Aziz Huq Writes About Mitch McConnell’s Legacy
Mitch McConnell: Hero or Villain?
Mitch McConnell changed Washington forever — whether for better or worse is up for debate.
The Kentucky Republican announced this week that he would step down as Senate GOP leader in November, capping the longest run in Senate leadership in American history. Since he entered Congress in 1985, and especially since he assumed his first leadership position in 2003, he has left his mark on key legislation moving through Capitol Hill and reshaped the federal judiciary. He has also become known for a ruthless but effective way of getting things done in Congress.
We reached out to scores of top political thinkers and congressional insiders to ask what they think is the single most consequential way McConnell has changed Washington. Their answers spanned a wide range, from normalizing obstruction and shielding Donald Trump from accountability to serving as architect of the Kentucky Republican Party and reshaping the courts. Some said he broke the Senate; others said he saved it. Whether their appraisal of his impact was positive or negative, every participant agreed that we will be living with the Washington that McConnell made long after November.
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‘Power used to decisive effect’
By Aziz Huq
Aziz Huq teaches law at the University of Chicago and is the author of The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies.
There is an odd debate in the United States about the legitimacy of courts exercising broad policymaking power over issues of vital concern to American life. The debate is odd because it is often conducted in splendid isolation from facts about the American judiciary that Mitch McConnell, for one, well understood and acted upon.
For it is not quite right to dismiss the courts, as some on the left do, as simply “a disaster for the democratic premise.” Rather, as McConnell well understood, the American Constitution enables democratically elected senators to wield immense power, extended well beyond their terms of service, over public policy via judicial appointments. It was a power used to decisive effect when he decided not to permit a vote on Merrick Garland’s nomination — rupturing decades of norms and opening the gates to a new era of norm-breaking (another legacy, oft overlooked).
In a few short years, he has reaped the end of abortion rights, affirmative action and a new constitutional dispensation in which the religious claim public monies while repudiating regulations designed to protect third parties. Democratic politics through judicial means can well be criticized because its entrenchment effects are more durable, its instrument more cloyingly elitist, its motions more nakedly hypocritical, or its bend tendentiously and unerringly to the right. But it is still an instance of democratic politics, of a sort, in action. Just ask McConnell.
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