Here at AP, we have never had any occasion whatsoever to say anything favorable about the current (for only a few more days) Senate Majority Leader, Addison “Mitch” McConnell (R-Kentucky).
There are several reasons for this.
First, Mitch is a Republican, whose control of his Senate is well-known.
Like LBJ, he’s a Master of the Senate. See Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson, volume 3, Master of the Senate. Caro’s book about LBJ’s many years in the Senate is 1,167 pages long, and we are absolutely certain that Donald Trump did not read it, ‘cause he doesn’t read, he just watches Fox News and Fox and Friends, and he tweets, and fulminates at rallies, where’s very well known for telling lies that his deplorable base laps up.
Mitch’s sole goal from early 2009 until the end of time was to make Barack Obama a one-term president. Fortunately, the American people had better ideas.
Mitch has, always and forever, sought to remake the Supreme Court in his conservative image. With considerable help from Donald Trump and many others, including The Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, he’s done that. So now we have The McConnell Court.
When hyper-conservative ideologue SCOTUS Justice Antonin Scalia died unexpectedly at somebody’s hunting lodge in the Lone Star State in February, 2016, he refused to allow Chief Judge Merrick Garland, President Obama’s carefully chosen nominee to succeed Scalia, even the opportunity to receive a hearing.
Mitch, a master manipulator of Senate rules, said, oh no, we have to wait to see who the next president will be, and it didn’t turn out to be Hillary (who, sure enough, had lotsa baggage), so now we have conservative Republican Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, and then we got Brett Kavanaugh, and now hyper-conservative Amy Coney Barrett, she’s on the Supreme Court as well.
But, one day before Donald and Melania leave the White House, we have to say, although grudgingly, that Mitch did something sensible: he said that Trump provoked the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/19/mcconnell-trump-provoked-capitol-attackers-460372.
We are eagerly waiting to learn if Mitch will vote for President Biden’s nominee for Attorney General, the very same Merrick Garland.
And we’re even more curious to see if Mitch will vote to convict Trump of inciting an insurrection on January 6.