make things not work, if the only outcome you care about is electoral.

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McConnell’s gleefully nihilist direction, would grind the judicial nomination process almost to a halt.

Donald Trump would enter the presidency with 88 district and 17 court of appeals vacancies to fill, along with a Supreme Court vacancy improbably procured and kept open by McConnell’s obstructionist absolutism. A seemingly bulletproof Republican Senate majority stood by, eager to seat the furthest-right nominees to all these judicial seats that they could find.

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Like everyone else, [McConnell, in 2016] viewed Trump’s seizure of the nomination as a worst-case scenario for the GOP. But as he always does when the GOP is self-destructing, he mainly kept quiet. Behind the scenes, of course, he did two key things to help: First, for old time’s sake, he refused to let Obama have one last moment of bipartisanship, when the president asked him and House Speaker Paul Ryan to call out Russian interference in the 2016 elections, according to former Vice President Joe Biden.

Even that was another campaign finance story. Leonard Blavatnik is a Russian-American dual citizen who made his fortune in postcommunist Russia. He had a history of donating modest sums to candidates from both parties until he became, suddenly, an extraordinarily generous supporter of Mitch McConnell’s political machine in 2015, The Dallas Morning News reported. From 2015 to 2017, Blavatnik steered $3.5 million to McConnell’s PAC. An offshore holding company co-owned by Blavatnik and billionaire Viktor Vekselberg owns 26.5 percent of Rusal, the aluminum giant controlled by oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who is regularly said to be the lobbying client most responsible for Paul Manafort getting in trouble. McConnell was first briefed about Russian attempts to sabotage or interfere with the presidential election in September 2016. In October, his PAC accepted another $1 million from Blavatnik.

This year, McConnell fought some opposition in his own party to lift sanctions that had been placed on Rusal by the Treasury Department. Regardless of your feelings about the Russia investigation, it’s not hard to imagine McConnell’s response to being told Russians were interfering in the election while a Putin-connected oligarch was shoveling money into his PAC: If they want to help us, let ’em. I’m not impugning his patriotism, either. He already had a documented history of changing foreign policy beliefs based on political donations: MacGillis records his quick transformation in the 1990s from an implacable foe of Red China to a supporter of “most favored nation” trading status with the People’s Republic, which coincided with some healthy fundraising from contributors to the U.S.-China Business Council.

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As Trump’s presidency has predictably proved to be a series of outrages and self-inflicted national crises, punctuated with periodic updates on all the crimes and should-be-crimes his friends, associates, and children have committed, McConnell has receded into the wallpaper. It’s another of his special political talents. During that historic shutdown, he simply vanished for days at a time, letting his louder, dimmer counterpart in the Democratic minority, New York Senator Chuck Schumer, make himself the face of the Senate side of the negotiations.

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[McConnell is] a man whose political project is increasingly about reducing the power of the ballot box as much as possible—a man who breaks any and all decorous governing traditions in his path in order to confirm judges who strike down voting rights laws, and who, during government shutdowns that he has the power to end, sits down to write op-eds bemoaning attempts to make Election Day a holiday.

McConnell has built a GOP machine that is as immune as it can be to the ballot box, because he is smart enough to know that Republicans cannot, as currently constituted, win fair elections often enough to retain power.

As I'm often saying: They can't win if they don't cheat.

[B]y choosing incredibly canny battles—his relentless attempts to first upend even the possibility of campaign finance regulation and enforcement, and then to pack the judiciary with right-wing ideologues—McConnell has enabled the conservative movement to dominate American politics long after its tenets are fully rejected by the majority of the electorate.

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McConnell hasn’t just “broken” the Senate by smashing its norms, or by making it dysfunctional. He’s essentially worked to make it irrelevant. For the foreseeable future, America’s regulatory policy will be written by the judiciary. Its ability to prosecute white-collar crime and bribery, to levy taxes, and create social welfare programs—all of these powers will be stripped from the Senate and put in the hands of the men (it’s almost all men) McConnell has placed on the courts.

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And the beautiful thing here is that Mitch McConnell already won. Even with Republicans losing the House, McConnell has another two years to complete his life’s work: a pipeline, sucking donor money out of the plutocracy and refining it into a judiciary that will someday declare it unconstitutional to levy property taxes on a billionaire’s climate change-adaptation bunker.

Ditch Mitch.