Harold Titus's Blog, page 3
March 27, 2022
The Amoralists -- Ted Cruz -- Part Two -- Law Career
After law school, Cruz served as a law clerk to J. Michael Luttig of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in 1995 and Chief Justice William Rehnquist of the United States in 1996. Cruz was the first Hispanic American to clerk for a Chief Justice of the United States. Both Judge Luttig and Justice Rehnquist were giants of the conservative legal bench. These prestigious clerkships at the Circuit Court level and U.S. Supreme Court are just about the plummiest any law school graduate could possibly get (Ted 1)
Mr. Cruz, the most ardent death penalty advocate of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist’s clerks in the 1996 term, became known at the court for his signature writing style. Nearly two decades later, his colleagues recall how Mr. Cruz, who frequently spoke of how his mentor’s father had been killed by a carjacker, often dwelled on the lurid details of murders that other clerks tended to summarize before quickly moving to the legal merits of the case.
“That, I think, was a special interest of his,” said Renée Lerner, then a clerk for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who said she was impressed with how deeply Mr. Cruz delved into the facts and history of a murder case. “It was unusual for a Supreme Court clerk to do that.”
Other clerks, however, had a less admiring view. In interviews with nearly two dozen of Mr. Cruz’s former colleagues on the court, many of the clerks working in the chambers of liberal justices, but also several from conservative chambers, depicted Mr. Cruz as “obsessed” with capital punishment. …
Melissa Hart, who clerked for one of the liberal justices, John Paul Stevens, said Mr. Cruz’s … writing approach “made a lot of people really angry.”
In Mr. Cruz’s time as a Supreme Court clerk, a coveted step in a legal career that he had meticulously plotted out, he showed his now familiar capacity to infuriate colleagues. He also worked hard to please his boss, delved into the nuances of constitutional law for long, grueling hours and sought to smooth over harsh feelings at clerk happy hours.
But when he left, he was most remembered by his fellow clerks for his fervor for capital punishment cases, a cause that would define his legal career and help him break into politics.
…
Mr. Cruz … clearly loved his time in a workplace rife with ideological differences. In the glass-encased room of the cafeteria where clerks could discuss cases in confidence, he sharpened his arguments. Playing basketball in the building’s “highest court in the land,” he said “my bad” to the colleagues he elbowed wildly on his way to the hoop. He organized a poker game with conservative clerks, and in the courtyard, he participated in the weekly happy hour, with alternating chambers taking on catering duties. (Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s clerks impressed with fajitas. Justice Thomas’s clerks did not with cereal.)
Neal Katyal, a clerk for Justice Stephen G. Breyer who went on to become the principal deputy and later acting solicitor general of the United States under President Obama, said he had befriended Mr. Cruz on their first day at the cafeteria. He said that it was “superfun” debating politics and law with Mr. Cruz, and that they had also hit the library with legal pads together and discussed life, love and “who we wanted to spend our lives with.”
But Mr. Cruz mostly had time for Chief Justice Rehnquist. Mr. Cruz and he played croquet together, and on Thursday mornings, Mr. Cruz struggled through doubles matches with the tennis-loving chief and his two other clerks. (So as not to disappoint his boss, Mr. Cruz had taken lessons before officially starting the job.) (Horowitz 1-3).
After a brief one-year stint as a law firm associate, Cruz joined the George W. Bush presidential campaign in 1999 as a domestic policy adviser. Cruz devised strategy and drafted pleadings for the Bush v Gore case during the 2000 Florida presidential recounts (Ted 1).
Once Bush took office, Cruz worked at the Justice Department as an associate deputy attorney general in 2001, but he had developed a reputation as “abrasive” during the campaign and ended up moving to the "unglamorous" position as the director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission in 2002, a job Cruz saw as "penance" for rubbing people the wrong way on the campaign.
Cruz married Heidi Nelson, whom he met working on the Bush campaign, in 2001 (Levy 1).
“I just don’t like the guy,” Bush has said since. The solicitor general role in his home state of Texas, offered to him by Greg Abbott—then the attorney general of Texas, now the governor—was a political lifeline (Kruse 2).
Cruz then returned to his home state of Texas to serve as Solicitor General of Texas from 2003 to 2008. As Solicitor General, Cruz was the state’s chief appellate lawyer. He was also the youngest, the first Hispanic, and the longest-serving, solicitor general in Texas history. As Solicitor General, Cruz argued before the Supreme Court of the United States nine times, winning five cases and losing four (Ted 2).
… the five-plus years he served as the solicitor general of Texas remain the most important period in his public résumé. They’re the record he ran on when he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012—and they represent significantly more of his working life than the three years he has served so far in the Senate.
They're also a prime source of fodder for liberal and moderate critics, should he become the Republican presidential nominee.
A Politico review of Cruz’s record as solicitor general shows he used the role in a new and far more ideological way than his predecessors, taking a relatively low-profile job that had traditionally been used mostly to defend the state government and turning it into a stage for pushing national conservative causes. Cruz argued eight cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court—far more than his predecessors and successors—using each of them to advance a position endorsed by conservative thinkers. He also was the counsel of record on some 70 friend-of-the-court briefs, or amicus briefs, weighing in on cases across the country, … in which Texas had no direct stake, but which similarly offered a chance to argue ideological points.
…
… Cruz’s time as solicitor general built him a powerful allegiance among the conservative donors necessary to launch a national campaign. …
…
When it came to cases that allowed him to argue for things like the forceful application of the death penalty and expressions of religion in the public arena and against things like abortion and gun control, Ho told me, Cruz “was on constant watch for opportunities to press a conservative vision of the Constitution.”
One person with intimate knowledge of the office described Cruz to me as a “show horse.” Others told me Cruz simply was discerning and strategic and had no qualms about delegating…. Cruz, ...compared with his predecessors, ratcheted up the writing of amicus briefs. And of the cases to which he or the more than a dozen attorneys who worked for him had to respond, he tended to prioritize those he felt would have the most impact, the most buzz, the best shot at ending up in front of the Supreme Court.
The first high-profile case along these lines—and often the first on a list that Cruz hits in speeches—was Van Orden v. Perry, one of a handful of key fights around the country over whether a public institution can display the Ten Commandments.
A homeless former lawyer named Thomas Van Orden sued Texas on account of a Ten Commandments monument on the capitol grounds in Austin. His contention was that this was an unconstitutional injection of religion into such a shared public space. Cruz fought him up the chain of courts. After the case, in interviews with reporters, at forums at conservative think tanks and in an appearance in a short documentary about the case made by the law school at Duke, Cruz painted the case as a pivotal battle against godless liberals who seek to rub out what he sees as religion’s rightful role in American culture. He said in a panel discussion at the Heritage Foundation that Van Orden was “a significant victory from the perspective of keeping away the chisels and sandblasters.” He fretted in the Dallas Morning News about efforts to “read into our Constitution a hostility toward religion.” Besides, he said in the Duke documentary, “nobody is forcing the passerby to confront this. If an individual is offended, don’t look at it.”
When the case went to the Supreme Court in 2005, it was Abbott, not Cruz, who argued on behalf of Texas—even though Cruz had argued in front of the appeals court in New Orleans, and Erwin Chemerinsky, who argued on behalf of Van Orden, told me he had dealt with Cruz almost exclusively throughout the case. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court sided with Texas—with Cruz—saying it was OK to have a Ten Commandments monument on the state’s capitol grounds.
In eight other cases, though, as solicitor general, Cruz gave oral arguments himself at the Supreme Court. Not all of them were wins, but all were chances for Cruz to showcase his particular brand of vigorously argued movement conservatism.
…
In 2004, in Dretke v. Haley, Cruz argued against leniency for a man who had been unjustly sentenced for a series of thefts—basically because the man’s attorney hadn’t objected when he was supposed to. Cruz worried it would set a bad precedent if the Supreme Court essentially let him out. He faced withering skepticism for putting the principle ahead of the case itself. “So a man does 15 years so you can vindicate your legal point in some other case?” Justice Anthony Kennedy said to Cruz. The justices kicked the case back to Texas courts, which ultimately resentenced the man to the time he had already served.
But the case Ted Cruz talks about the most is Medellin v. Texas. In 2005 and again in 2007, Cruz was put in the intriguing position of, in essence, going up against President George W. Bush. The specifics were compelling: Jose Medellin, a Mexican citizen who had grown up in Texas, raped and killed two teenage girls in Houston. His appeal centered on the fact that he hadn’t been given the chance to talk to the Mexican consulate, violating an international treaty. The International Court of Justice ordered a retrial, not just for Medellin but 50 other Mexican citizens with similar situations. Bush, stunning Cruz and others, penned an executive memorandum siding with the court.
Cruz argued in front of the Supreme Court that the president had overreached. The case, he said, was a question of U.S. sovereignty and of the foundational issue of separation of powers. The president, Cruz said, did not have the power to do what he did. No president would. Not in this country. Cruz, in polite understatement, called it “a very curious assertion of presidential power.” …
The court ruled 6-3 for Texas in June 2005. Medellin was executed a little more than three years later.
Cruz had four other oral arguments in front of the Supreme Court. In League of United Latin American Citizens v Perry in 2006, he emphasized the importance of separation of powers in defending a congressional redistricting case that made Texas a friendlier state in which to run for Republicans. In Smith v Texas and Panetti v Quarterman in 2007 and Kennedy v Louisiana in 2008, he argued pro-death-penalty positions in one case in which the defendant was borderline insane, and another in which the defendant had raped but not killed an 8-year-old girl.
The even more telling portion of what he did as solicitor general is the amicus briefs. …
In a brief in Elk Grove v. Newdow, a case out of California, he argued that children in public schools should be able to say the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, citing “the undeniable link between our Nation and her religious foundation.”
In a brief in Lopez v. Gonzales, a case out of South Dakota, he wrote, “Our Nation must secure its borders, especially against convicted felons who enter illegally.”
In a brief in Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, a case out of New Hampshire, he stressed the need for parental notification before abortion.
In a brief in Gonzales v. Carhart, a case that came through courts in California, Nebraska and New York, he argued for the defense of a federal law banning the procedure known by critics as "partial-birth abortions" because “they draw a bright line that clearly distinguishes between abortion and infanticide.”
And then there was what he wrote in his brief in District of Columbia v. Heller, the seminal Second Amendment case from 2008, when the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right, as opposed to a collective, militia-related right, to have and use guns.
Every year from 2003 to 2007, Cruz was the counsel of record on briefs that won a Best Brief Award from the National Association of Attorneys Generals. He wasn’t the only winner—in 2007, for instance, NAAG gave a Best Brief Award to 17 people—but Cruz was a named winner five years in a row.
…
Around then, according to his book, Cruz had a four-hour breakfast with veteran Republican political strategist Karl Rove. “I asked his advice,” Cruz wrote, “on eventually running for office—whether I should stay on longer as solicitor general or go to private practice.” Rove, Cruz said, told him to keep doing what he was doing: “stay on the job as solicitor general, keep building my record, and find opportunities to systematically build political support for a future run.”
When Cruz left the solicitor general position, in 2009, to join the international law firm Morgan Lewis—now Morgan, Lewis & Bockius—Abbott praised him effusively.
…
He began running for attorney general in 2009—a logical next step—but then-Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison didn’t resign her seat to run for governor, as everybody was expecting, which meant certain dominoes didn’t fall, leaving Abbott as attorney general. That left Cruz stuck at Morgan Lewis, which wasn’t the worst, considering he made more than a million dollars a year every year he was there, according to his financial disclosure forms. But still, Ed Burbach, who worked in the office next to Cruz when he was solicitor general, told me, “I don’t think Morgan Lewis was his goal.”
So in 2011, a year in which he made $1,573,543 from Morgan Lewis, he launched a long-shot run for the U.S. Senate, challenging in the Republican primary David Dewhurst, Texas’ well-known lieutenant governor.
That June, in New Orleans, in a Hilton ballroom at the annual Republican Leadership Conference, he made his pitch. He was polling at less than 10 percent. He told the small crowd about his record.
“During the five and a half years I served as solicitor general, over and over again, Texas stood up and led the nation defending conservative principles,” Cruz said. “We defended the Ten Commandments,” he said, not telling them that Abbott had been the one to actually argue in front of the Supreme Court. “We defended the Pledge of Allegiance,” not telling them that what he did was write an amicus brief. “We defended the Second Amendment,” he said, not telling them that what he did in the case, too, was write a brief. “We went to the Supreme Court, and we won,” he kept telling them, and they kept clapping, and the clapping was getting louder. He told them about Medellin. He told them all of this before he talked about his anti-Obamacare stance, before he told them about his family’s history, his father fleeing from Cuba and pursuing the American dream.
Two months later, in South Carolina at the RedState Bloggers Conference, it was the same: “Over and over again Texas stood up …”
“That’s the record I’m running on,” he told 70 people in folding chairs at a candidates forum put on by the Republican Women of Kerr County, Texas, that fall.
He chased down Dewhurst, getting enough votes in the primary to force a runoff. …
And during his run for the U.S. Senate, throughout 2011 and 2012, putting the finishing touches on that bridge from elite legal nerd to right-wing politician, Cruz settled on his two sentences.
“I’m not running as a lawyer,” he said in a radio interview in San Antonio. “I’m running as a fighter” (Kruse 4-15).
Works cited:
Horowitz, Jason. “As Supreme Court Clerk, Ted Cruz Made Death Penalty His Cause.” New York Times, January 20, 2016. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/us...
Kruse, Michael. “How Ted Cruz Became Ted Cruz.” Politico, January 5, 2016. Net. https://www.politico.com/magazine/sto...
Levy, Gabrielle. “10 Things You Didn't Know about Ted Cruz.” U.S. News, May 3, 2017. Net. https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/...
“Ted Cruz’s (Brilliant) Legal Career.” The Reeves Law Group. Net. https://www.robertreeveslaw.com/blog/...
Mr. Cruz, the most ardent death penalty advocate of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist’s clerks in the 1996 term, became known at the court for his signature writing style. Nearly two decades later, his colleagues recall how Mr. Cruz, who frequently spoke of how his mentor’s father had been killed by a carjacker, often dwelled on the lurid details of murders that other clerks tended to summarize before quickly moving to the legal merits of the case.
“That, I think, was a special interest of his,” said Renée Lerner, then a clerk for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who said she was impressed with how deeply Mr. Cruz delved into the facts and history of a murder case. “It was unusual for a Supreme Court clerk to do that.”
Other clerks, however, had a less admiring view. In interviews with nearly two dozen of Mr. Cruz’s former colleagues on the court, many of the clerks working in the chambers of liberal justices, but also several from conservative chambers, depicted Mr. Cruz as “obsessed” with capital punishment. …
Melissa Hart, who clerked for one of the liberal justices, John Paul Stevens, said Mr. Cruz’s … writing approach “made a lot of people really angry.”
In Mr. Cruz’s time as a Supreme Court clerk, a coveted step in a legal career that he had meticulously plotted out, he showed his now familiar capacity to infuriate colleagues. He also worked hard to please his boss, delved into the nuances of constitutional law for long, grueling hours and sought to smooth over harsh feelings at clerk happy hours.
But when he left, he was most remembered by his fellow clerks for his fervor for capital punishment cases, a cause that would define his legal career and help him break into politics.
…
Mr. Cruz … clearly loved his time in a workplace rife with ideological differences. In the glass-encased room of the cafeteria where clerks could discuss cases in confidence, he sharpened his arguments. Playing basketball in the building’s “highest court in the land,” he said “my bad” to the colleagues he elbowed wildly on his way to the hoop. He organized a poker game with conservative clerks, and in the courtyard, he participated in the weekly happy hour, with alternating chambers taking on catering duties. (Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s clerks impressed with fajitas. Justice Thomas’s clerks did not with cereal.)
Neal Katyal, a clerk for Justice Stephen G. Breyer who went on to become the principal deputy and later acting solicitor general of the United States under President Obama, said he had befriended Mr. Cruz on their first day at the cafeteria. He said that it was “superfun” debating politics and law with Mr. Cruz, and that they had also hit the library with legal pads together and discussed life, love and “who we wanted to spend our lives with.”
But Mr. Cruz mostly had time for Chief Justice Rehnquist. Mr. Cruz and he played croquet together, and on Thursday mornings, Mr. Cruz struggled through doubles matches with the tennis-loving chief and his two other clerks. (So as not to disappoint his boss, Mr. Cruz had taken lessons before officially starting the job.) (Horowitz 1-3).
After a brief one-year stint as a law firm associate, Cruz joined the George W. Bush presidential campaign in 1999 as a domestic policy adviser. Cruz devised strategy and drafted pleadings for the Bush v Gore case during the 2000 Florida presidential recounts (Ted 1).
Once Bush took office, Cruz worked at the Justice Department as an associate deputy attorney general in 2001, but he had developed a reputation as “abrasive” during the campaign and ended up moving to the "unglamorous" position as the director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission in 2002, a job Cruz saw as "penance" for rubbing people the wrong way on the campaign.
Cruz married Heidi Nelson, whom he met working on the Bush campaign, in 2001 (Levy 1).
“I just don’t like the guy,” Bush has said since. The solicitor general role in his home state of Texas, offered to him by Greg Abbott—then the attorney general of Texas, now the governor—was a political lifeline (Kruse 2).
Cruz then returned to his home state of Texas to serve as Solicitor General of Texas from 2003 to 2008. As Solicitor General, Cruz was the state’s chief appellate lawyer. He was also the youngest, the first Hispanic, and the longest-serving, solicitor general in Texas history. As Solicitor General, Cruz argued before the Supreme Court of the United States nine times, winning five cases and losing four (Ted 2).
… the five-plus years he served as the solicitor general of Texas remain the most important period in his public résumé. They’re the record he ran on when he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012—and they represent significantly more of his working life than the three years he has served so far in the Senate.
They're also a prime source of fodder for liberal and moderate critics, should he become the Republican presidential nominee.
A Politico review of Cruz’s record as solicitor general shows he used the role in a new and far more ideological way than his predecessors, taking a relatively low-profile job that had traditionally been used mostly to defend the state government and turning it into a stage for pushing national conservative causes. Cruz argued eight cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court—far more than his predecessors and successors—using each of them to advance a position endorsed by conservative thinkers. He also was the counsel of record on some 70 friend-of-the-court briefs, or amicus briefs, weighing in on cases across the country, … in which Texas had no direct stake, but which similarly offered a chance to argue ideological points.
…
… Cruz’s time as solicitor general built him a powerful allegiance among the conservative donors necessary to launch a national campaign. …
…
When it came to cases that allowed him to argue for things like the forceful application of the death penalty and expressions of religion in the public arena and against things like abortion and gun control, Ho told me, Cruz “was on constant watch for opportunities to press a conservative vision of the Constitution.”
One person with intimate knowledge of the office described Cruz to me as a “show horse.” Others told me Cruz simply was discerning and strategic and had no qualms about delegating…. Cruz, ...compared with his predecessors, ratcheted up the writing of amicus briefs. And of the cases to which he or the more than a dozen attorneys who worked for him had to respond, he tended to prioritize those he felt would have the most impact, the most buzz, the best shot at ending up in front of the Supreme Court.
The first high-profile case along these lines—and often the first on a list that Cruz hits in speeches—was Van Orden v. Perry, one of a handful of key fights around the country over whether a public institution can display the Ten Commandments.
A homeless former lawyer named Thomas Van Orden sued Texas on account of a Ten Commandments monument on the capitol grounds in Austin. His contention was that this was an unconstitutional injection of religion into such a shared public space. Cruz fought him up the chain of courts. After the case, in interviews with reporters, at forums at conservative think tanks and in an appearance in a short documentary about the case made by the law school at Duke, Cruz painted the case as a pivotal battle against godless liberals who seek to rub out what he sees as religion’s rightful role in American culture. He said in a panel discussion at the Heritage Foundation that Van Orden was “a significant victory from the perspective of keeping away the chisels and sandblasters.” He fretted in the Dallas Morning News about efforts to “read into our Constitution a hostility toward religion.” Besides, he said in the Duke documentary, “nobody is forcing the passerby to confront this. If an individual is offended, don’t look at it.”
When the case went to the Supreme Court in 2005, it was Abbott, not Cruz, who argued on behalf of Texas—even though Cruz had argued in front of the appeals court in New Orleans, and Erwin Chemerinsky, who argued on behalf of Van Orden, told me he had dealt with Cruz almost exclusively throughout the case. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court sided with Texas—with Cruz—saying it was OK to have a Ten Commandments monument on the state’s capitol grounds.
In eight other cases, though, as solicitor general, Cruz gave oral arguments himself at the Supreme Court. Not all of them were wins, but all were chances for Cruz to showcase his particular brand of vigorously argued movement conservatism.
…
In 2004, in Dretke v. Haley, Cruz argued against leniency for a man who had been unjustly sentenced for a series of thefts—basically because the man’s attorney hadn’t objected when he was supposed to. Cruz worried it would set a bad precedent if the Supreme Court essentially let him out. He faced withering skepticism for putting the principle ahead of the case itself. “So a man does 15 years so you can vindicate your legal point in some other case?” Justice Anthony Kennedy said to Cruz. The justices kicked the case back to Texas courts, which ultimately resentenced the man to the time he had already served.
But the case Ted Cruz talks about the most is Medellin v. Texas. In 2005 and again in 2007, Cruz was put in the intriguing position of, in essence, going up against President George W. Bush. The specifics were compelling: Jose Medellin, a Mexican citizen who had grown up in Texas, raped and killed two teenage girls in Houston. His appeal centered on the fact that he hadn’t been given the chance to talk to the Mexican consulate, violating an international treaty. The International Court of Justice ordered a retrial, not just for Medellin but 50 other Mexican citizens with similar situations. Bush, stunning Cruz and others, penned an executive memorandum siding with the court.
Cruz argued in front of the Supreme Court that the president had overreached. The case, he said, was a question of U.S. sovereignty and of the foundational issue of separation of powers. The president, Cruz said, did not have the power to do what he did. No president would. Not in this country. Cruz, in polite understatement, called it “a very curious assertion of presidential power.” …
The court ruled 6-3 for Texas in June 2005. Medellin was executed a little more than three years later.
Cruz had four other oral arguments in front of the Supreme Court. In League of United Latin American Citizens v Perry in 2006, he emphasized the importance of separation of powers in defending a congressional redistricting case that made Texas a friendlier state in which to run for Republicans. In Smith v Texas and Panetti v Quarterman in 2007 and Kennedy v Louisiana in 2008, he argued pro-death-penalty positions in one case in which the defendant was borderline insane, and another in which the defendant had raped but not killed an 8-year-old girl.
The even more telling portion of what he did as solicitor general is the amicus briefs. …
In a brief in Elk Grove v. Newdow, a case out of California, he argued that children in public schools should be able to say the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, citing “the undeniable link between our Nation and her religious foundation.”
In a brief in Lopez v. Gonzales, a case out of South Dakota, he wrote, “Our Nation must secure its borders, especially against convicted felons who enter illegally.”
In a brief in Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, a case out of New Hampshire, he stressed the need for parental notification before abortion.
In a brief in Gonzales v. Carhart, a case that came through courts in California, Nebraska and New York, he argued for the defense of a federal law banning the procedure known by critics as "partial-birth abortions" because “they draw a bright line that clearly distinguishes between abortion and infanticide.”
And then there was what he wrote in his brief in District of Columbia v. Heller, the seminal Second Amendment case from 2008, when the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right, as opposed to a collective, militia-related right, to have and use guns.
Every year from 2003 to 2007, Cruz was the counsel of record on briefs that won a Best Brief Award from the National Association of Attorneys Generals. He wasn’t the only winner—in 2007, for instance, NAAG gave a Best Brief Award to 17 people—but Cruz was a named winner five years in a row.
…
Around then, according to his book, Cruz had a four-hour breakfast with veteran Republican political strategist Karl Rove. “I asked his advice,” Cruz wrote, “on eventually running for office—whether I should stay on longer as solicitor general or go to private practice.” Rove, Cruz said, told him to keep doing what he was doing: “stay on the job as solicitor general, keep building my record, and find opportunities to systematically build political support for a future run.”
When Cruz left the solicitor general position, in 2009, to join the international law firm Morgan Lewis—now Morgan, Lewis & Bockius—Abbott praised him effusively.
…
He began running for attorney general in 2009—a logical next step—but then-Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison didn’t resign her seat to run for governor, as everybody was expecting, which meant certain dominoes didn’t fall, leaving Abbott as attorney general. That left Cruz stuck at Morgan Lewis, which wasn’t the worst, considering he made more than a million dollars a year every year he was there, according to his financial disclosure forms. But still, Ed Burbach, who worked in the office next to Cruz when he was solicitor general, told me, “I don’t think Morgan Lewis was his goal.”
So in 2011, a year in which he made $1,573,543 from Morgan Lewis, he launched a long-shot run for the U.S. Senate, challenging in the Republican primary David Dewhurst, Texas’ well-known lieutenant governor.
That June, in New Orleans, in a Hilton ballroom at the annual Republican Leadership Conference, he made his pitch. He was polling at less than 10 percent. He told the small crowd about his record.
“During the five and a half years I served as solicitor general, over and over again, Texas stood up and led the nation defending conservative principles,” Cruz said. “We defended the Ten Commandments,” he said, not telling them that Abbott had been the one to actually argue in front of the Supreme Court. “We defended the Pledge of Allegiance,” not telling them that what he did was write an amicus brief. “We defended the Second Amendment,” he said, not telling them that what he did in the case, too, was write a brief. “We went to the Supreme Court, and we won,” he kept telling them, and they kept clapping, and the clapping was getting louder. He told them about Medellin. He told them all of this before he talked about his anti-Obamacare stance, before he told them about his family’s history, his father fleeing from Cuba and pursuing the American dream.
Two months later, in South Carolina at the RedState Bloggers Conference, it was the same: “Over and over again Texas stood up …”
“That’s the record I’m running on,” he told 70 people in folding chairs at a candidates forum put on by the Republican Women of Kerr County, Texas, that fall.
He chased down Dewhurst, getting enough votes in the primary to force a runoff. …
And during his run for the U.S. Senate, throughout 2011 and 2012, putting the finishing touches on that bridge from elite legal nerd to right-wing politician, Cruz settled on his two sentences.
“I’m not running as a lawyer,” he said in a radio interview in San Antonio. “I’m running as a fighter” (Kruse 4-15).
Works cited:
Horowitz, Jason. “As Supreme Court Clerk, Ted Cruz Made Death Penalty His Cause.” New York Times, January 20, 2016. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/us...
Kruse, Michael. “How Ted Cruz Became Ted Cruz.” Politico, January 5, 2016. Net. https://www.politico.com/magazine/sto...
Levy, Gabrielle. “10 Things You Didn't Know about Ted Cruz.” U.S. News, May 3, 2017. Net. https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/...
“Ted Cruz’s (Brilliant) Legal Career.” The Reeves Law Group. Net. https://www.robertreeveslaw.com/blog/...
March 24, 2022
The Amoralists -- Ted Cruz -- Part One -- School Debater
Rafael Edward Cruz was born on December 22, 1970, … in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, to Eleanor Elizabeth (nee Darragh) Wilson and Rafael Cruz. Eleanor Wilson was born in Wilmington, Delaware. She is of three-quarters Irish and one-quarter Italian descent, and earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Rice University in the 1950s.
Cruz's father was born and raised in Cuba, the son of a Canary islander who immigrated to Cuba as a child. As a teenager in the 1950s, he was beaten by agents of Fulgencio Batista for opposing the Batista regime. He left Cuba in 1957 to attend the University of Texas at Austin and obtained political asylum in the United States after his four-year student visa expired. He earned Canadian citizenship in 1973 and became a naturalized United States citizen in 2005.
At the time of his birth, Ted Cruz's parents had lived in Calgary for three years and were working in the oil business as owners of a seismic-data processing firm for oil drilling. Cruz has said that he is the son of "two mathematicians/computer programmers." In 1974, Cruz's father left the family and moved to Texas. Later that year, Cruz's parents reconciled and relocated the family to Houston. They divorced in 1997. Cruz has two older half-sisters, Miriam Ceferina Cruz and Roxana Lourdes Cruz, from his father's first marriage. Miriam died in 2011.
Cruz began going by Ted at age 13.
For junior high school Cruz went to Awty International School in Houston. Cruz attended two private high schools: Faith West Academy, near Katy, Texas; and Second Baptist High School in Houston, from which he graduated as valedictorian in 1988. During high school, Cruz participated in a Houston-based group known at the time as the Free Market Education Foundation, a program that taught high school students the philosophies of economists such as Milton Friedman and Frédéric Bastiat. (Wikipedia 2-3).
In his early teens, Cruz was a member of the Constitutional Corroborators, part of a five-strong “unit” of high-achieving, politically minded students managed by Rolland Storey, a retired gas executive from Houston. Storey ran an after-school programme under the banner of a conservative thinktank called the Free Enterprise Education Center (now the Free Enterprise Institute). It was crucial in honing Cruz’s public speaking skills and economic views.
…
The Corroborators toured Rotary clubs and chambers of commerce in Houston and across Texas. Their star turn was in setting up easels and writing summaries of the constitution from memory – along with a definition of socialism, so that everyone was clear on the enemy. In his 2015 autobiography, A Time for Truth, Cruz recalled that they gave half-hour presentations on the constitution that ended with a patriotic poem, I Am an American.
…
“Midway through junior high school, I decided that I’d had enough of being the unpopular nerd,” he wrote in his book. “I remember sitting up one night asking a friend why I wasn’t one of the popular kids. I ended up staying up most of that night thinking about it. ‘Okay, well, what is it that the popular kids do? I will consciously emulate that.’”
He embraced sports and replaced his glasses with contact lenses. His braces came off and he saw a dermatologist who improved his acne. According to this book, he was suspended from high school for several days for going to a party, drinking and smoking pot.
On other occasions, he wrote, he was beaten up by drunk older kids at 2am, and reprimanded by the principal for a prank that involved covering a rival school’s building in toilet paper and shaving cream, then fleeing in a 1978 Ford Fairmont with Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries blaring out of the car stereo.
Cruz had become popular and respected when, seeking more academic stimulation than he had found at his previous school, he transferred midway through his junior year of high school to Second Baptist, a small private establishment on the campus of a megachurch in one of Houston’s greenest and most desirable areas. Today, Cruz’s family home and campaign headquarters are only a couple of miles away.
Former students and teachers contacted by the Guardian said that Cruz was a brilliant student whose political plans were already crystallizing. “He was very intelligent, a valedictorian the year he graduated. He knew early on he wanted to be in politics and government,” said Gary Moore, a Second Baptist pastor. A classmate, Laurie Rankin Carl, said: “He fit right in … he was head of our class.”
Cruz was heavily involved in extracurricular activities, including the drama club, the public speaking team and sundry school publications. He played American football, soccer and basketball. He was twice class president and vice-president of the student body. “He was very well liked by the teachers and his classmates and was generally considered a prodigy,” said John Fuex, who was a year below Cruz.
…
As a fellow Constitutional Corroborator, Laura Calaway spent a week during spring break travelling around Texas in a van with Cruz in 1988. “In hindsight it was all very exciting and I felt important to be a part of this educational group,” she said.
Still, he did not make a good first impression on her. As a high school senior from the blue-collar Houston suburb of Deer Park, she felt that Cruz – a veteran Corroborator whose reputation as a formidable debater preceded him – was aloof.
…
Calaway has few other memories of Cruz, but recalled that he found it hard to bond with the others during the road trip. The suggestion echoes critics’ claims that Cruz, for all his eloquence and Texan swagger, can seem stilted in public, too calculating to connect emotionally with his audience.
“I think this is a lifetime struggle of his; he couldn’t relate to us as a group of teenagers. He really struggled in trying to be part of a group dynamic, and the jokes,” she said (Dart 2-3).
When Craig Mazin first met his freshman roommate, Rafael Edward Cruz, he knew the 17-year-old Texan was not like other students at Princeton, or probably anywhere else for that matter.
"I remember very specifically that he had a book in Spanish and the title was Was Karl Marx a Satanist? And I thought, who is this person?" Mazin says of Ted Cruz. “Even in 1988, he was politically extreme in a way that was surprising to me.”
By Mazin’s account and those of multiple members of Princeton’s class of 1992, the Ted Cruz who arrived as a college freshman in 1988 was nearly identical to the man who arrived in Washington as a freshman Republican senator in 2013: intelligent, confident, fixated on conservative political theory, and deeply polarizing.
“It was my distinct impression that Ted had nothing to learn from anyone else,” said Erik Leitch, who lived in Butler College with Cruz. Leitch said he remembers Cruz as someone who wanted to argue over anything or nothing, just for the exercise of arguing. “The only point of Ted talking to you was to convince you of the rightness of his views."
In addition to Mazin and Leitch, several fellow classmates who asked that their names not be used described the young Cruz with words like “abrasive,” "intense," “strident,” “crank,” and “arrogant." Four independently offered the word “creepy,” with some pointing to Cruz’s habit of donning a paisley bathrobe and walking to the opposite end of their dorm’s hallway where the female students lived.
“I would end up fielding the [girls’] complaints: 'Could you please keep your roommate out of our hallway?'" Mazin says.
Cruz also angered a number of upperclassmen his freshman year when he joined in a regular poker game and quickly ran up $1,800 in debt to other students from his losses. Cruz’s spokeswoman, Catherine Frazier, said Cruz acknowledges playing in the poker games, which he now considers “foolish.”
“He went to his aunt, who worked at a bank in Dallas, and borrowed $1,800 from her, which he paid in cash and promptly quit the game,” Frazier told The Daily Beast, explaining that Cruz worked two jobs and made monthly payments to his aunt for the next two years to repay the debt.
While Cruz may have been disliked, and intensely so, by many of his classmates, he found a close and longtime friend in a gregarious, popular student from Jamaica named David Panton, who became Cruz’s tag-team partner on Princeton’s renowned debate squad, as well as his roommate for the remainder of their time at Princeton and when they both attended Harvard Law School.
“Unlike what others may say, I consider Ted to be very kind. He is a very, very gentle-hearted person,” Panton told The Daily Beast. "He took me under his wing and was a mentor to me. He was very kind to me. I am a much smarter and much better person today because of Ted Cruz."
Cruz and Panton debated together for four years at Princeton and came to dominate the collegiate parliamentary debate circuit, winning the North American championships in 1992 and being named the top two collegiate debaters in the country (Cruz was No. 1). The competitive debate world also gave Cruz a different social circle, with fellow debaters congregating in his room to hang out and play Super Mario Bros. Debate weekends included Friday night parties that Cruz often attended, where he was remembered to be "sort of a stud" with girls on the debate circuit. Princeton debaters also said he spent extra time mentoring them to improve their skills, even though they competed against each other.
Cruz ran for student government president unsuccessfully more than once, but rose to lead the conservative portion of the college’s Whig-Cliosophic Society, a high-minded political club that was co-founded by James Madison (class of 1771). To other students, Cruz seemed singularly interested in ideological life, and Whig-Clio proved the natural outlet for it. Other members of Whig-Clio have included Aaron Burr, Woodrow Wilson, Samuel Alito, and Mitch Daniels.
From Princeton, Cruz joined the intellectual and ideological elite—Harvard Law School, where he finished magna cum laude; a clerkship for Chief Justice William Rehnquist; a stint on the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign working for Josh Bolten (class of ’76); and two jobs in the Bush administration before being appointed Texas’s solicitor general in 2003 and later launching his campaign for Senate.
…
“He's not someone who shifts in the wind,” Panton says. “The Ted Cruz that I knew at 17 years old is exactly the same as the Ted Cruz I know at 42 years old. He was very conservative then, and an outspoken conservative. He remains strongly conservative today."
…
The time-capsule quality of Cruz’s politics is lost on no one who knew him at Princeton, none of whom could point to a political position that he held 25 years ago that he does not seem to still hold today. For some, that amounts to a laudably consistent belief system. For others, it reveals a man of calcified thinking, dangerously impervious to facts, reality, and a changing world.
"More than anyone I knew, Ted seemed to have arrived in college with a fully formed worldview,” Butler College colleague Erik Leitch said. “And what strikes me now, looking at him as an adult and hearing the things he's saying, it seems like nothing has changed. Four years of an Ivy League education, Harvard Law, and years of life experience have altered nothing."
While Cruz’s friends from the debate team foresaw a successful career in politics for Cruz, many of the Princeton alums offered that they were deeply troubled by the possibility of Cruz running for president, a notion that one, who did not want to be quoted speaking against a former classmate who is now a senator, called “horrifying.”
Craig Mazin said he knew some people might be afraid to speak in the press about a senator, but added of Cruz, “We should be afraid that someone like that has power.”
And the idea that his freshman roommate could someday be the leader of the free world? “I would rather have anybody else be the president of the United States. Anyone,” Mazin said. “I would rather pick somebody from the phone book" (Murphy 2-3).
In his book, “A Time for Truth” Cruz describes his time in college. His parents, who had previously been well off, were in a difficult financial situation at that time, and he needed to work two jobs to help pay his tuition. He also talks about being more interested in debating than schoolwork. He would spend many hours each week preparing for debates, traveling to debates, and analyzing his mistakes after the debates. He became an award winning debater, but this didn't help him earn top grades. At the time, his classes were not his biggest priority. He recalls earning a number of B’s which are not bad grades for Princeton, especially if you consider his lack of effort. Later, in his junior year, he began to take his classes more serious. He quit his jobs and took out student loans to finance his education. He realized that in order to get accepted by a top law school, he needed to boost his GPA. He buckled down, and graduated cum laude. After graduating from Princeton, he attended Harvard Law School, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude (Balsam 1).
Several debaters [interviewed] recalled incidents in which Mr. Cruz used a story about his father coming to America from Cuba with $100 sewn into his underwear for emotional effect. I started asking sources about this. One debater recalled having fun with Mr. Cruz’s Cuban non sequitur, prompting Mr. Cruz, a super-serious debater, to shout, “How dare you insult my father!”
Monica Youn, a teammate who edited the school’s liberal newspaper, said that at the Friday night keg parties, if Mr. Cruz slipped into speech mode, “You would tease him a little bit about it, and he’d stop.” She also said that Mr. Cruz’s over-the-top style held back his debating partner, David Panton, who many described as a “teddy bear.”
Acknowledging that Mr. Cruz was a decorated speaker, Ms. Youn added that his “winning record was never on par with his speaking record. At the end of the day I think being persuasive is somewhat different than being a good speaker in that sometimes you have to rein it back and I don’t think that Ted ever had a really good sense of when to rein it back.”
This basic idea, which I often heard from Republican Senators, was echoed in dozens of on-the-record phone calls. One judge recalled that Mr. Cruz angrily blamed her for coughing and throwing him off his game. Others marveled at his ability to project an aura of absolute conviction, no matter what side of a topic he argued.
“In any debate round, he would act like what he was telling you was something he believed to his core,” said Deborah J. Saltzman, an Amherst debater who is now a judge with the United States Bankruptcy Court in California.
Judges who watched him enough became annoyed by his style, she said, adding that opponents had the impression “he would say just about anything, whatever would win the debate.”
When Mr. Cruz moved on to Harvard Law School, he returned to the circuit as a so-called dinosaur; some of the Harvard undergraduates were annoyed and reported watching in disbelief as the older Mr. Cruz beat his school in minor tournaments. They remembered too that as a debater, Mr. Cruz often concluded his oratory by telling the judge, “Frank Sinatra says dooby dooby do, and we’re going to say do — the right thing” (Horowitz 2).
Works cited:
Balsam, Pinchas. “How Well Did Ted Cruz Do in College?” Quora. Net. https://www.quora.com/How-well-did-Te...
Dart, Tom. “Ted Cruz in High School: a 'Prodigy' with Plans for World Domination.” The Guardian, February 3, 2016. Net. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...
Horowitz, Jason. “Digging into Ted Cruz’s Debating History: Reporter’s Notebook.” New York Times, April 24, 2015. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/times-insider...
Murphy, Patricia. “Ted Cruz at Princeton: Creepy, Sometimes Well-Liked, and Exactly the Same.” Daily Beast, updated July 11, 2017. Net. https://www.thedailybeast.com/ted-cru...
“Ted Cruz.” Wikipedia. Net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cru...
Cruz's father was born and raised in Cuba, the son of a Canary islander who immigrated to Cuba as a child. As a teenager in the 1950s, he was beaten by agents of Fulgencio Batista for opposing the Batista regime. He left Cuba in 1957 to attend the University of Texas at Austin and obtained political asylum in the United States after his four-year student visa expired. He earned Canadian citizenship in 1973 and became a naturalized United States citizen in 2005.
At the time of his birth, Ted Cruz's parents had lived in Calgary for three years and were working in the oil business as owners of a seismic-data processing firm for oil drilling. Cruz has said that he is the son of "two mathematicians/computer programmers." In 1974, Cruz's father left the family and moved to Texas. Later that year, Cruz's parents reconciled and relocated the family to Houston. They divorced in 1997. Cruz has two older half-sisters, Miriam Ceferina Cruz and Roxana Lourdes Cruz, from his father's first marriage. Miriam died in 2011.
Cruz began going by Ted at age 13.
For junior high school Cruz went to Awty International School in Houston. Cruz attended two private high schools: Faith West Academy, near Katy, Texas; and Second Baptist High School in Houston, from which he graduated as valedictorian in 1988. During high school, Cruz participated in a Houston-based group known at the time as the Free Market Education Foundation, a program that taught high school students the philosophies of economists such as Milton Friedman and Frédéric Bastiat. (Wikipedia 2-3).
In his early teens, Cruz was a member of the Constitutional Corroborators, part of a five-strong “unit” of high-achieving, politically minded students managed by Rolland Storey, a retired gas executive from Houston. Storey ran an after-school programme under the banner of a conservative thinktank called the Free Enterprise Education Center (now the Free Enterprise Institute). It was crucial in honing Cruz’s public speaking skills and economic views.
…
The Corroborators toured Rotary clubs and chambers of commerce in Houston and across Texas. Their star turn was in setting up easels and writing summaries of the constitution from memory – along with a definition of socialism, so that everyone was clear on the enemy. In his 2015 autobiography, A Time for Truth, Cruz recalled that they gave half-hour presentations on the constitution that ended with a patriotic poem, I Am an American.
…
“Midway through junior high school, I decided that I’d had enough of being the unpopular nerd,” he wrote in his book. “I remember sitting up one night asking a friend why I wasn’t one of the popular kids. I ended up staying up most of that night thinking about it. ‘Okay, well, what is it that the popular kids do? I will consciously emulate that.’”
He embraced sports and replaced his glasses with contact lenses. His braces came off and he saw a dermatologist who improved his acne. According to this book, he was suspended from high school for several days for going to a party, drinking and smoking pot.
On other occasions, he wrote, he was beaten up by drunk older kids at 2am, and reprimanded by the principal for a prank that involved covering a rival school’s building in toilet paper and shaving cream, then fleeing in a 1978 Ford Fairmont with Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries blaring out of the car stereo.
Cruz had become popular and respected when, seeking more academic stimulation than he had found at his previous school, he transferred midway through his junior year of high school to Second Baptist, a small private establishment on the campus of a megachurch in one of Houston’s greenest and most desirable areas. Today, Cruz’s family home and campaign headquarters are only a couple of miles away.
Former students and teachers contacted by the Guardian said that Cruz was a brilliant student whose political plans were already crystallizing. “He was very intelligent, a valedictorian the year he graduated. He knew early on he wanted to be in politics and government,” said Gary Moore, a Second Baptist pastor. A classmate, Laurie Rankin Carl, said: “He fit right in … he was head of our class.”
Cruz was heavily involved in extracurricular activities, including the drama club, the public speaking team and sundry school publications. He played American football, soccer and basketball. He was twice class president and vice-president of the student body. “He was very well liked by the teachers and his classmates and was generally considered a prodigy,” said John Fuex, who was a year below Cruz.
…
As a fellow Constitutional Corroborator, Laura Calaway spent a week during spring break travelling around Texas in a van with Cruz in 1988. “In hindsight it was all very exciting and I felt important to be a part of this educational group,” she said.
Still, he did not make a good first impression on her. As a high school senior from the blue-collar Houston suburb of Deer Park, she felt that Cruz – a veteran Corroborator whose reputation as a formidable debater preceded him – was aloof.
…
Calaway has few other memories of Cruz, but recalled that he found it hard to bond with the others during the road trip. The suggestion echoes critics’ claims that Cruz, for all his eloquence and Texan swagger, can seem stilted in public, too calculating to connect emotionally with his audience.
“I think this is a lifetime struggle of his; he couldn’t relate to us as a group of teenagers. He really struggled in trying to be part of a group dynamic, and the jokes,” she said (Dart 2-3).
When Craig Mazin first met his freshman roommate, Rafael Edward Cruz, he knew the 17-year-old Texan was not like other students at Princeton, or probably anywhere else for that matter.
"I remember very specifically that he had a book in Spanish and the title was Was Karl Marx a Satanist? And I thought, who is this person?" Mazin says of Ted Cruz. “Even in 1988, he was politically extreme in a way that was surprising to me.”
By Mazin’s account and those of multiple members of Princeton’s class of 1992, the Ted Cruz who arrived as a college freshman in 1988 was nearly identical to the man who arrived in Washington as a freshman Republican senator in 2013: intelligent, confident, fixated on conservative political theory, and deeply polarizing.
“It was my distinct impression that Ted had nothing to learn from anyone else,” said Erik Leitch, who lived in Butler College with Cruz. Leitch said he remembers Cruz as someone who wanted to argue over anything or nothing, just for the exercise of arguing. “The only point of Ted talking to you was to convince you of the rightness of his views."
In addition to Mazin and Leitch, several fellow classmates who asked that their names not be used described the young Cruz with words like “abrasive,” "intense," “strident,” “crank,” and “arrogant." Four independently offered the word “creepy,” with some pointing to Cruz’s habit of donning a paisley bathrobe and walking to the opposite end of their dorm’s hallway where the female students lived.
“I would end up fielding the [girls’] complaints: 'Could you please keep your roommate out of our hallway?'" Mazin says.
Cruz also angered a number of upperclassmen his freshman year when he joined in a regular poker game and quickly ran up $1,800 in debt to other students from his losses. Cruz’s spokeswoman, Catherine Frazier, said Cruz acknowledges playing in the poker games, which he now considers “foolish.”
“He went to his aunt, who worked at a bank in Dallas, and borrowed $1,800 from her, which he paid in cash and promptly quit the game,” Frazier told The Daily Beast, explaining that Cruz worked two jobs and made monthly payments to his aunt for the next two years to repay the debt.
While Cruz may have been disliked, and intensely so, by many of his classmates, he found a close and longtime friend in a gregarious, popular student from Jamaica named David Panton, who became Cruz’s tag-team partner on Princeton’s renowned debate squad, as well as his roommate for the remainder of their time at Princeton and when they both attended Harvard Law School.
“Unlike what others may say, I consider Ted to be very kind. He is a very, very gentle-hearted person,” Panton told The Daily Beast. "He took me under his wing and was a mentor to me. He was very kind to me. I am a much smarter and much better person today because of Ted Cruz."
Cruz and Panton debated together for four years at Princeton and came to dominate the collegiate parliamentary debate circuit, winning the North American championships in 1992 and being named the top two collegiate debaters in the country (Cruz was No. 1). The competitive debate world also gave Cruz a different social circle, with fellow debaters congregating in his room to hang out and play Super Mario Bros. Debate weekends included Friday night parties that Cruz often attended, where he was remembered to be "sort of a stud" with girls on the debate circuit. Princeton debaters also said he spent extra time mentoring them to improve their skills, even though they competed against each other.
Cruz ran for student government president unsuccessfully more than once, but rose to lead the conservative portion of the college’s Whig-Cliosophic Society, a high-minded political club that was co-founded by James Madison (class of 1771). To other students, Cruz seemed singularly interested in ideological life, and Whig-Clio proved the natural outlet for it. Other members of Whig-Clio have included Aaron Burr, Woodrow Wilson, Samuel Alito, and Mitch Daniels.
From Princeton, Cruz joined the intellectual and ideological elite—Harvard Law School, where he finished magna cum laude; a clerkship for Chief Justice William Rehnquist; a stint on the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign working for Josh Bolten (class of ’76); and two jobs in the Bush administration before being appointed Texas’s solicitor general in 2003 and later launching his campaign for Senate.
…
“He's not someone who shifts in the wind,” Panton says. “The Ted Cruz that I knew at 17 years old is exactly the same as the Ted Cruz I know at 42 years old. He was very conservative then, and an outspoken conservative. He remains strongly conservative today."
…
The time-capsule quality of Cruz’s politics is lost on no one who knew him at Princeton, none of whom could point to a political position that he held 25 years ago that he does not seem to still hold today. For some, that amounts to a laudably consistent belief system. For others, it reveals a man of calcified thinking, dangerously impervious to facts, reality, and a changing world.
"More than anyone I knew, Ted seemed to have arrived in college with a fully formed worldview,” Butler College colleague Erik Leitch said. “And what strikes me now, looking at him as an adult and hearing the things he's saying, it seems like nothing has changed. Four years of an Ivy League education, Harvard Law, and years of life experience have altered nothing."
While Cruz’s friends from the debate team foresaw a successful career in politics for Cruz, many of the Princeton alums offered that they were deeply troubled by the possibility of Cruz running for president, a notion that one, who did not want to be quoted speaking against a former classmate who is now a senator, called “horrifying.”
Craig Mazin said he knew some people might be afraid to speak in the press about a senator, but added of Cruz, “We should be afraid that someone like that has power.”
And the idea that his freshman roommate could someday be the leader of the free world? “I would rather have anybody else be the president of the United States. Anyone,” Mazin said. “I would rather pick somebody from the phone book" (Murphy 2-3).
In his book, “A Time for Truth” Cruz describes his time in college. His parents, who had previously been well off, were in a difficult financial situation at that time, and he needed to work two jobs to help pay his tuition. He also talks about being more interested in debating than schoolwork. He would spend many hours each week preparing for debates, traveling to debates, and analyzing his mistakes after the debates. He became an award winning debater, but this didn't help him earn top grades. At the time, his classes were not his biggest priority. He recalls earning a number of B’s which are not bad grades for Princeton, especially if you consider his lack of effort. Later, in his junior year, he began to take his classes more serious. He quit his jobs and took out student loans to finance his education. He realized that in order to get accepted by a top law school, he needed to boost his GPA. He buckled down, and graduated cum laude. After graduating from Princeton, he attended Harvard Law School, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude (Balsam 1).
Several debaters [interviewed] recalled incidents in which Mr. Cruz used a story about his father coming to America from Cuba with $100 sewn into his underwear for emotional effect. I started asking sources about this. One debater recalled having fun with Mr. Cruz’s Cuban non sequitur, prompting Mr. Cruz, a super-serious debater, to shout, “How dare you insult my father!”
Monica Youn, a teammate who edited the school’s liberal newspaper, said that at the Friday night keg parties, if Mr. Cruz slipped into speech mode, “You would tease him a little bit about it, and he’d stop.” She also said that Mr. Cruz’s over-the-top style held back his debating partner, David Panton, who many described as a “teddy bear.”
Acknowledging that Mr. Cruz was a decorated speaker, Ms. Youn added that his “winning record was never on par with his speaking record. At the end of the day I think being persuasive is somewhat different than being a good speaker in that sometimes you have to rein it back and I don’t think that Ted ever had a really good sense of when to rein it back.”
This basic idea, which I often heard from Republican Senators, was echoed in dozens of on-the-record phone calls. One judge recalled that Mr. Cruz angrily blamed her for coughing and throwing him off his game. Others marveled at his ability to project an aura of absolute conviction, no matter what side of a topic he argued.
“In any debate round, he would act like what he was telling you was something he believed to his core,” said Deborah J. Saltzman, an Amherst debater who is now a judge with the United States Bankruptcy Court in California.
Judges who watched him enough became annoyed by his style, she said, adding that opponents had the impression “he would say just about anything, whatever would win the debate.”
When Mr. Cruz moved on to Harvard Law School, he returned to the circuit as a so-called dinosaur; some of the Harvard undergraduates were annoyed and reported watching in disbelief as the older Mr. Cruz beat his school in minor tournaments. They remembered too that as a debater, Mr. Cruz often concluded his oratory by telling the judge, “Frank Sinatra says dooby dooby do, and we’re going to say do — the right thing” (Horowitz 2).
Works cited:
Balsam, Pinchas. “How Well Did Ted Cruz Do in College?” Quora. Net. https://www.quora.com/How-well-did-Te...
Dart, Tom. “Ted Cruz in High School: a 'Prodigy' with Plans for World Domination.” The Guardian, February 3, 2016. Net. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...
Horowitz, Jason. “Digging into Ted Cruz’s Debating History: Reporter’s Notebook.” New York Times, April 24, 2015. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/times-insider...
Murphy, Patricia. “Ted Cruz at Princeton: Creepy, Sometimes Well-Liked, and Exactly the Same.” Daily Beast, updated July 11, 2017. Net. https://www.thedailybeast.com/ted-cru...
“Ted Cruz.” Wikipedia. Net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cru...
March 20, 2022
The Amoralists -- Mitch McConnell -- Part Five -- Fixated on Regaining Power--
Then came the [2020] election. Mr. Trump refused to accept the results, making wild and unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud. Mr. McConnell indulged him and refused to recognize President Biden as the winner until he could avoid it no longer after the states certified their electoral votes on Dec. 14. He congratulated Mr. Biden the next day.
The interests of Mr. McConnell and Mr. Trump now sharply diverged, with Mr. McConnell fixated on regaining power in 2022 while Mr. Trump was stuck on 2020, making outlandish allegations that threatened to drive off more suburban voters and imperiled two Georgia seats that went to Democrats on Jan. 5. Then the riot the next day found marauders in the Senate chamber, Mr. McConnell’s sanctum sanctorum.
“This mob was fed lies,” Mr. McConnell declared on Jan. 19, accusing Mr. Trump of provoking the rioters and prompting rumblings that he of all people might vote to convict Mr. Trump in the coming impeachment trial. But he did not. Instead, he voted to acquit Mr. Trump then tried to bury him minutes later while distinguishing between Mr. Trump’s responsibility for the riot and the Trump voters Mr. McConnell and Republican Senate candidates would need next year.
“Seventy-four million Americans did not engineer the campaign of disinformation and rage that provoked it,” Mr. McConnell said. “One person did. Just one.”
Mr. [Karl] Rove said Mr. McConnell handled it well.
“McConnell reads his conference and he knows that, like him, they thought simultaneously that this was a highly partisan process and not good for country, but also that Trump had played a significant role in fomenting Jan. 6,” he said (Hulse “Relationship” 6).
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said on Saturday that Donald Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January – minutes after voting to acquit the former president in his impeachment trial for that very same act.
McConnell, like the senators who voted in favor of impeachment, was deeply critical of Trump’s conduct leading up to the attack. “They [the mob] did this because they’d been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth because he was angry he lost an election,” McConnell said.
But McConnell argued the Senate could not convict Trump because he had left office before the Senate trial began – a timeline McConnell orchestrated as Senate majority leader after refusing Democrats’ requests to call the Senate into an emergency session in January.
The House impeached Trump for a second time in his final days in office, but McConnell delayed starting the Senate trial until after Joe Biden was sworn in.
McConnell said the Senate was not meant to serve as a “moral tribunal” and said Trump could still be open to criminal prosecution.
“President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he’s in office,” McConnell said. “He didn’t get away with anything yet.”
House majority leader Nancy Pelosi criticized McConnell’s remarks in a press conference on Saturday and said the issue of timing “was not the reason that he voted the way he did; it was the excuse that he used”.
“For Mitch McConnell – who created the situation where it could not have been heard before the 20th, or even begun before the 20th in the Senate – to say all the things he said, oh my gosh, about Donald Trump and how horrible he was and is, and then say, ‘But that’s the time that the House chose to bring it over’ – Oh, no. We didn’t choose. You chose not to receive it,” Pelosi said.
Pelosi was also critical of the “cowardly” Republicans who voted against impeachment after the attack.
“I salute the Republican senators who voted their conscience and for our country,” Pelosi said. “Other Senate Republicans’ refusal to hold Trump accountable for igniting a violent insurrection to cling to power will go down as one of the darkest days and most dishonorable acts in our nation’s history” (Holpuch 1-2).
Mitch McConnell’s opposition to a bipartisan proposal to independently investigate the Capitol insurrection is turning GOP senators against the bill, potentially dooming its prospects in the Senate.
The Senate minority leader informed Republicans on Wednesday that he is opposed to the 9/11-style commission that would probe the deadly Jan. 6 riot, as envisioned by the House. And in the wake of McConnell’s remarks, Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) — who had expressed support on Tuesday for the idea — said he could no longer back the commission in its current form.
…
McConnell had signaled on Tuesday that he was undecided but came down more firmly after another day of deliberations and explained his views in a Wednesday floor speech. The Kentucky Republican called the House’s proposal “slanted and unbalanced” and said the ongoing congressional investigations are sufficient to probe the pro-Trump riot at the Capitol.
“It’s not at all clear what new facts or additional investigation yet another commission could lay on top of the existing efforts by law enforcement and Congress,” McConnell said (Levine and Everett 1).
Shortly before members of Congress left Capitol Hill for their holiday break, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was asked what he hoped to learn from the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. I assumed he'd dismiss the bipartisan panel and its relevance.
But he didn't. "I read the reports every day," the Kentucky Republican told reporters, "and it'll be interesting to see what [investigators] conclude."
…
Let's not forget that the original plan was for an independent, 9/11-style commission that would be responsible for investigating the attack. Democratic and Republican leaders negotiated the terms of how such a commission would be structured, and the expectation was that Congress would move forward in a bipartisan way after Democrats effectively endorsed all of the GOP's requests.
McConnell balked anyway. On May 19, the minority leader denounced the bipartisan plan, suggesting an independent investigation wouldn't produce any "new facts."
…
A week later, McConnell told his members a Jan. 6 probe was likely to undermine the party's midterm election message. By May 28, the top Senate Republican was reportedly telling his members he'd consider it "a personal favor" if they opposed the legislation to create an independent Jan. 6 commission.
…
… here we are, seven months later, watching McConnell sing a very different tune. The minority leader who went out of his way to block an independent investigation is now publicly endorsing the House select committee's probe, telling Americans that what investigators "are seeking to find out is something the public needs to know."
What's far from clear is why in the world the Kentuckian's perspective has changed.
Did McConnell learn important new intelligence as a member of the gang of eight? Is this a rhetorical shot across the bow at Donald Trump, who's working desperately to replace McConnell as the top Senate Republican?
I won't pretend to know what the senator is thinking, but as a recent Washington Post analysis concluded, "[What McConnell is] saying is a departure from his party that significantly hamstrings efforts to undermine the committee. And it's certainly worth keeping an eye on" (Benen 1-2).
Top Republican senator Mitch McConnell has attacked Joe Biden’s push for a voting rights bill, underscoring the difficulty the Democrats face attempting to steer legislation through Congress with a narrow majority.
The US president [Joe Biden] has called for his party to jettison the Senate’s longstanding “filibuster” rule, which requires 60 of the 100 senators to agree to advance most legislation, a move that McConnell said would irreparably damage the chamber.
“The president’s rant yesterday was incoherent, incorrect and beneath his office,” McConnell said on the Senate floor on Wednesday, referring to Biden’s speech in Atlanta the day before in which he appealed for voting-rights legislation and called Republicans cowardly for not supporting it.
McConnell accused the president of giving “a deliberately divisive speech that was designed to pull our country further apart”.
…
Donald Trump’s false claims that his 2020 election defeat was the result of fraud inspired a wave of new restrictions on voting in Republican-controlled states last year.
…
Democrats see their voting rights bills as a last chance to counter those before the 8 November elections, when they run the risk of losing their razor-thin majorities in at least one chamber of Congress.
Since Trump’s defeat, Republican lawmakers in 19 states have passed dozens of laws making it harder to vote. Critics say these measures target minorities, who vote in greater proportions for Democrats.
The Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act together would make election day a holiday, expand access to postal voting and strengthen US justice department oversight of local election jurisdictions with a history of discrimination.
“Twelve months ago the president said that politics need not be a raging fire destroying everything in its path,” McConnell said. “But yesterday he poured a giant can of gasoline on the fire.“
Republicans argue that the bills Democrats are proposing are an infringement of states’ rights to run their elections. They come as Trump supporters who have embraced the former president’s false claims of election fraud are running for offices that could give them oversight over local elections. Democrats and election analysts have raised concerns that they could use those posts to influence election outcomes (Incoherent 1-3).
Senator Mitch McConnell is extending an open invitation to Senator Joe Manchin III — come on over to our side.
…
“Why in the world would they want to call him a liar and try to hotbox him and embarrass him?” Mr. McConnell, who is just one Senate seat away from regaining the majority leader title, asked in an interview. “I think the message is, ‘We don’t want you around.’ Obviously that is up to Joe Manchin, but he is clearly not welcome on that side of the aisle.”
…
Mr. McConnell’s appeal to Mr. Manchin came as the Republican leader celebrated the year coming to a close without Democrats advancing two of their most ambitious priorities: legislation to bolster voting rights and the sprawling domestic policy bill that Mr. McConnell characterized as part of a “socialist surge that has captured the other side.”
Considering how Republicans began 2021 — in the minority in Congress, a newly elected Democrat poised to move into the White House and a public worn down by a pandemic and alarmed by an assault on the Capitol — Mr. McConnell and his colleagues say they have had a successful year. In some respects, it was all the things they did not do that may have served them best.
They did not maneuver themselves into shutting down the government as they have in the past — despite demands from the right that they never work with Mr. Biden. And they did not allow the government to default, with Mr. McConnell providing Democrats a circuitous path to raising the debt ceiling. Either could have created a backlash for Republicans.
As Democrats spent months trying to hammer out the huge policy bill among themselves, Republicans were relegated to the sidelines. Mr. McConnell said Democrats’ inability to come together on it so far reflected a misreading of the 2020 elections, when voters gave them the White House but bare majorities in both the Senate and the House.
“They did not have a mandate to do anything close to what they tried to do,” said Mr. McConnell, suggesting that progressive “ideology overcame their judgment.”
The decision by Mr. McConnell and other Republicans to help Democrats write and pass a separate, $1 trillion public works bill was, Mr. McConnell said, a smart one, even though Republican supporters of the measure took heat from others in the party, notably Mr. Trump.
…
… Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and majority leader, also intends to press forward with voting rights measures fiercely opposed by Mr. McConnell and is threatening to try to change Senate rules if Republicans try to filibuster it again.
Democrats say Mr. McConnell is being complicit in allowing some states to impose new voting restrictions meant to target voters of color, a charge he rejects, saying that the impact of the new laws is being exaggerated. He said he was relying on Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona Democrat who recently reaffirmed her opposition to changing filibuster rules, to hold steady.
“Kyrsten Sinema has been quite unequivocal that she is not going to break the Senate and eliminate the legislative filibuster,” he said. “Thank goodness for that.”
…
Mr. McConnell said he believed his party’s performance this year and the struggles of the Democrats were setting Republicans up for a strong midterm election next year and his potential return to running the Senate no matter what party Mr. Manchin is in. Despite Mr. Trump’s efforts to encourage candidates he favors in key Senate races, Mr. McConnell said he was intent on avoiding the type of primary contests that in the past have hurt Republicans by saddling them with primary winners who falter in general elections (Hulse “McConnell” 1-3).
Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, pushed back hard on Tuesday against the Republican Party censure of Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and its characterization of the Jan. 6 riot as “legitimate political discourse,” saying the riot was a “violent insurrection.”
The remarks from Mr. McConnell, the normally taciturn Kentucky Republican, added to a small but forceful chorus of G.O.P. lawmakers who have decried the action that the Republican National Committee took on Friday, when it officially rebuked Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger for participating in the House investigation of the Jan. 6 attack, accusing them of “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
Mr. McConnell repudiated that description, saying of the events of Jan. 6, 2021: “We saw it happen. It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election, from one administration to the next. That’s what it was.”
…
Mr. McConnell’s comments were a rebuke of how far the party has gone to deny the reality of the violence that unfolded during the bloody assault on the Capitol, sending lawmakers from both parties running for safety. More than 150 people were injured in the attack, which led to several deaths, and nearly 750 individuals have been criminally charged in connection with it.
In the days since the Republican National Committee passed the resolution at its winter meeting in Salt Lake City, a handful of Republicans have criticized the move as everything from a political distraction to a shame on the party. Mr. McConnell, who orchestrated the impeachment acquittal of former President Donald J. Trump and blocked the naming of an independent, bipartisan commission to examine the attack, was among the most blunt in his defense of the only Republicans serving on the committee that rose from that proposal’s ashes.
“Traditionally, the view of the national party committees is that we support all members of our party, regardless of their positions on some issues,” he said. “The issue is whether or not the R.N.C. should be sort of singling out members of our party who may have different views of the majority. That’s not the job of the R.N.C” (Weisman and Karni 1-3).
Works cited:
Benen, Steve. “Mitch McConnell Changes His Tune about the Jan. 6 Investigation.” MSNBC, December 28, 2021. Net. https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-s...
Holpuch, Amanda. “Mitch McConnell Savages Trump – Minutes after Voting To Acquit.” The Guardian, February 13, 2021. Net. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...
Hulse, Carl. “McConnell to Manchin: We’d Love To Have You, Joe.” New York Times, December 21, 2021. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/21/us...
Hulse, Carl. “The Relationship between McConnell and Trump Was Good for Both — Until It Wasn’t.” New York Times, February 19, 2021. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/us...
“‘Incoherent, Incorrect’: McConnell Dismisses Biden’s Push for US Voting Rights Bill.” The Guardian, January 13, 2022. Net. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...
Levine, Marianne and Everett, Burgess. “McConnell Turns Senate Republicans against Jan. 6 Commission.” Politico, May 19, 2021. Net. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05...
Weisman, Jonathan and Karni, Annie. “McConnell Denounces R.N.C. Censure of Jan. 6 Panel Members.” New York Times, February 8. 2022. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/08/us...
The interests of Mr. McConnell and Mr. Trump now sharply diverged, with Mr. McConnell fixated on regaining power in 2022 while Mr. Trump was stuck on 2020, making outlandish allegations that threatened to drive off more suburban voters and imperiled two Georgia seats that went to Democrats on Jan. 5. Then the riot the next day found marauders in the Senate chamber, Mr. McConnell’s sanctum sanctorum.
“This mob was fed lies,” Mr. McConnell declared on Jan. 19, accusing Mr. Trump of provoking the rioters and prompting rumblings that he of all people might vote to convict Mr. Trump in the coming impeachment trial. But he did not. Instead, he voted to acquit Mr. Trump then tried to bury him minutes later while distinguishing between Mr. Trump’s responsibility for the riot and the Trump voters Mr. McConnell and Republican Senate candidates would need next year.
“Seventy-four million Americans did not engineer the campaign of disinformation and rage that provoked it,” Mr. McConnell said. “One person did. Just one.”
Mr. [Karl] Rove said Mr. McConnell handled it well.
“McConnell reads his conference and he knows that, like him, they thought simultaneously that this was a highly partisan process and not good for country, but also that Trump had played a significant role in fomenting Jan. 6,” he said (Hulse “Relationship” 6).
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said on Saturday that Donald Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January – minutes after voting to acquit the former president in his impeachment trial for that very same act.
McConnell, like the senators who voted in favor of impeachment, was deeply critical of Trump’s conduct leading up to the attack. “They [the mob] did this because they’d been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth because he was angry he lost an election,” McConnell said.
But McConnell argued the Senate could not convict Trump because he had left office before the Senate trial began – a timeline McConnell orchestrated as Senate majority leader after refusing Democrats’ requests to call the Senate into an emergency session in January.
The House impeached Trump for a second time in his final days in office, but McConnell delayed starting the Senate trial until after Joe Biden was sworn in.
McConnell said the Senate was not meant to serve as a “moral tribunal” and said Trump could still be open to criminal prosecution.
“President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he’s in office,” McConnell said. “He didn’t get away with anything yet.”
House majority leader Nancy Pelosi criticized McConnell’s remarks in a press conference on Saturday and said the issue of timing “was not the reason that he voted the way he did; it was the excuse that he used”.
“For Mitch McConnell – who created the situation where it could not have been heard before the 20th, or even begun before the 20th in the Senate – to say all the things he said, oh my gosh, about Donald Trump and how horrible he was and is, and then say, ‘But that’s the time that the House chose to bring it over’ – Oh, no. We didn’t choose. You chose not to receive it,” Pelosi said.
Pelosi was also critical of the “cowardly” Republicans who voted against impeachment after the attack.
“I salute the Republican senators who voted their conscience and for our country,” Pelosi said. “Other Senate Republicans’ refusal to hold Trump accountable for igniting a violent insurrection to cling to power will go down as one of the darkest days and most dishonorable acts in our nation’s history” (Holpuch 1-2).
Mitch McConnell’s opposition to a bipartisan proposal to independently investigate the Capitol insurrection is turning GOP senators against the bill, potentially dooming its prospects in the Senate.
The Senate minority leader informed Republicans on Wednesday that he is opposed to the 9/11-style commission that would probe the deadly Jan. 6 riot, as envisioned by the House. And in the wake of McConnell’s remarks, Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) — who had expressed support on Tuesday for the idea — said he could no longer back the commission in its current form.
…
McConnell had signaled on Tuesday that he was undecided but came down more firmly after another day of deliberations and explained his views in a Wednesday floor speech. The Kentucky Republican called the House’s proposal “slanted and unbalanced” and said the ongoing congressional investigations are sufficient to probe the pro-Trump riot at the Capitol.
“It’s not at all clear what new facts or additional investigation yet another commission could lay on top of the existing efforts by law enforcement and Congress,” McConnell said (Levine and Everett 1).
Shortly before members of Congress left Capitol Hill for their holiday break, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was asked what he hoped to learn from the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. I assumed he'd dismiss the bipartisan panel and its relevance.
But he didn't. "I read the reports every day," the Kentucky Republican told reporters, "and it'll be interesting to see what [investigators] conclude."
…
Let's not forget that the original plan was for an independent, 9/11-style commission that would be responsible for investigating the attack. Democratic and Republican leaders negotiated the terms of how such a commission would be structured, and the expectation was that Congress would move forward in a bipartisan way after Democrats effectively endorsed all of the GOP's requests.
McConnell balked anyway. On May 19, the minority leader denounced the bipartisan plan, suggesting an independent investigation wouldn't produce any "new facts."
…
A week later, McConnell told his members a Jan. 6 probe was likely to undermine the party's midterm election message. By May 28, the top Senate Republican was reportedly telling his members he'd consider it "a personal favor" if they opposed the legislation to create an independent Jan. 6 commission.
…
… here we are, seven months later, watching McConnell sing a very different tune. The minority leader who went out of his way to block an independent investigation is now publicly endorsing the House select committee's probe, telling Americans that what investigators "are seeking to find out is something the public needs to know."
What's far from clear is why in the world the Kentuckian's perspective has changed.
Did McConnell learn important new intelligence as a member of the gang of eight? Is this a rhetorical shot across the bow at Donald Trump, who's working desperately to replace McConnell as the top Senate Republican?
I won't pretend to know what the senator is thinking, but as a recent Washington Post analysis concluded, "[What McConnell is] saying is a departure from his party that significantly hamstrings efforts to undermine the committee. And it's certainly worth keeping an eye on" (Benen 1-2).
Top Republican senator Mitch McConnell has attacked Joe Biden’s push for a voting rights bill, underscoring the difficulty the Democrats face attempting to steer legislation through Congress with a narrow majority.
The US president [Joe Biden] has called for his party to jettison the Senate’s longstanding “filibuster” rule, which requires 60 of the 100 senators to agree to advance most legislation, a move that McConnell said would irreparably damage the chamber.
“The president’s rant yesterday was incoherent, incorrect and beneath his office,” McConnell said on the Senate floor on Wednesday, referring to Biden’s speech in Atlanta the day before in which he appealed for voting-rights legislation and called Republicans cowardly for not supporting it.
McConnell accused the president of giving “a deliberately divisive speech that was designed to pull our country further apart”.
…
Donald Trump’s false claims that his 2020 election defeat was the result of fraud inspired a wave of new restrictions on voting in Republican-controlled states last year.
…
Democrats see their voting rights bills as a last chance to counter those before the 8 November elections, when they run the risk of losing their razor-thin majorities in at least one chamber of Congress.
Since Trump’s defeat, Republican lawmakers in 19 states have passed dozens of laws making it harder to vote. Critics say these measures target minorities, who vote in greater proportions for Democrats.
The Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act together would make election day a holiday, expand access to postal voting and strengthen US justice department oversight of local election jurisdictions with a history of discrimination.
“Twelve months ago the president said that politics need not be a raging fire destroying everything in its path,” McConnell said. “But yesterday he poured a giant can of gasoline on the fire.“
Republicans argue that the bills Democrats are proposing are an infringement of states’ rights to run their elections. They come as Trump supporters who have embraced the former president’s false claims of election fraud are running for offices that could give them oversight over local elections. Democrats and election analysts have raised concerns that they could use those posts to influence election outcomes (Incoherent 1-3).
Senator Mitch McConnell is extending an open invitation to Senator Joe Manchin III — come on over to our side.
…
“Why in the world would they want to call him a liar and try to hotbox him and embarrass him?” Mr. McConnell, who is just one Senate seat away from regaining the majority leader title, asked in an interview. “I think the message is, ‘We don’t want you around.’ Obviously that is up to Joe Manchin, but he is clearly not welcome on that side of the aisle.”
…
Mr. McConnell’s appeal to Mr. Manchin came as the Republican leader celebrated the year coming to a close without Democrats advancing two of their most ambitious priorities: legislation to bolster voting rights and the sprawling domestic policy bill that Mr. McConnell characterized as part of a “socialist surge that has captured the other side.”
Considering how Republicans began 2021 — in the minority in Congress, a newly elected Democrat poised to move into the White House and a public worn down by a pandemic and alarmed by an assault on the Capitol — Mr. McConnell and his colleagues say they have had a successful year. In some respects, it was all the things they did not do that may have served them best.
They did not maneuver themselves into shutting down the government as they have in the past — despite demands from the right that they never work with Mr. Biden. And they did not allow the government to default, with Mr. McConnell providing Democrats a circuitous path to raising the debt ceiling. Either could have created a backlash for Republicans.
As Democrats spent months trying to hammer out the huge policy bill among themselves, Republicans were relegated to the sidelines. Mr. McConnell said Democrats’ inability to come together on it so far reflected a misreading of the 2020 elections, when voters gave them the White House but bare majorities in both the Senate and the House.
“They did not have a mandate to do anything close to what they tried to do,” said Mr. McConnell, suggesting that progressive “ideology overcame their judgment.”
The decision by Mr. McConnell and other Republicans to help Democrats write and pass a separate, $1 trillion public works bill was, Mr. McConnell said, a smart one, even though Republican supporters of the measure took heat from others in the party, notably Mr. Trump.
…
… Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and majority leader, also intends to press forward with voting rights measures fiercely opposed by Mr. McConnell and is threatening to try to change Senate rules if Republicans try to filibuster it again.
Democrats say Mr. McConnell is being complicit in allowing some states to impose new voting restrictions meant to target voters of color, a charge he rejects, saying that the impact of the new laws is being exaggerated. He said he was relying on Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona Democrat who recently reaffirmed her opposition to changing filibuster rules, to hold steady.
“Kyrsten Sinema has been quite unequivocal that she is not going to break the Senate and eliminate the legislative filibuster,” he said. “Thank goodness for that.”
…
Mr. McConnell said he believed his party’s performance this year and the struggles of the Democrats were setting Republicans up for a strong midterm election next year and his potential return to running the Senate no matter what party Mr. Manchin is in. Despite Mr. Trump’s efforts to encourage candidates he favors in key Senate races, Mr. McConnell said he was intent on avoiding the type of primary contests that in the past have hurt Republicans by saddling them with primary winners who falter in general elections (Hulse “McConnell” 1-3).
Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, pushed back hard on Tuesday against the Republican Party censure of Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and its characterization of the Jan. 6 riot as “legitimate political discourse,” saying the riot was a “violent insurrection.”
The remarks from Mr. McConnell, the normally taciturn Kentucky Republican, added to a small but forceful chorus of G.O.P. lawmakers who have decried the action that the Republican National Committee took on Friday, when it officially rebuked Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger for participating in the House investigation of the Jan. 6 attack, accusing them of “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
Mr. McConnell repudiated that description, saying of the events of Jan. 6, 2021: “We saw it happen. It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election, from one administration to the next. That’s what it was.”
…
Mr. McConnell’s comments were a rebuke of how far the party has gone to deny the reality of the violence that unfolded during the bloody assault on the Capitol, sending lawmakers from both parties running for safety. More than 150 people were injured in the attack, which led to several deaths, and nearly 750 individuals have been criminally charged in connection with it.
In the days since the Republican National Committee passed the resolution at its winter meeting in Salt Lake City, a handful of Republicans have criticized the move as everything from a political distraction to a shame on the party. Mr. McConnell, who orchestrated the impeachment acquittal of former President Donald J. Trump and blocked the naming of an independent, bipartisan commission to examine the attack, was among the most blunt in his defense of the only Republicans serving on the committee that rose from that proposal’s ashes.
“Traditionally, the view of the national party committees is that we support all members of our party, regardless of their positions on some issues,” he said. “The issue is whether or not the R.N.C. should be sort of singling out members of our party who may have different views of the majority. That’s not the job of the R.N.C” (Weisman and Karni 1-3).
Works cited:
Benen, Steve. “Mitch McConnell Changes His Tune about the Jan. 6 Investigation.” MSNBC, December 28, 2021. Net. https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-s...
Holpuch, Amanda. “Mitch McConnell Savages Trump – Minutes after Voting To Acquit.” The Guardian, February 13, 2021. Net. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...
Hulse, Carl. “McConnell to Manchin: We’d Love To Have You, Joe.” New York Times, December 21, 2021. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/21/us...
Hulse, Carl. “The Relationship between McConnell and Trump Was Good for Both — Until It Wasn’t.” New York Times, February 19, 2021. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/us...
“‘Incoherent, Incorrect’: McConnell Dismisses Biden’s Push for US Voting Rights Bill.” The Guardian, January 13, 2022. Net. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...
Levine, Marianne and Everett, Burgess. “McConnell Turns Senate Republicans against Jan. 6 Commission.” Politico, May 19, 2021. Net. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05...
Weisman, Jonathan and Karni, Annie. “McConnell Denounces R.N.C. Censure of Jan. 6 Panel Members.” New York Times, February 8. 2022. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/08/us...
March 17, 2022
The Amoralists -- Mitch McConnell -- Part Four -- Enabling Trump
[By August 2016] the Central Intelligence Agency had discovered evidence that Russia had interfered in the presidential campaign, apparently with the aim of disrupting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, and had possibly made contact with representatives of the Trump campaign. The agency approached congressional leaders to discuss the findings. According to Denis McDonough, Obama’s chief of staff at the time, Harry Reid urged the Obama administration to go public with the information. But the administration, chary of appearing to politicize intelligence, refused to do so unless both congressional Republican leaders consented. In early September, McConnell and Reid along with Ryan and Pelosi were briefed at the White House and asked by Obama to issue a joint statement to state election officials.
Ryan and his chief of staff at the time wrote and circulated a statement. “We thought it was really a good sign that the speaker took the pen and drafted the statement,” McDonough told me. “What happened then was, everybody signed off except Senator McConnell.”
McConnell has said his concerns had to do with wording regarding election infrastructure. McDonough says there were other substantial disagreements but declined to elaborate on what they were. Ryan says he took McConnell’s side in the dispute. The process of drafting the statement was drawn out for several weeks, “to the consternation and frustration of everybody — to include the speaker of the House,” McDonough says. “At the time, the speaker evinced to me considerable frustration.”
On Sept. 28, all four congressional leaders released a letter warning state election officials of potential interference from foreign actors, which avoided specific mention of Russia’s role. Both Ryan and McConnell have said they were not asked to mention Russia. Several Obama administration officials, however, including McDonough and James R. Clapper Jr., Obama’s director of national intelligence, have retrospectively blamed McConnell, and sometimes Ryan, for “watering down,” as McDonough put it in an NBC interview, the warning. “To their everlasting shame, the leaders — McConnell, Ryan — refused” to make more information public, James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, said in an interview at the 92nd Street Y in December. “I think they’re going to have a hard time explaining that to history.”
…
On Oct. 7, 2016, the Department of Homeland Security and Clapper’s office put out a joint statement, acknowledging for the first time that the intelligence community was “confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of emails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations.” But within hours, the news was swamped by the publication by The Washington Post of a video of Trump on the set of “Access Hollywood,” in which he bragged about sexually assaulting women. After the tape was released, Ryan released a statement saying he was “sickened” by Trump’s comments, canceled a campaign appearance with him and told his fellow Republican House candidates on a conference call that he would no longer defend Trump.
…
McConnell put out a statement saying “these comments are repugnant, and unacceptable in any circumstance” and calling on Trump to apologize, but he did nothing to separate his party’s Senate candidates from Trump. Early in the campaign, The Times reported, he had planned for a worst-case scenario in which McConnell and his Senate candidates, colleagues recalled him saying at the time, would “drop him like a hot rock.” But in the last weeks of the campaign, he had come to think that severing red-state candidates from the party’s nominee could hurt them on Election Day.
He sat up that night at the National Republican Senatorial Committee headquarters, watching the news, awaiting confirmation of what he imagined would be his fate: the end of a brief tenure in the majority-leader perch he had worked so long to reach. “I thought we were going to lose the Senate,” McConnell told me. “By 11 o’clock, we’d held the Senate. And I thought, No chance Trump’s going to get it. No chance. And by 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning — my God.”
But however unexpected Trump’s victory might have been to McConnell at the time, he has retrospectively — and plausibly — claimed credit for it. He was quick to point out that Trump won nearly as many registered Republicans as Mitt Romney did in 2012, and one exit poll showed that “the single biggest issue bringing them home,” he said, was the Supreme Court seat he had held open. “It was a real masterstroke, in my opinion, to keep that seat open in 2016,” Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, told me. “I doubt Donald Trump would have won if that seat was not open.”
…
When the Republicans’ seven-year crusade to dismantle Obamacare effectively ran aground in the Senate the following July, it was McConnell whom Trump blamed for the bill’s failure. After McConnell, speaking at a Rotary Club event in Kentucky, chided Trump for his inexperience and high hopes — “I think he had excessive expectations about how quickly things happen in the democratic process,” McConnell said — Trump called him in a rage, then took to Twitter: “Can you believe that Mitch McConnell, who has screamed Repeal & Replace for 7 years, couldn’t get it done.” A reporter asked Trump that day if McConnell should step down. “If he doesn’t get repeal and replace done,” the president replied, “and if he doesn’t get taxes done, meaning cuts and reform, and if he doesn’t get a very easy one to get done, infrastructure, if he doesn’t get that done, then you can ask me that question.”
The abuse continued intermittently throughout the Senate’s August recess, in which McConnell also criticized Trump’s statements in the wake of the Charlottesville white supremacist rally. “There are no good neo-Nazis,” McConnell said in a statement. Finally, in October, McConnell and Trump sat down over lunch to clear the air. “I was trying to remind him of the significance of some of the things that had been happening,” McConnell told me. “Because he was in a real downer over the loss of Obamacare. And we all were. I understood that. But I think he was concluding, too soon, that it wasn’t going to be a good Congress.”
…
McConnell seemed to realize something, too: That his spare communication style was not the best way of dealing with this particular president. He now speaks to Trump several times a week. “I think that one of the things that the leader has done a better job of over time,” Billy Piper, McConnell’s chief of staff until 2011, told me, “is understanding that that’s an important part of a positive relationship with the president: direct and frequent communications, so that the president, you know, is hearing directly what’s going on and how his agenda’s being advanced, as opposed to getting it through third parties or news reports.” He added, “That’s probably not McConnell’s intuitive nature” (Homans 16-21).
… Mr. McConnell, long obsessed with the federal courts, saw opportunity. Even before Mr. Trump was sworn in, Mr. McConnell approached Donald F. McGahn II, the incoming White House counsel, about establishing an assembly line of judicial nominees to fill vacancies caused by Republicans’ refusal to consider Obama administration nominees.
The interests of the Trump administration and Mitch McConnell had aligned. He prioritized appeals court judges, eliminated the 60-vote threshold for Supreme Court nominees and stood by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh despite accusations of sexual misconduct, which the justice denied. He pushed Justice Amy Coney Barrett just days before the 2020 presidential election despite using the approach of the 2016 election to block Judge Merrick B. Garland’s nomination eight months before the voting. The judicial success provided both the president and the Republican leader with a legacy.
But it wasn’t just judges. Mr. McConnell delivered Mr. Trump’s tax cuts, remained stoic during regular presidential outbursts and made short work of the 2020 impeachment, with his most prominent failure in conservative eyes being the inability to overturn the Affordable Care Act.
“Mitch McConnell was indispensable to Donald Trump’s success,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina … said on Fox News. “Mitch McConnell working with Donald Trump did a hell of a job” (Hulse 11-5)
The Senate in the early hours of Friday morning rejected a new, scaled-down Republican plan to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act, derailing the Republicans’ seven-year campaign to dismantle President Barack Obama’s signature health care law and dealing a huge political setback to President Trump.
Senator John McCain of Arizona, who just this week returned to the Senate after receiving a diagnosis of brain cancer, cast the decisive vote to defeat the proposal, joining two other Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, in opposing it.
The 49-to-51 vote was also a humiliating setback for the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who has nurtured his reputation as a master tactician and spent the last three months trying to devise a repeal bill that could win support from members of his caucus.
…
Mr. McConnell said he was proud of his vote to start unwinding the Affordable Care Act. “What we tried to accomplish for the American people was the right thing for the country,” Mr. McConnell said. “And our only regret tonight, our only regret, is that we didn’t achieve what we had hoped to accomplish” (Pear and Kaplan 1-2).
Passage of the tax bill was similarly unconventional. The 490-page bill was unveiled only hours before a middle-of-the-night vote early Saturday, without the typical debate expected for such a sweeping package that will affect nearly all Americans. It was approved to applause from Republicans in the chamber, but the Democratic side was empty, senators long gone.
…
Democrats … [noted] the bill was still being changed as late as Friday evening, with scribbled notes in the margins. McConnell dismissed their complaints as the language of defeat.
“You complain about process when you’re losing,” he said.
Rather than micromanage the drafting of the tax bill, McConnell and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) deputized a posse of four GOP senators shortly after last November’s election to work with the other senators in considering the contours of the legislation. The process produced a measure with broader ownership from Republicans than the failed Obamacare overhaul.
“The healthcare experience was a learning experience for all of us,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who was part of the quartet, and said senators have been talking about tax ideas for years. “This was different” (Mascaro 1).
It was supposed to be a gift-wrapped present to taxpayers and the economy. But in hindsight, it looks more like a costly lump of coal.
…
"Our focus is on helping the folks who work in the mailrooms and the machine shops of America," he [Trump] told supporters in the fall of 2017. "The plumbers, the carpenters, the cops, the teachers, the truck drivers, the pipe-fitters, the people that like me best."
"After eight straight years of slow growth and underperformance, America is ready to take off," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said when the tax cut passed two years ago (Horsley 1).
Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, called on Congress on Tuesday to move on from the Mueller report and issued his own verdict from the Senate floor: “Case closed.”
“With an exhaustive investigation complete, would the country finally unify to confront the real challenges before us?” Mr. McConnell said. “Or would we remain consumed by unhinged partisanship, and keep dividing ourselves to the point that Putin and his agents need only stand on the sidelines and watch as their job is done for them?”
“Regrettably,” he continued, “the answer is obvious.”
…
… Republican leaders say questions of abuse of power and obstruction of justice are over. Mr. McConnell waved the congressional Democrats off their investigations, arguing that “relitigating a two-and-a-half-year-old election result” and continuing to traffic in “fanciful conspiracy theories” fixated on “delegitimizing the president” would hurt the country (Edmondson 1).
The first impeachment trial of Donald Trump … began in the U.S. Senate on January 16, 2020, and concluded with his acquittal on February 5. After an inquiry between September to November 2019, President Trump was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives on December 18, 2019; the articles of impeachment charged him with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
…
… On January 31, a majority of 51 senators (all Republicans) voted against allowing subpoenas to call witnesses or documents …
…
Leader Mitch McConnell was quietly planning a possible trial. On October 8, 2019, he led a meeting on the subject, advising the Republican Senators to craft their responses according to their own political needs.
McConnell proposed two potential avenues: state opposition to the House process, or refuse to comment due to being potential jurors.
[Later, McConnell declared:] "Everything I do during this I'm coordinating with the White House counsel. There will be no difference between the president's position and our position as to how to handle this ... I'm going to take my cues from the president's lawyers."
As part of the "total coordination", McConnell said the president's lawyers could decide if witnesses would be called for the trial.
McConnell also said there was "no chance" the Senate would convict Trump and remove him from office, while declaring his wish that all Senate Republicans would acquit Trump of both charges.
… [December 17] McConnell said, "I'm not an impartial juror. This is a political process. There is not anything judicial about it. Impeachment is a political decision." The Constitution mandates senators to take an impeachment oath, in which by Senate rules is stated, "I will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws, so help me God."
On December 15, Senate minority leader Chuck Summer, in a letter to McConnell, called for Mick Mulvaney, Robert Blair, John Bolyon and Michael Duffey to testify in the expected Senate trial, and suggested that pre-trial proceedings take place on January 6, 2020. Two days later, McConnell rejected the call for witnesses to testify, saying the Senate's job is only to judge, not to investigate. Schumer quickly replied, citing bipartisan public support for the testimony of witnesses who could fill in gaps caused by Trump preventing his staff from testifying in the House investigation.
On December 17, McConnell opened the Senate session with a half-hour long speech denouncing the impeachment, calling it "the most rushed, least thorough, and most unfair in modern history", and "fundamentally unlike any articles that any prior House of Representatives has ever passed". Schumer replied that he "did not hear a single sentence, a single argument as to why the witnesses I suggested should not give testimony" in the potential Senate trial (First 1-2).
Works cited:
Edmondson, Catie. “‘Case Closed’: McConnell Urges Congress To Move on from Mueller Report.” New York Times, May 7, 2019. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/us...
‘First Impeachment Trial of Donald Trump.” Wikipedia. Net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_i...
Homans, Charles. “Mitch McConnell Got Everything He Wanted. But at What Cost?” New York Times, January 22, 2019. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/ma...
Horsley, Scott. “After 2 Years, Trump Tax Cuts Have Failed To Deliver on GOP's Promises.” NPR, December 20, 2019. Net. https://www.npr.org/2019/12/20/789540...
Hulse, Carl. “The Relationship between McConnell and Trump Was Good for Both — Until It Wasn’t.” New York Times, February 19, 2021. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/us...
Mascaro, Lisa. “GOP tax bill Is Latest Example of Senate Leader Mitch McConnell Breaking the Norms He Often Espouses.” Los Angeles Times, December 3, 2017. Net. https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-n...
Pear, Robert and Kaplan, Thomas. “Senate Rejects Slimmed-Down Obamacare Repeal as McCain Votes No.” New York Times, July 27, 2017. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/us...
Ryan and his chief of staff at the time wrote and circulated a statement. “We thought it was really a good sign that the speaker took the pen and drafted the statement,” McDonough told me. “What happened then was, everybody signed off except Senator McConnell.”
McConnell has said his concerns had to do with wording regarding election infrastructure. McDonough says there were other substantial disagreements but declined to elaborate on what they were. Ryan says he took McConnell’s side in the dispute. The process of drafting the statement was drawn out for several weeks, “to the consternation and frustration of everybody — to include the speaker of the House,” McDonough says. “At the time, the speaker evinced to me considerable frustration.”
On Sept. 28, all four congressional leaders released a letter warning state election officials of potential interference from foreign actors, which avoided specific mention of Russia’s role. Both Ryan and McConnell have said they were not asked to mention Russia. Several Obama administration officials, however, including McDonough and James R. Clapper Jr., Obama’s director of national intelligence, have retrospectively blamed McConnell, and sometimes Ryan, for “watering down,” as McDonough put it in an NBC interview, the warning. “To their everlasting shame, the leaders — McConnell, Ryan — refused” to make more information public, James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, said in an interview at the 92nd Street Y in December. “I think they’re going to have a hard time explaining that to history.”
…
On Oct. 7, 2016, the Department of Homeland Security and Clapper’s office put out a joint statement, acknowledging for the first time that the intelligence community was “confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of emails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations.” But within hours, the news was swamped by the publication by The Washington Post of a video of Trump on the set of “Access Hollywood,” in which he bragged about sexually assaulting women. After the tape was released, Ryan released a statement saying he was “sickened” by Trump’s comments, canceled a campaign appearance with him and told his fellow Republican House candidates on a conference call that he would no longer defend Trump.
…
McConnell put out a statement saying “these comments are repugnant, and unacceptable in any circumstance” and calling on Trump to apologize, but he did nothing to separate his party’s Senate candidates from Trump. Early in the campaign, The Times reported, he had planned for a worst-case scenario in which McConnell and his Senate candidates, colleagues recalled him saying at the time, would “drop him like a hot rock.” But in the last weeks of the campaign, he had come to think that severing red-state candidates from the party’s nominee could hurt them on Election Day.
He sat up that night at the National Republican Senatorial Committee headquarters, watching the news, awaiting confirmation of what he imagined would be his fate: the end of a brief tenure in the majority-leader perch he had worked so long to reach. “I thought we were going to lose the Senate,” McConnell told me. “By 11 o’clock, we’d held the Senate. And I thought, No chance Trump’s going to get it. No chance. And by 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning — my God.”
But however unexpected Trump’s victory might have been to McConnell at the time, he has retrospectively — and plausibly — claimed credit for it. He was quick to point out that Trump won nearly as many registered Republicans as Mitt Romney did in 2012, and one exit poll showed that “the single biggest issue bringing them home,” he said, was the Supreme Court seat he had held open. “It was a real masterstroke, in my opinion, to keep that seat open in 2016,” Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, told me. “I doubt Donald Trump would have won if that seat was not open.”
…
When the Republicans’ seven-year crusade to dismantle Obamacare effectively ran aground in the Senate the following July, it was McConnell whom Trump blamed for the bill’s failure. After McConnell, speaking at a Rotary Club event in Kentucky, chided Trump for his inexperience and high hopes — “I think he had excessive expectations about how quickly things happen in the democratic process,” McConnell said — Trump called him in a rage, then took to Twitter: “Can you believe that Mitch McConnell, who has screamed Repeal & Replace for 7 years, couldn’t get it done.” A reporter asked Trump that day if McConnell should step down. “If he doesn’t get repeal and replace done,” the president replied, “and if he doesn’t get taxes done, meaning cuts and reform, and if he doesn’t get a very easy one to get done, infrastructure, if he doesn’t get that done, then you can ask me that question.”
The abuse continued intermittently throughout the Senate’s August recess, in which McConnell also criticized Trump’s statements in the wake of the Charlottesville white supremacist rally. “There are no good neo-Nazis,” McConnell said in a statement. Finally, in October, McConnell and Trump sat down over lunch to clear the air. “I was trying to remind him of the significance of some of the things that had been happening,” McConnell told me. “Because he was in a real downer over the loss of Obamacare. And we all were. I understood that. But I think he was concluding, too soon, that it wasn’t going to be a good Congress.”
…
McConnell seemed to realize something, too: That his spare communication style was not the best way of dealing with this particular president. He now speaks to Trump several times a week. “I think that one of the things that the leader has done a better job of over time,” Billy Piper, McConnell’s chief of staff until 2011, told me, “is understanding that that’s an important part of a positive relationship with the president: direct and frequent communications, so that the president, you know, is hearing directly what’s going on and how his agenda’s being advanced, as opposed to getting it through third parties or news reports.” He added, “That’s probably not McConnell’s intuitive nature” (Homans 16-21).
… Mr. McConnell, long obsessed with the federal courts, saw opportunity. Even before Mr. Trump was sworn in, Mr. McConnell approached Donald F. McGahn II, the incoming White House counsel, about establishing an assembly line of judicial nominees to fill vacancies caused by Republicans’ refusal to consider Obama administration nominees.
The interests of the Trump administration and Mitch McConnell had aligned. He prioritized appeals court judges, eliminated the 60-vote threshold for Supreme Court nominees and stood by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh despite accusations of sexual misconduct, which the justice denied. He pushed Justice Amy Coney Barrett just days before the 2020 presidential election despite using the approach of the 2016 election to block Judge Merrick B. Garland’s nomination eight months before the voting. The judicial success provided both the president and the Republican leader with a legacy.
But it wasn’t just judges. Mr. McConnell delivered Mr. Trump’s tax cuts, remained stoic during regular presidential outbursts and made short work of the 2020 impeachment, with his most prominent failure in conservative eyes being the inability to overturn the Affordable Care Act.
“Mitch McConnell was indispensable to Donald Trump’s success,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina … said on Fox News. “Mitch McConnell working with Donald Trump did a hell of a job” (Hulse 11-5)
The Senate in the early hours of Friday morning rejected a new, scaled-down Republican plan to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act, derailing the Republicans’ seven-year campaign to dismantle President Barack Obama’s signature health care law and dealing a huge political setback to President Trump.
Senator John McCain of Arizona, who just this week returned to the Senate after receiving a diagnosis of brain cancer, cast the decisive vote to defeat the proposal, joining two other Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, in opposing it.
The 49-to-51 vote was also a humiliating setback for the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who has nurtured his reputation as a master tactician and spent the last three months trying to devise a repeal bill that could win support from members of his caucus.
…
Mr. McConnell said he was proud of his vote to start unwinding the Affordable Care Act. “What we tried to accomplish for the American people was the right thing for the country,” Mr. McConnell said. “And our only regret tonight, our only regret, is that we didn’t achieve what we had hoped to accomplish” (Pear and Kaplan 1-2).
Passage of the tax bill was similarly unconventional. The 490-page bill was unveiled only hours before a middle-of-the-night vote early Saturday, without the typical debate expected for such a sweeping package that will affect nearly all Americans. It was approved to applause from Republicans in the chamber, but the Democratic side was empty, senators long gone.
…
Democrats … [noted] the bill was still being changed as late as Friday evening, with scribbled notes in the margins. McConnell dismissed their complaints as the language of defeat.
“You complain about process when you’re losing,” he said.
Rather than micromanage the drafting of the tax bill, McConnell and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) deputized a posse of four GOP senators shortly after last November’s election to work with the other senators in considering the contours of the legislation. The process produced a measure with broader ownership from Republicans than the failed Obamacare overhaul.
“The healthcare experience was a learning experience for all of us,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who was part of the quartet, and said senators have been talking about tax ideas for years. “This was different” (Mascaro 1).
It was supposed to be a gift-wrapped present to taxpayers and the economy. But in hindsight, it looks more like a costly lump of coal.
…
"Our focus is on helping the folks who work in the mailrooms and the machine shops of America," he [Trump] told supporters in the fall of 2017. "The plumbers, the carpenters, the cops, the teachers, the truck drivers, the pipe-fitters, the people that like me best."
"After eight straight years of slow growth and underperformance, America is ready to take off," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said when the tax cut passed two years ago (Horsley 1).
Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, called on Congress on Tuesday to move on from the Mueller report and issued his own verdict from the Senate floor: “Case closed.”
“With an exhaustive investigation complete, would the country finally unify to confront the real challenges before us?” Mr. McConnell said. “Or would we remain consumed by unhinged partisanship, and keep dividing ourselves to the point that Putin and his agents need only stand on the sidelines and watch as their job is done for them?”
“Regrettably,” he continued, “the answer is obvious.”
…
… Republican leaders say questions of abuse of power and obstruction of justice are over. Mr. McConnell waved the congressional Democrats off their investigations, arguing that “relitigating a two-and-a-half-year-old election result” and continuing to traffic in “fanciful conspiracy theories” fixated on “delegitimizing the president” would hurt the country (Edmondson 1).
The first impeachment trial of Donald Trump … began in the U.S. Senate on January 16, 2020, and concluded with his acquittal on February 5. After an inquiry between September to November 2019, President Trump was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives on December 18, 2019; the articles of impeachment charged him with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
…
… On January 31, a majority of 51 senators (all Republicans) voted against allowing subpoenas to call witnesses or documents …
…
Leader Mitch McConnell was quietly planning a possible trial. On October 8, 2019, he led a meeting on the subject, advising the Republican Senators to craft their responses according to their own political needs.
McConnell proposed two potential avenues: state opposition to the House process, or refuse to comment due to being potential jurors.
[Later, McConnell declared:] "Everything I do during this I'm coordinating with the White House counsel. There will be no difference between the president's position and our position as to how to handle this ... I'm going to take my cues from the president's lawyers."
As part of the "total coordination", McConnell said the president's lawyers could decide if witnesses would be called for the trial.
McConnell also said there was "no chance" the Senate would convict Trump and remove him from office, while declaring his wish that all Senate Republicans would acquit Trump of both charges.
… [December 17] McConnell said, "I'm not an impartial juror. This is a political process. There is not anything judicial about it. Impeachment is a political decision." The Constitution mandates senators to take an impeachment oath, in which by Senate rules is stated, "I will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws, so help me God."
On December 15, Senate minority leader Chuck Summer, in a letter to McConnell, called for Mick Mulvaney, Robert Blair, John Bolyon and Michael Duffey to testify in the expected Senate trial, and suggested that pre-trial proceedings take place on January 6, 2020. Two days later, McConnell rejected the call for witnesses to testify, saying the Senate's job is only to judge, not to investigate. Schumer quickly replied, citing bipartisan public support for the testimony of witnesses who could fill in gaps caused by Trump preventing his staff from testifying in the House investigation.
On December 17, McConnell opened the Senate session with a half-hour long speech denouncing the impeachment, calling it "the most rushed, least thorough, and most unfair in modern history", and "fundamentally unlike any articles that any prior House of Representatives has ever passed". Schumer replied that he "did not hear a single sentence, a single argument as to why the witnesses I suggested should not give testimony" in the potential Senate trial (First 1-2).
Works cited:
Edmondson, Catie. “‘Case Closed’: McConnell Urges Congress To Move on from Mueller Report.” New York Times, May 7, 2019. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/us...
‘First Impeachment Trial of Donald Trump.” Wikipedia. Net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_i...
Homans, Charles. “Mitch McConnell Got Everything He Wanted. But at What Cost?” New York Times, January 22, 2019. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/ma...
Horsley, Scott. “After 2 Years, Trump Tax Cuts Have Failed To Deliver on GOP's Promises.” NPR, December 20, 2019. Net. https://www.npr.org/2019/12/20/789540...
Hulse, Carl. “The Relationship between McConnell and Trump Was Good for Both — Until It Wasn’t.” New York Times, February 19, 2021. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/us...
Mascaro, Lisa. “GOP tax bill Is Latest Example of Senate Leader Mitch McConnell Breaking the Norms He Often Espouses.” Los Angeles Times, December 3, 2017. Net. https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-n...
Pear, Robert and Kaplan, Thomas. “Senate Rejects Slimmed-Down Obamacare Repeal as McCain Votes No.” New York Times, July 27, 2017. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/us...
March 13, 2022
The Amoralists -- Mitch McConnell -- Part Three -- Unprincipled Power
No person has done more in living memory to undermine the functioning of the US government than the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell.
...
McConnell doesn’t give a fig about the Senate, or about democracy. He cares only about winning. On the eve of the 2010 midterm elections he famously declared that his top priority was for Barack Obama “to be a one-term president”.
Between 2009 and 2013, McConnell’s Senate Republicans blocked 79 Obama nominees. In the entire history of the United States until that point, only 68 presidential nominees had been blocked.
This unprecedented use of the filibuster finally led Senate Democrats in 2013 to change the rules on some presidential nominees (but not the supreme court), to require simple majorities.
In response, McConnell fumed that “breaking the rules to change the rules is un-American”. If so, McConnell is about as un-American as they come. Once back in control of the Senate he [in 2916] buried Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland for the supreme court by refusing even to hold hearings.
Then, in 2017, McConnell and his Republicans changed the rules again, ending the use of the filibuster even for supreme court nominees and clearing the way for Senate confirmation of Trump’s Neil Gorsuch.
Step by step, McConnell has sacrificed the Senate as an institution to partisan political victories.
There is a vast difference between winning at politics by playing according to the norms of our democracy, and winning by subverting those norms.
…
[McConnell] … is the epitome of unprincipled power. History will not treat him kindly. (Reich 1-3).
Under McConnell’s leadership, as the Washington Post’s Paul Kane wrote recently, the chamber that calls itself the world’s greatest deliberative body has become, “by almost every measure,” the “least deliberative in the modern era.” In 2019, it voted on legislation only a hundred and eight times. In 1999, by contrast, the Senate had three hundred and fifty such votes, and helped pass a hundred and seventy new laws. At the end of 2019, more than two hundred and seventy-five bills, passed by the House of Representatives with bipartisan support, were sitting dormant on McConnell’s desk. Among them are bills mandating background checks on gun purchasers and lowering the cost of prescription drugs—ideas that are overwhelmingly popular with the public. But McConnell, currently the top recipient of Senate campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, has denounced efforts to lower drug costs as “socialist price controls.”
Longtime lawmakers in both parties say that the Senate is broken. In February, seventy former senators signed a bipartisan letter decrying the institution for not “fulfilling its constitutional duties.” Dick Durbin, of Illinois, who has been in the Senate for twenty-four years and is now the second-in-command in the Democratic leadership, told me that, under McConnell, “the Senate has deteriorated to the point where there is no debate whatsoever—he’s dismantled the Senate brick by brick.”
McConnell was the Minority Leader from 2006 to 2014. After Barack Obama was elected in 2008, McConnell used the filibuster to block a record number of bills and nominations supported by the Administration. As Majority Leader, he has control over the chamber’s schedule, and he keeps bills and nominations he opposes from even coming up for consideration. “He’s the traffic cop, and you can’t get through the intersection without him,” Durbin said.
Norman Ornstein, a political scientist specializing in congressional matters at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, told me that he has known every Senate Majority Leader in the past fifty years, and that McConnell “will go down in history as one of the most significant people in destroying the fundamentals of our constitutional democracy.” He continued, “There isn’t anyone remotely close. There’s nobody as corrupt, in terms of violating the norms of government.”
The most famous example of McConnell’s obstructionism was his audacious refusal to allow a hearing on Merrick Garland, whom Obama nominated for the Supreme Court, in 2016. When Justice Antonin Scalia unexpectedly died, vacating the seat, there were three hundred and forty-two days left in Obama’s second term. But McConnell argued that “the American people” should decide who should fill the seat in the next election, ignoring the fact that the American people had elected Obama. As a young lawyer, McConnell had argued in an academic journal that politics should play no part in Supreme Court picks; the only thing that mattered was if the nominee was professionally qualified. In 2016, though, he said it made no difference how qualified Garland, a highly respected moderate judge, was. Before then, the Senate had never declined to consider a nominee simply because it was an election year. On the contrary, the Senate had previously confirmed seventeen Supreme Court nominees during election years and rejected two. Nevertheless, McConnell prevailed.
...
McConnell has pointed to his obstruction of Garland with pride, saying, “The most important decision I’ve made in my political career was the decision not to do something.”
Many believe that, in 2016, the open Court seat motivated evangelical voters to overlook their doubts about Trump, providing the crucial bloc that won him the Presidency.
…
But McConnell’s predecessor as Majority Leader, the retired Democratic senator Harry Reid, of Nevada, accuses McConnell of destroying norms that fostered comity and consensus, such as the restrained use of filibusters. Although the two leaders had at first managed to be friendly, bonding over their shared support for Washington’s baseball team, the Nationals, they became bitter antagonists during the Obama Administration. “Mitch and the Republicans are doing all they can to make the Senate irrelevant,” Reid told me. …
…
McConnell’s opposition to Obama was relentless. In 2010, the Senate Majority Leader famously said, when asked about his goals, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term President.” … (Mayer 20-21).
A few years ago, I was in the middle of an interview with Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., when President Barack Obama called. Then the minority leader, McConnell walked across his spacious office in the United States Capitol to his desk and picked up the phone.
The senator had permitted me to stay in his office as long as I agreed not to write about what was said in the conversation. The exchange was a window into the relationship between the 44th president and his chief Republican antagonist in the Senate.
McConnell stood during the call. I could not hear Obama's end of the conversation, but, in delivering his side, the Kentucky lawmaker was stone-faced and nearly monosyllabic.
McConnell started the call with "Hello." He ended it with "Goodbye." I made a note that at neither end of the call, which lasted a few minutes, did McConnell utter the words "Mr. President." To say that the Republican leader's words, body language and overall demeanor were Arctic cold would be understating.
The Obama-McConnell relationship has long been known as frigid. Now we know a little more why that is. Obama rubs McConnell the wrong way. Big time.
…
"A lot of people ask me what President Obama is really like," McConnell writes. "I tell them all the same thing. He's no different in private than in public. He's like the kid in your class who exerts a hell of a lot of effort making sure everyone thinks he's the smartest one in the room. He talks down to people, whether in a meeting among colleagues in the White House or addressing the nation."
Some pages on [in his memoir], the Senate Republican leader observes: "Almost without exception, President Obama begins serious policy discussions by explaining why everyone else is wrong. After he assigns straw men to your views, he enthusiastically attempts to knock them down with a theatrically earnest re-litigation of what you've missed about his brilliance" (Carroll 1-3).
McConnell’s disrespect for Obama mirrored the views of rich conservative corporate donors like the Kochs, who underwrote many of the campaigns that enabled Republicans to capture the majority in the House of Representatives in 2010, and in the Senate four years later. In the 2014 midterm elections alone, the Koch donor network, which has a few hundred members, spent more than a hundred million dollars. In 2014, shortly before Republicans took the Senate, McConnell appeared as an honored guest at one of the Kochs’ semi-annual fund-raising summits. He thanked “Charles and David,” adding, “I don’t know where we would be without you.” Soon after he was sworn in as the Senate Majority Leader, he hired a former lobbyist for Koch Industries as his policy chief. McConnell then took aim at the Kochs’ longtime foe the Environmental Protection Agency, urging governors to disobey new restrictions on greenhouse gases (Mayer 21-22).
For his part, Obama hasn't exactly embraced rapprochement with his chief GOP nemesis in the Senate. How strongly he feels about McConnell's way of dealing with him will have to wait for the presidential memoir. But we have been given hints.
At the 2013 White House Correspondents Association Dinner, Obama outlined the state of affairs with McConnell: "Some folks still don't think I spend enough time with Congress. 'Why don't you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?' they ask. Really? Why don't you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?"
After McConnell and the GOP took over the Senate in the 2014 elections, Obama briefly offered an olive branch – or, more accurately, a shot glass. "Actually, I would enjoy having some Kentucky bourbon with Mitch McConnell," the president declared at a post-election White House news conference.
The "bourbon summit," a potential publicity bonanza for the chosen Kentucky bourbons, never materialized. The cold war between the White House and McConnell stayed cold (Carroll 3).
In 2009–10, President Barack Obama briefly enjoyed an effective 60-vote Democratic majority (including independents) in the Senate during the 111th Congress. During that time period, the Senate passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly known as "Obamacare," on December 24, 2009 by a vote of 60-39 (after invoking cloture by the same 60-39 margin). However, Obama's proposal to create a public health insurance option was removed from the health care legislation because it could not command 60-vote support.
House Democrats did not approve of all aspects of the Senate bill, but after 60-vote Senate control was permanently lost in February 2010 due to the election of Scott Brown to fill the seat of the late Ted Kennedy, House Democrats decided to pass the Senate bill intact and it became law. Several House-desired modifications to the Senate bill — those sufficient to pass scrutiny under the Byrd rule — were then made under reconciliation via the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, which was enacted days later following a 56–43 vote in the Senate.
The near-60-vote Senate majority that Democrats held throughout the 111th Congress was also critical to passage of other major Obama initiatives, including the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009 (passed 60–38, three Republicans voting yes) and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (passed 60–39, three Republicans voting yes, one Democrat voting no). However, the House-passed American Clean Energy and Security Act, which would have created a cap-and-trade system and established a national renewable electricity standard to combat climate change, never received a Senate floor vote (Filibuster 4).
As partisan clashing came to a head in the 1990s and 2000’s, senators turned to the filibuster more frequently in an effort to thwart the majority party. According to research by UCLA political scientist Barbara Sinclair, there was an average of one filibuster per Congress during the 1950s.
That number grew steadily since and spiked in 2007 and 2008 (the 110th Congress), when there were 52 filibusters. By the time the 111th Congress adjourned in 2010, the number of filibusters had risen to 137 for the entire two-year term (History 4).
Frustrated by lies put out by Mitch McConnell in 2016 about how the apparent weak economy was Obama’s fault, I wrote this letter to the Florence, Oregon, [my hometown] Siuslaw News.
We have been hearing a lot recently about politicians lying. One lie dwarfs all.
“It’s Obama’s economy,” we hear Republican flaks repeat. “He’s botched it. We will create jobs, grow the economy!” They count on our lack of attention to or memory of important political/economic events of the past decade.
How many of you actually recall the major 2008 GOP-induced economic meltdown and, afterward, how the GOP obstructed the President’s and the Democratic House and Senate’s attempts to stimulate the economy?
The first two years of Obama’s presidency Mitch McConnell repeatedly used the Senate rule that a minimum of 60 votes were required to defeat the filibuster of any bill brought to the Senate floor for a vote. During most of those two years the Senate consisted of 58 Democrats, 40 Republicans, and two independents. Several of those 58 Democratic senators voted consistently with the Republicans. To reach the 60 vote threshold, Democrats had to gain the support of the two independents (one of them Democrat turncoat Joe Lieberman) and at least two or three “moderate” Republicans. The Affordable Care Act (“Obama Care”), the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the “stimulus package”), and the Wall Street Reform Act (which included the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) managed to slip through after Democrats made bill-weakening concessions. Virtually everything else passed by the Democratic Party-controlled House was successfully filibustered. ....
Here are a few of the bills – all of which would have benefited working class Americans -- that McConnell’s minions stopped. Infrastructure building; equal pay for women; an increased minimum wage; stoppage of corporate tax breaks for moving jobs and production facilities out of the country; a rehiring of 400,000 teachers, firefighters, paramedics and police officers; student loan reform; an extension of unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed; legislation to help working people join labor unions; the requirement that millionaires pay a comparable tax rate to middle-class Americans, the repeal of Big Oil tax subsidies.
When the Republicans won control of the House in 2010, President Obama’s hopes for improving the lot of ordinary Americans were dashed. Everything the GOP-controlled House thereafter passed was designed either to profit large corporations and the super wealthy or weaken the support system for destitute Americans. Additionally, GOP House and Senate leaders sought to acquire what they wanted by shutting down once and later threatening to shut down the operations of the government.
For seven and a half years the Republican Party has sabotaged the national economy all the while presuming that it could win national elections by pinning the blame for stunted recovery on Congressional Democrats and our President. Liars (Titus 1).
“If there’s any power in this job, really,” McConnell likes to say, “it’s the power to schedule, to decide what you’re going to do or not do.” The converse of this, McConnell learned even before becoming minority leader in 2007, is also true: The greatest leverage the minority has is the ability to complicate the schedule. Drawing out deliberations can cripple the Senate, which is in session for only 34 weeks or so each year, most of which, in practice, are only four working days.
The bluntest instrument senators in the minority have to wield to this end is the filibuster or, more often, the threat of it. ...
But McConnell also slowed down the process in more subtle ways, particularly in his yearlong effort to derail the Affordable Care Act, which made him once again the public face of a particularly unapologetic form of Republican intransigence. “He said, ‘Our strategy is to delay this sucker as long as we possibly can, and the longer we delay it the worse the president looks: Why can’t he get it done? He’s got 60 votes?’ ” Bob Bennett, the late Utah Republican senator and a friend of McConnell’s, said in Alec MacGillis’s 2014 McConnell biography, “The Cynic.” Senate committee Democrats would negotiate policy particulars for months with their Republican colleagues only to see the Republicans’ votes evaporate at the end of the process.
McConnell’s staff, meanwhile, battered the bill relentlessly in public, publicizing the sweetheart accommodations Democratic senators were receiving for their votes. By the time Obamacare passed in March 2010, according to a CNN poll, only 39 percent of the country viewed it favorably, and McConnell had mostly run out the clock: There were less than eight months left, by then, until the midterm elections in which Republicans would take the House.
Legislation is one of the Senate’s core responsibilities; the other is confirming executive-branch appointments, such as administration officials and judges. By custom, the Senate had previously approved district-court judge nominations in groups, in the interest of efficiency. Under McConnell’s leadership, Republicans insisted on confirming Obama’s nominations individually, drawing out the process enough that, by the summer of 2010, there were 99 vacancies on the federal bench and 40 “judicial emergencies” had been declared by overburdened courts.
When Senate Republicans are blamed for obstruction, they are quick to point out that Democrats, when they were in the minority during most of George W. Bush’s presidency, filibustered judicial nominees, too — less frequently than McConnell, but often enough that Republicans had considered the “nuclear option”: getting rid of the filibuster for judicial matters, which would allow judges to be confirmed on a simple majority vote. But as McConnell escalated the use of filibusters, it was Harry Reid, then the majority leader, who finally decided to get rid of them for lower-court appointees in 2013.
McConnell was furious. Facing Reid on the Senate floor, he declared that “our friend the majority leader is going to be remembered as the worst leader here ever.” McConnell used other procedural moves to gum up Obama’s subsequent executive nominations, and by August 2014, the backlog stretched to more than 100 appointees. After McConnell became majority leader, following that November’s elections, judicial nominations all but ground to a halt, with McConnell confirming barely a quarter of Obama’s court picks. “I believe that Mitch McConnell has ruined the Senate,” Reid, who retired in 2017, now says. “I do not believe the Senate, for the next generation or two, will be the Senate I was there for. It’s gone. The old Senate is gone” (Homans 15-16).
The McConnell court is now every bit as partisan as one of the panels on my old show, “Crossfire.” Except on “Crossfire,” we didn’t wear robes and pretend we were somehow above the fray. For decades to come, American citizens upset about any erosion of their constitutional rights – civil rights, LGBTQ rights, voting rights, women’s rights, reproductive rights, consumer rights, environmental protections – can thank McConnell.
Legacies are often hard to predict when a politician is still in office. Not this time. When you see bitter, hateful, vengeful hyperpartisanship infecting our national life – from the White House to the Senate to the marble palace of the Supreme Court – you can thank the “Gentleman from Kentucky” (Begala 3).
Works cited:
Begala, Paul. “Mitch McConnell Has Done Grave Damage to All Three Branches of Government.” CNN, October 10, 2018. Net. https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/09/opinio...
Carroll, James R. “The Obama-McConnell Cold War.” U.S. News, June 22, 2016. Net. https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articl...
“Filibuster in the United States Senate.” Wikipedia. Net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibus...
History.Com Editors. “Filibuster.” History, August 21, 2018. Net. https://www.history.com/topics/us-gov...
Homans, Charles. “Mitch McConnell Got Everything He Wanted. But at What Cost?” New York Times, January 22, 2019. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/ma...
Mayer, Jane. “How Mitch McConnell Became Trump’s Enabler-in-Chief.” The New Yorker, April 20, 2020. Net. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
Reich, Robert. “Mitch McConnell Is Destroying the Senate – and American Government.” The Guardian, April 6, 2019. Net. https://www.theguardian.com/commentis...
Titus, Harold. Letter to the Editor. Siuslaw News, September 10, 2016. Net. http://authorharoldtitus.blogspot.com...
...
McConnell doesn’t give a fig about the Senate, or about democracy. He cares only about winning. On the eve of the 2010 midterm elections he famously declared that his top priority was for Barack Obama “to be a one-term president”.
Between 2009 and 2013, McConnell’s Senate Republicans blocked 79 Obama nominees. In the entire history of the United States until that point, only 68 presidential nominees had been blocked.
This unprecedented use of the filibuster finally led Senate Democrats in 2013 to change the rules on some presidential nominees (but not the supreme court), to require simple majorities.
In response, McConnell fumed that “breaking the rules to change the rules is un-American”. If so, McConnell is about as un-American as they come. Once back in control of the Senate he [in 2916] buried Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland for the supreme court by refusing even to hold hearings.
Then, in 2017, McConnell and his Republicans changed the rules again, ending the use of the filibuster even for supreme court nominees and clearing the way for Senate confirmation of Trump’s Neil Gorsuch.
Step by step, McConnell has sacrificed the Senate as an institution to partisan political victories.
There is a vast difference between winning at politics by playing according to the norms of our democracy, and winning by subverting those norms.
…
[McConnell] … is the epitome of unprincipled power. History will not treat him kindly. (Reich 1-3).
Under McConnell’s leadership, as the Washington Post’s Paul Kane wrote recently, the chamber that calls itself the world’s greatest deliberative body has become, “by almost every measure,” the “least deliberative in the modern era.” In 2019, it voted on legislation only a hundred and eight times. In 1999, by contrast, the Senate had three hundred and fifty such votes, and helped pass a hundred and seventy new laws. At the end of 2019, more than two hundred and seventy-five bills, passed by the House of Representatives with bipartisan support, were sitting dormant on McConnell’s desk. Among them are bills mandating background checks on gun purchasers and lowering the cost of prescription drugs—ideas that are overwhelmingly popular with the public. But McConnell, currently the top recipient of Senate campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, has denounced efforts to lower drug costs as “socialist price controls.”
Longtime lawmakers in both parties say that the Senate is broken. In February, seventy former senators signed a bipartisan letter decrying the institution for not “fulfilling its constitutional duties.” Dick Durbin, of Illinois, who has been in the Senate for twenty-four years and is now the second-in-command in the Democratic leadership, told me that, under McConnell, “the Senate has deteriorated to the point where there is no debate whatsoever—he’s dismantled the Senate brick by brick.”
McConnell was the Minority Leader from 2006 to 2014. After Barack Obama was elected in 2008, McConnell used the filibuster to block a record number of bills and nominations supported by the Administration. As Majority Leader, he has control over the chamber’s schedule, and he keeps bills and nominations he opposes from even coming up for consideration. “He’s the traffic cop, and you can’t get through the intersection without him,” Durbin said.
Norman Ornstein, a political scientist specializing in congressional matters at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, told me that he has known every Senate Majority Leader in the past fifty years, and that McConnell “will go down in history as one of the most significant people in destroying the fundamentals of our constitutional democracy.” He continued, “There isn’t anyone remotely close. There’s nobody as corrupt, in terms of violating the norms of government.”
The most famous example of McConnell’s obstructionism was his audacious refusal to allow a hearing on Merrick Garland, whom Obama nominated for the Supreme Court, in 2016. When Justice Antonin Scalia unexpectedly died, vacating the seat, there were three hundred and forty-two days left in Obama’s second term. But McConnell argued that “the American people” should decide who should fill the seat in the next election, ignoring the fact that the American people had elected Obama. As a young lawyer, McConnell had argued in an academic journal that politics should play no part in Supreme Court picks; the only thing that mattered was if the nominee was professionally qualified. In 2016, though, he said it made no difference how qualified Garland, a highly respected moderate judge, was. Before then, the Senate had never declined to consider a nominee simply because it was an election year. On the contrary, the Senate had previously confirmed seventeen Supreme Court nominees during election years and rejected two. Nevertheless, McConnell prevailed.
...
McConnell has pointed to his obstruction of Garland with pride, saying, “The most important decision I’ve made in my political career was the decision not to do something.”
Many believe that, in 2016, the open Court seat motivated evangelical voters to overlook their doubts about Trump, providing the crucial bloc that won him the Presidency.
…
But McConnell’s predecessor as Majority Leader, the retired Democratic senator Harry Reid, of Nevada, accuses McConnell of destroying norms that fostered comity and consensus, such as the restrained use of filibusters. Although the two leaders had at first managed to be friendly, bonding over their shared support for Washington’s baseball team, the Nationals, they became bitter antagonists during the Obama Administration. “Mitch and the Republicans are doing all they can to make the Senate irrelevant,” Reid told me. …
…
McConnell’s opposition to Obama was relentless. In 2010, the Senate Majority Leader famously said, when asked about his goals, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term President.” … (Mayer 20-21).
A few years ago, I was in the middle of an interview with Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., when President Barack Obama called. Then the minority leader, McConnell walked across his spacious office in the United States Capitol to his desk and picked up the phone.
The senator had permitted me to stay in his office as long as I agreed not to write about what was said in the conversation. The exchange was a window into the relationship between the 44th president and his chief Republican antagonist in the Senate.
McConnell stood during the call. I could not hear Obama's end of the conversation, but, in delivering his side, the Kentucky lawmaker was stone-faced and nearly monosyllabic.
McConnell started the call with "Hello." He ended it with "Goodbye." I made a note that at neither end of the call, which lasted a few minutes, did McConnell utter the words "Mr. President." To say that the Republican leader's words, body language and overall demeanor were Arctic cold would be understating.
The Obama-McConnell relationship has long been known as frigid. Now we know a little more why that is. Obama rubs McConnell the wrong way. Big time.
…
"A lot of people ask me what President Obama is really like," McConnell writes. "I tell them all the same thing. He's no different in private than in public. He's like the kid in your class who exerts a hell of a lot of effort making sure everyone thinks he's the smartest one in the room. He talks down to people, whether in a meeting among colleagues in the White House or addressing the nation."
Some pages on [in his memoir], the Senate Republican leader observes: "Almost without exception, President Obama begins serious policy discussions by explaining why everyone else is wrong. After he assigns straw men to your views, he enthusiastically attempts to knock them down with a theatrically earnest re-litigation of what you've missed about his brilliance" (Carroll 1-3).
McConnell’s disrespect for Obama mirrored the views of rich conservative corporate donors like the Kochs, who underwrote many of the campaigns that enabled Republicans to capture the majority in the House of Representatives in 2010, and in the Senate four years later. In the 2014 midterm elections alone, the Koch donor network, which has a few hundred members, spent more than a hundred million dollars. In 2014, shortly before Republicans took the Senate, McConnell appeared as an honored guest at one of the Kochs’ semi-annual fund-raising summits. He thanked “Charles and David,” adding, “I don’t know where we would be without you.” Soon after he was sworn in as the Senate Majority Leader, he hired a former lobbyist for Koch Industries as his policy chief. McConnell then took aim at the Kochs’ longtime foe the Environmental Protection Agency, urging governors to disobey new restrictions on greenhouse gases (Mayer 21-22).
For his part, Obama hasn't exactly embraced rapprochement with his chief GOP nemesis in the Senate. How strongly he feels about McConnell's way of dealing with him will have to wait for the presidential memoir. But we have been given hints.
At the 2013 White House Correspondents Association Dinner, Obama outlined the state of affairs with McConnell: "Some folks still don't think I spend enough time with Congress. 'Why don't you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?' they ask. Really? Why don't you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?"
After McConnell and the GOP took over the Senate in the 2014 elections, Obama briefly offered an olive branch – or, more accurately, a shot glass. "Actually, I would enjoy having some Kentucky bourbon with Mitch McConnell," the president declared at a post-election White House news conference.
The "bourbon summit," a potential publicity bonanza for the chosen Kentucky bourbons, never materialized. The cold war between the White House and McConnell stayed cold (Carroll 3).
In 2009–10, President Barack Obama briefly enjoyed an effective 60-vote Democratic majority (including independents) in the Senate during the 111th Congress. During that time period, the Senate passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly known as "Obamacare," on December 24, 2009 by a vote of 60-39 (after invoking cloture by the same 60-39 margin). However, Obama's proposal to create a public health insurance option was removed from the health care legislation because it could not command 60-vote support.
House Democrats did not approve of all aspects of the Senate bill, but after 60-vote Senate control was permanently lost in February 2010 due to the election of Scott Brown to fill the seat of the late Ted Kennedy, House Democrats decided to pass the Senate bill intact and it became law. Several House-desired modifications to the Senate bill — those sufficient to pass scrutiny under the Byrd rule — were then made under reconciliation via the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, which was enacted days later following a 56–43 vote in the Senate.
The near-60-vote Senate majority that Democrats held throughout the 111th Congress was also critical to passage of other major Obama initiatives, including the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009 (passed 60–38, three Republicans voting yes) and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (passed 60–39, three Republicans voting yes, one Democrat voting no). However, the House-passed American Clean Energy and Security Act, which would have created a cap-and-trade system and established a national renewable electricity standard to combat climate change, never received a Senate floor vote (Filibuster 4).
As partisan clashing came to a head in the 1990s and 2000’s, senators turned to the filibuster more frequently in an effort to thwart the majority party. According to research by UCLA political scientist Barbara Sinclair, there was an average of one filibuster per Congress during the 1950s.
That number grew steadily since and spiked in 2007 and 2008 (the 110th Congress), when there were 52 filibusters. By the time the 111th Congress adjourned in 2010, the number of filibusters had risen to 137 for the entire two-year term (History 4).
Frustrated by lies put out by Mitch McConnell in 2016 about how the apparent weak economy was Obama’s fault, I wrote this letter to the Florence, Oregon, [my hometown] Siuslaw News.
We have been hearing a lot recently about politicians lying. One lie dwarfs all.
“It’s Obama’s economy,” we hear Republican flaks repeat. “He’s botched it. We will create jobs, grow the economy!” They count on our lack of attention to or memory of important political/economic events of the past decade.
How many of you actually recall the major 2008 GOP-induced economic meltdown and, afterward, how the GOP obstructed the President’s and the Democratic House and Senate’s attempts to stimulate the economy?
The first two years of Obama’s presidency Mitch McConnell repeatedly used the Senate rule that a minimum of 60 votes were required to defeat the filibuster of any bill brought to the Senate floor for a vote. During most of those two years the Senate consisted of 58 Democrats, 40 Republicans, and two independents. Several of those 58 Democratic senators voted consistently with the Republicans. To reach the 60 vote threshold, Democrats had to gain the support of the two independents (one of them Democrat turncoat Joe Lieberman) and at least two or three “moderate” Republicans. The Affordable Care Act (“Obama Care”), the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the “stimulus package”), and the Wall Street Reform Act (which included the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) managed to slip through after Democrats made bill-weakening concessions. Virtually everything else passed by the Democratic Party-controlled House was successfully filibustered. ....
Here are a few of the bills – all of which would have benefited working class Americans -- that McConnell’s minions stopped. Infrastructure building; equal pay for women; an increased minimum wage; stoppage of corporate tax breaks for moving jobs and production facilities out of the country; a rehiring of 400,000 teachers, firefighters, paramedics and police officers; student loan reform; an extension of unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed; legislation to help working people join labor unions; the requirement that millionaires pay a comparable tax rate to middle-class Americans, the repeal of Big Oil tax subsidies.
When the Republicans won control of the House in 2010, President Obama’s hopes for improving the lot of ordinary Americans were dashed. Everything the GOP-controlled House thereafter passed was designed either to profit large corporations and the super wealthy or weaken the support system for destitute Americans. Additionally, GOP House and Senate leaders sought to acquire what they wanted by shutting down once and later threatening to shut down the operations of the government.
For seven and a half years the Republican Party has sabotaged the national economy all the while presuming that it could win national elections by pinning the blame for stunted recovery on Congressional Democrats and our President. Liars (Titus 1).
“If there’s any power in this job, really,” McConnell likes to say, “it’s the power to schedule, to decide what you’re going to do or not do.” The converse of this, McConnell learned even before becoming minority leader in 2007, is also true: The greatest leverage the minority has is the ability to complicate the schedule. Drawing out deliberations can cripple the Senate, which is in session for only 34 weeks or so each year, most of which, in practice, are only four working days.
The bluntest instrument senators in the minority have to wield to this end is the filibuster or, more often, the threat of it. ...
But McConnell also slowed down the process in more subtle ways, particularly in his yearlong effort to derail the Affordable Care Act, which made him once again the public face of a particularly unapologetic form of Republican intransigence. “He said, ‘Our strategy is to delay this sucker as long as we possibly can, and the longer we delay it the worse the president looks: Why can’t he get it done? He’s got 60 votes?’ ” Bob Bennett, the late Utah Republican senator and a friend of McConnell’s, said in Alec MacGillis’s 2014 McConnell biography, “The Cynic.” Senate committee Democrats would negotiate policy particulars for months with their Republican colleagues only to see the Republicans’ votes evaporate at the end of the process.
McConnell’s staff, meanwhile, battered the bill relentlessly in public, publicizing the sweetheart accommodations Democratic senators were receiving for their votes. By the time Obamacare passed in March 2010, according to a CNN poll, only 39 percent of the country viewed it favorably, and McConnell had mostly run out the clock: There were less than eight months left, by then, until the midterm elections in which Republicans would take the House.
Legislation is one of the Senate’s core responsibilities; the other is confirming executive-branch appointments, such as administration officials and judges. By custom, the Senate had previously approved district-court judge nominations in groups, in the interest of efficiency. Under McConnell’s leadership, Republicans insisted on confirming Obama’s nominations individually, drawing out the process enough that, by the summer of 2010, there were 99 vacancies on the federal bench and 40 “judicial emergencies” had been declared by overburdened courts.
When Senate Republicans are blamed for obstruction, they are quick to point out that Democrats, when they were in the minority during most of George W. Bush’s presidency, filibustered judicial nominees, too — less frequently than McConnell, but often enough that Republicans had considered the “nuclear option”: getting rid of the filibuster for judicial matters, which would allow judges to be confirmed on a simple majority vote. But as McConnell escalated the use of filibusters, it was Harry Reid, then the majority leader, who finally decided to get rid of them for lower-court appointees in 2013.
McConnell was furious. Facing Reid on the Senate floor, he declared that “our friend the majority leader is going to be remembered as the worst leader here ever.” McConnell used other procedural moves to gum up Obama’s subsequent executive nominations, and by August 2014, the backlog stretched to more than 100 appointees. After McConnell became majority leader, following that November’s elections, judicial nominations all but ground to a halt, with McConnell confirming barely a quarter of Obama’s court picks. “I believe that Mitch McConnell has ruined the Senate,” Reid, who retired in 2017, now says. “I do not believe the Senate, for the next generation or two, will be the Senate I was there for. It’s gone. The old Senate is gone” (Homans 15-16).
The McConnell court is now every bit as partisan as one of the panels on my old show, “Crossfire.” Except on “Crossfire,” we didn’t wear robes and pretend we were somehow above the fray. For decades to come, American citizens upset about any erosion of their constitutional rights – civil rights, LGBTQ rights, voting rights, women’s rights, reproductive rights, consumer rights, environmental protections – can thank McConnell.
Legacies are often hard to predict when a politician is still in office. Not this time. When you see bitter, hateful, vengeful hyperpartisanship infecting our national life – from the White House to the Senate to the marble palace of the Supreme Court – you can thank the “Gentleman from Kentucky” (Begala 3).
Works cited:
Begala, Paul. “Mitch McConnell Has Done Grave Damage to All Three Branches of Government.” CNN, October 10, 2018. Net. https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/09/opinio...
Carroll, James R. “The Obama-McConnell Cold War.” U.S. News, June 22, 2016. Net. https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articl...
“Filibuster in the United States Senate.” Wikipedia. Net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibus...
History.Com Editors. “Filibuster.” History, August 21, 2018. Net. https://www.history.com/topics/us-gov...
Homans, Charles. “Mitch McConnell Got Everything He Wanted. But at What Cost?” New York Times, January 22, 2019. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/ma...
Mayer, Jane. “How Mitch McConnell Became Trump’s Enabler-in-Chief.” The New Yorker, April 20, 2020. Net. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
Reich, Robert. “Mitch McConnell Is Destroying the Senate – and American Government.” The Guardian, April 6, 2019. Net. https://www.theguardian.com/commentis...
Titus, Harold. Letter to the Editor. Siuslaw News, September 10, 2016. Net. http://authorharoldtitus.blogspot.com...
March 10, 2022
The Amoralists -- Mitch McConnell -- Part Two -- Control the Money
Biographer] Alec MacGillis: it was Mitch McConnell’s overweening desire to win, and fear of losing — and desire to not just win but win big and be safe, politically safe, in Washington — that led him to shift so dramatically. If you were to pick one kind of key moment, it was '84, when he was elected by a very, very, very slim margin against the incumbent Democrat, whereas Ronald Reagan was elected by a huge margin in Kentucky, and McConnell had clearly come in only thanks to Reagan's coattails.
He was sort of embarrassed by that fact and declined to acknowledge it publicly, and just seems to have drawn from that experience, his near loss, which quite possibly might have ended his career right there. He seems to have concluded from that that he needed to get in line with where the Republican Party was going under Reagan, that he needed to adapt himself to the regional realignment of the Republican Party as it was moving from a party that still had liberal, moderate members ... to a party that was far more Southern (Isquith 1).
…In 1984, when McConnell first ran for Senate, he learned the politics of destruction at the hands of a master. His challenge to Sen. Walter “Dee” Huddleston, a genial two-term Democrat, looked like a distant long shot. But McConnell, who’d been re-elected judge executive in 1981, used his position to build up a fat campaign war chest, and he devoted a good amount of it to hiring the most notorious political hit man in America: Roger Ailes.
The future founder and CEO of Fox News had already established his well-earned reputation for flaunting the truth and grabbing the opposition by the jugular while working for Nixon and Reagan. For McConnell, he cooked up an ad that would become a classic of the genre. Called “Hound Dog,” it featured a pack of bloodhounds trying to sniff out Huddleston, who was allegedly neglecting his Senate duties to make paid political speeches around the country. In fact, as Newsweek reported, Huddleston had made 94 percent of Senate votes. But the hound dogs caught Kentuckians’ imaginations and completely changed the race.
“[McConnell] was 40 points behind … but then they put up this ad and it made people laugh.” Most important, it was Huddleston they were snickering at.
McConnell squeaked into the Senate by the narrowest of victories — 5,000 votes statewide, a less-than-one-percent margin. He arrived in Washington as the only Republican to unseat a Democrat in the Senate that year. But he took no time to celebrate: He immediately set to work courting big donors for his re-election bid in 1990. “As I always say,” McConnell wrote in his book, “the three most important words in politics are ‘cash on hand.’ ”
McConnell cemented his reputation as a no-holds-barred campaigner in 1990, when he faced Democrat Harvey Sloane, a two-term Louisville mayor and Yale-educated doctor.
McConnell rolled out a tactic he’d use again and again in future campaigns — making his opponent look like more of an outsider than the incumbent from Washington. McConnell had promised reporters he’d be running a purely positive campaign, but he broke that pledge with alacrity. At Fancy Farm in 1989, he lit into Sloane as the “wimp from the East” whose “mommy left him a million dollars” and who had “come down here to save us from ourselves.” (When reporters asked McConnell afterward why he’d already gone negative, he replied, “I just couldn’t help myself.”) Running with generous backing from the NRA, McConnell also painted Sloane as a gun-grabber. McConnell’s campaign sent endless mailers and ran streams of ads turning Sloane’s support for an assault-weapons ban into further evidence that he was an uppity liberal. McConnell, among his many pernicious contributions to American politics, became one of the first to successfully turn the Second Amendment into a cultural wedge issue. (Two decades later, when public outcry for gun-control measures swelled after 20 first-graders and six teachers were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, McConnell engineered a filibuster that prevented the Senate from even voting on a background-check requirement.)
With the election fast approaching, and McConnell’s lead too narrow for comfort, it was time for the coup de grâce. The senator’s campaign leaked to the press that Sloane, who hadn’t been practicing medicine for a few years, had renewed a prescription for his sleeping pills using his expired Drug Enforcement Administration credentials.
Before long, Kentuckians’ airwaves were filled with ads featuring ominous images of vials and pills, with a deep-voiced narrator decrying Sloane’s habit of prescribing himself “mood-altering” “powerful depressants” at “double the safe dose without a legal permit” (Moser 16-17).
Sloane, an Ivy League-educated doctor whom McConnell mocked as “a wimp from the East,” had gone to Kentucky through a federal program that provides medical services to the rural poor, and went on to become Louisville’s mayor. During the Senate campaign, Sloane, who had postponed a hip replacement until after the election, renewed a prescription for sleeping pills although his license had expired. It was a real lapse in judgment, but he didn’t have a drug problem. Sloane said of McConnell’s attack, “It was craven. He’s just a conniving guy. He’s the Machiavelli of the twenty-first century.” McConnell himself has summarized his approach to campaigns simply: “If they throw a stone at you, you drop a boulder on them” (Mayer 15).
After throwing the kitchen sink at Sloane — whose political career never recovered — McConnell won narrowly, with just 52 percent of the vote. But with the GOP on the rise in Kentucky, and McConnell pulling the strings, he would never again come close to losing. Even so, he would always relish pummeling anyone who dared challenge him. As longtime Democratic operative Jim Cauley put it, “They take good people and make them bad.”
McConnell had become secure enough in Kentucky, and flush enough with big corporate donors, that he could focus more fully on his larger goal of elevating himself over his Republican colleagues in Washington. He would pursue Senate leadership the same way he’d approached winning elections from the start. He’d do whatever it took.
As a senator from a small state, graced with none of the backslapping bonhomie that traditionally led senators up the ladder to power, McConnell had to cast around for a way to rise. When he found it, it meant disavowing one of the few principles he still clung to.
Just as he’d originally run as a pro-choice, pro-labor, pro-civil-rights Republican, McConnell had a long history of calling for removing big money from politics. In 1973, not long after he was elected chairman of the Jefferson County Republican Party, he’d written an op-ed for the Courier-Journal calling for “truly effective campaign finance reform” — lowering contribution limits, mandating public disclosure of donors, even capping how much a candidate could spend in a race. He’d later laugh this off, claiming he’d been “playing for headlines” to distract folks from the Watergate scandal. But in 1987, midway through his first term, McConnell floated a constitutional amendment to end what he called the “millionaire’s loophole” — the ability for wealthy Americans to spend limitless money on their own campaigns.
The proposal went nowhere, and in his second term, McConnell made a 180-degree turn and set himself down a path to becoming the most outspoken and influential opponent of campaign-finance restrictions in American history. At the same time, he began to master the art of tactical obstructionism. Democratic Sens. David Boren and George Mitchell had proposed a bill that included both spending limits and public financing for campaigns. While some Republicans were hesitant to speak out against a measure designed to tamp down on corruption, McConnell took the lead, blocking the bill by reviving the use of the filibuster, which still carried unsavory associations with segregationist efforts to block civil-rights measures in the Sixties.
“Filibustering is sometimes presented as an obstructionist tactic by its opponents,” McConnell would later say, “but in my view, if legislation as awful as this bill is brought up for consideration, there is a duty to obstruct its passage.”
By 1997, McConnell’s reputation for relentless fundraising — “It’s a joy to him,” marveled Sen. Alan Simpson — had won him his first leadership post, as chairman of the Republican National Senatorial Committee. That same year, when a bill was floated to ban “soft money” — contributions to political parties that could be funneled into particular campaigns, allowing donors to exceed legal limits on donations — McConnell steeled the nerves of his fellow Republicans in opposing it: “If we stop this thing,” he reportedly told his colleagues, “we can control this institution for the next 20 years.” The fact that McConnell had himself proposed a soft-money ban four years earlier mattered not at all.
Two years later, McConnell clinched his reputation by fighting tooth-and-nail against fellow Republican John McCain’s effort to rein in campaign money with the McCain-Feingold Act. As the Senate debated the measure in October 1999, McConnell confronted McCain on the floor, demanding that he name senators he considered to be corrupted by donors’ money. “For there to be corruption,” McConnell said, “someone must be corrupt. I just ask my friend from Arizona what he has in mind here?”
When McCain refused to say which senators he had in mind, McConnell kept needling him. Finally McCain shot back: “A certain senator stood up and said it was OK for you not to vote for the tobacco bill because the tobacco companies will run ads in our favor.” That “certain senator,” as everyone knew, was McConnell.
Some senators might have been embarrassed. But the same sorts of scorched-earth tactics McConnell had used to win elections back home were now turning him into a national conservative antihero. McCain and the others could talk loftily about saving democracy; McConnell invited and embraced their scorn, knowing he was also winning the silent gratitude of many of his fellow senators. In a sense, he made himself a human shield for other Republicans opposed to reform. But he also got a kick out of being vilified. When U.S. News & World Report ran a headline calling McConnell the “Darth Vader” of campaign finance reform, he had it framed and hung in his office.
Lord Vader wasn’t finished. When McCain-Feingold became law, McConnell immediately lent his name to a lawsuit to block the law’s enforcement. In 2003, his suit lost on appeal in a narrow 5-4 decision in the Supreme Court. Undaunted, he then co-founded the James Madison Center for Free Speech in D.C., with arch-conservative lawyer James Bopp, who would bring the Citizens United case that, come 2010, would not only strike down McCain-Feingold but also legalize unlimited corporate contributions. By then, McConnell had been elected Republican leader — and was busy laying minefields in the legislative path of President Obama and the Democratic Congress (Moser 18-20).
In 1990, Ailes helped McConnell paint his Democratic challenger, Harvey Sloane, as a dangerous drug addict. Television ads showed images of pill containers as a narrator warned of Sloane’s reliance on “powerful,” “mood-altering” “depressants” that had been prescribed “without a legal permit.”
…
Most politicians find fund-raising odious, but Alan Simpson, the former Republican senator from Wyoming, who served a dozen years with McConnell, told [biographer] MacGillis that fund-raising was “a joy to him,” adding, “He gets a twinkle in his eye and his step quickens. I mean, he loves it.” McConnell’s donors have found themselves rewarded. ...
…
… In 2000, Jack Spadaro, an engineer for the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, began conducting an investigation in Martin County, Kentucky, after a slurry pond owned by Massey Energy burst open, releasing three hundred million gallons of lavalike coal waste that killed more than a million fish and contaminated the water systems of nearly thirty thousand people. Spadaro and his team were working on a report that documented eight apparent violations of the law, which could have led to charges of criminal negligence and cost Massey hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. But, that November, George W. Bush was elected President, and he soon named [Elaine] Chao [McConnell’s future wife] his Labor Secretary, giving her authority over the Mine Safety and Health Administration. She chose McConnell’s former chief of staff, Steven Law, as her chief of staff. Spadaro told me, “Law had his finger in everything, and was truly running the Labor Department. He was Mitch’s guy.” The day Bush was sworn in, Spadaro was ordered to halt his investigation. Before the Labor Department issued any fines, Massey made a hundred-thousand-dollar donation to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. McConnell himself had run the unit, which raises funds for Senate campaigns, between 1997 and 2000.
Massey ended up paying only fifty-six hundred dollars in federal fines.
…
… He [Spadaro] noted, “Massey gave a lot of money to McConnell over the years. McConnell’s very bright. He took the money and, in return, protected the coal industry. He’s truly the most corrupt politician in the U.S.” Records show that, between 1990 and 2010, McConnell was the recipient of the second-largest amount of federal campaign donations from people and pacs associated with Massey. And when McConnell ran the National Republican Senatorial Committee it took in five hundred and eighty-four thousand dollars from the coal industry.
…
As a backbench senator, McConnell used his fund-raising talents to rise in the Party’s leadership—a path laid out by Lyndon Johnson. Robert A. Caro, the author of a magisterial four-volume biography of Johnson, told me that, “in a stroke of genius,” Johnson, as a Democratic junior congressman, “realizes he has no power, but he has something no other congressman has—the oilmen and big contractors in Texas who need favors in Washington.” By establishing control over the distribution of the donors’ money, Johnson acquired immense power over his peers. …
According to Keith Runyon [editor for The Courier-Journal], McConnell was focused on his political survival from the moment he arrived in Washington. He recalls that, the morning after McConnell was first sworn in to the Senate, McConnell told him that he would be moving to the right from then on, to keep getting re-ëlected. McConnell has denied saying so, but Runyon told me, “He is a flat-out liar.” Another acquaintance who has known McConnell for years said that, “to the extent that he’s conversational, he wore his ambition to become Majority Leader on his sleeve.”
McConnell envied better-known colleagues who were chased down the corridors by news reporters. He wanted to be like them, he later told Carl Hulse, a Times correspondent, who interviewed McConnell for his book “Confirmation Bias,” about fights over Supreme Court nominees. The way McConnell ended up making his name was decidedly unglamorous: blocking campaign-finance reform. Even he derided the subject as rivaling “static cling as an issue most Americans care about.” Dull as campaign financing was, it was vitally important to his peers, and to democracy. Few members wanted to risk appearing corrupt, and so they were grateful to McConnell for fighting one reform after the next—while claiming that it was purely about defending the First Amendment. According to MacGillis, behind closed doors McConnell admitted to his Senate colleagues that undoing the reforms was “in the best interest of Republicans.”
Armed with funding from such billionaire conservatives as the DeVos family, McConnell helped take the quest to kill restraints on spending all the way to the Supreme Court. In 2010, his side won: the Citizens United decision opened the way for corporations, big donors, and secretive nonprofits to pour unlimited and often untraceable cash into elections.
“McConnell loves money, and abhors any controls on it,” Fred Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21, a group that supports campaign-finance reform, said. “Money is the central theme of his career. And, if you want to control Congress, the best way is to control the money.”
Between 1984, when McConnell was first elected to the Senate, and today, the amount of money spent on federal campaigns has increased at least sixfold, excluding outside spending, more and more of which comes from very rich donors. Influence-peddling has grown from a grubby, shameful business into a multi billion-dollar, high-paying industry. McConnell has led the way in empowering those private interests, and in aligning the Republican Party with them. His staff embodied “the revolving door,” as they went from working for one of America’s poorest states to lobbying for America’s richest corporations, while growing rich themselves and helping fund McConnell’s campaigns. Money from the coal industry, tobacco companies, Big Pharma, Wall Street, the Chamber of Commerce, and many other interests flowed into Republican coffers while McConnell blocked federal actions that those interests opposed: climate-change legislation, affordable health care, gun control, and efforts to curb economic inequality.
McConnell, like L.B.J., used fund-raising to help allies and punish enemies. “What he’s done behind the scenes is apply the thing that speaks louder in Washington, D.C., than anything else—money,” [Rick] Wilson, the former Republican consultant, said. “Suddenly, Susan Collins gets a bridge in Maine. Lisa Murkowski suddenly gets a harbor. Oh, what a coincidence!” McConnell has a brilliant grasp of his caucus members’ needs, and he helps them protect their seats with tens of millions of dollars in campaign donations and federal grants … (Mayer 15-20).
Works cited:
Isquith, Elias. "You Think We’re This Dumb?": Inside the Sick, Cynical Mind of Mitch McConnell.” Salon, October 1, 2014. Net. https://www.salon.com/2014/10/01/you_...
Mayer, Jane. “How Mitch McConnell Became Trump’s Enabler-in-Chief.” The New Yorker, April 20, 2020. Net. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
Moser, Bob. “Mitch McConnell: The Man Who Sold America.” Rolling Stone, September 17, 2019. Net. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics...
He was sort of embarrassed by that fact and declined to acknowledge it publicly, and just seems to have drawn from that experience, his near loss, which quite possibly might have ended his career right there. He seems to have concluded from that that he needed to get in line with where the Republican Party was going under Reagan, that he needed to adapt himself to the regional realignment of the Republican Party as it was moving from a party that still had liberal, moderate members ... to a party that was far more Southern (Isquith 1).
…In 1984, when McConnell first ran for Senate, he learned the politics of destruction at the hands of a master. His challenge to Sen. Walter “Dee” Huddleston, a genial two-term Democrat, looked like a distant long shot. But McConnell, who’d been re-elected judge executive in 1981, used his position to build up a fat campaign war chest, and he devoted a good amount of it to hiring the most notorious political hit man in America: Roger Ailes.
The future founder and CEO of Fox News had already established his well-earned reputation for flaunting the truth and grabbing the opposition by the jugular while working for Nixon and Reagan. For McConnell, he cooked up an ad that would become a classic of the genre. Called “Hound Dog,” it featured a pack of bloodhounds trying to sniff out Huddleston, who was allegedly neglecting his Senate duties to make paid political speeches around the country. In fact, as Newsweek reported, Huddleston had made 94 percent of Senate votes. But the hound dogs caught Kentuckians’ imaginations and completely changed the race.
“[McConnell] was 40 points behind … but then they put up this ad and it made people laugh.” Most important, it was Huddleston they were snickering at.
McConnell squeaked into the Senate by the narrowest of victories — 5,000 votes statewide, a less-than-one-percent margin. He arrived in Washington as the only Republican to unseat a Democrat in the Senate that year. But he took no time to celebrate: He immediately set to work courting big donors for his re-election bid in 1990. “As I always say,” McConnell wrote in his book, “the three most important words in politics are ‘cash on hand.’ ”
McConnell cemented his reputation as a no-holds-barred campaigner in 1990, when he faced Democrat Harvey Sloane, a two-term Louisville mayor and Yale-educated doctor.
McConnell rolled out a tactic he’d use again and again in future campaigns — making his opponent look like more of an outsider than the incumbent from Washington. McConnell had promised reporters he’d be running a purely positive campaign, but he broke that pledge with alacrity. At Fancy Farm in 1989, he lit into Sloane as the “wimp from the East” whose “mommy left him a million dollars” and who had “come down here to save us from ourselves.” (When reporters asked McConnell afterward why he’d already gone negative, he replied, “I just couldn’t help myself.”) Running with generous backing from the NRA, McConnell also painted Sloane as a gun-grabber. McConnell’s campaign sent endless mailers and ran streams of ads turning Sloane’s support for an assault-weapons ban into further evidence that he was an uppity liberal. McConnell, among his many pernicious contributions to American politics, became one of the first to successfully turn the Second Amendment into a cultural wedge issue. (Two decades later, when public outcry for gun-control measures swelled after 20 first-graders and six teachers were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, McConnell engineered a filibuster that prevented the Senate from even voting on a background-check requirement.)
With the election fast approaching, and McConnell’s lead too narrow for comfort, it was time for the coup de grâce. The senator’s campaign leaked to the press that Sloane, who hadn’t been practicing medicine for a few years, had renewed a prescription for his sleeping pills using his expired Drug Enforcement Administration credentials.
Before long, Kentuckians’ airwaves were filled with ads featuring ominous images of vials and pills, with a deep-voiced narrator decrying Sloane’s habit of prescribing himself “mood-altering” “powerful depressants” at “double the safe dose without a legal permit” (Moser 16-17).
Sloane, an Ivy League-educated doctor whom McConnell mocked as “a wimp from the East,” had gone to Kentucky through a federal program that provides medical services to the rural poor, and went on to become Louisville’s mayor. During the Senate campaign, Sloane, who had postponed a hip replacement until after the election, renewed a prescription for sleeping pills although his license had expired. It was a real lapse in judgment, but he didn’t have a drug problem. Sloane said of McConnell’s attack, “It was craven. He’s just a conniving guy. He’s the Machiavelli of the twenty-first century.” McConnell himself has summarized his approach to campaigns simply: “If they throw a stone at you, you drop a boulder on them” (Mayer 15).
After throwing the kitchen sink at Sloane — whose political career never recovered — McConnell won narrowly, with just 52 percent of the vote. But with the GOP on the rise in Kentucky, and McConnell pulling the strings, he would never again come close to losing. Even so, he would always relish pummeling anyone who dared challenge him. As longtime Democratic operative Jim Cauley put it, “They take good people and make them bad.”
McConnell had become secure enough in Kentucky, and flush enough with big corporate donors, that he could focus more fully on his larger goal of elevating himself over his Republican colleagues in Washington. He would pursue Senate leadership the same way he’d approached winning elections from the start. He’d do whatever it took.
As a senator from a small state, graced with none of the backslapping bonhomie that traditionally led senators up the ladder to power, McConnell had to cast around for a way to rise. When he found it, it meant disavowing one of the few principles he still clung to.
Just as he’d originally run as a pro-choice, pro-labor, pro-civil-rights Republican, McConnell had a long history of calling for removing big money from politics. In 1973, not long after he was elected chairman of the Jefferson County Republican Party, he’d written an op-ed for the Courier-Journal calling for “truly effective campaign finance reform” — lowering contribution limits, mandating public disclosure of donors, even capping how much a candidate could spend in a race. He’d later laugh this off, claiming he’d been “playing for headlines” to distract folks from the Watergate scandal. But in 1987, midway through his first term, McConnell floated a constitutional amendment to end what he called the “millionaire’s loophole” — the ability for wealthy Americans to spend limitless money on their own campaigns.
The proposal went nowhere, and in his second term, McConnell made a 180-degree turn and set himself down a path to becoming the most outspoken and influential opponent of campaign-finance restrictions in American history. At the same time, he began to master the art of tactical obstructionism. Democratic Sens. David Boren and George Mitchell had proposed a bill that included both spending limits and public financing for campaigns. While some Republicans were hesitant to speak out against a measure designed to tamp down on corruption, McConnell took the lead, blocking the bill by reviving the use of the filibuster, which still carried unsavory associations with segregationist efforts to block civil-rights measures in the Sixties.
“Filibustering is sometimes presented as an obstructionist tactic by its opponents,” McConnell would later say, “but in my view, if legislation as awful as this bill is brought up for consideration, there is a duty to obstruct its passage.”
By 1997, McConnell’s reputation for relentless fundraising — “It’s a joy to him,” marveled Sen. Alan Simpson — had won him his first leadership post, as chairman of the Republican National Senatorial Committee. That same year, when a bill was floated to ban “soft money” — contributions to political parties that could be funneled into particular campaigns, allowing donors to exceed legal limits on donations — McConnell steeled the nerves of his fellow Republicans in opposing it: “If we stop this thing,” he reportedly told his colleagues, “we can control this institution for the next 20 years.” The fact that McConnell had himself proposed a soft-money ban four years earlier mattered not at all.
Two years later, McConnell clinched his reputation by fighting tooth-and-nail against fellow Republican John McCain’s effort to rein in campaign money with the McCain-Feingold Act. As the Senate debated the measure in October 1999, McConnell confronted McCain on the floor, demanding that he name senators he considered to be corrupted by donors’ money. “For there to be corruption,” McConnell said, “someone must be corrupt. I just ask my friend from Arizona what he has in mind here?”
When McCain refused to say which senators he had in mind, McConnell kept needling him. Finally McCain shot back: “A certain senator stood up and said it was OK for you not to vote for the tobacco bill because the tobacco companies will run ads in our favor.” That “certain senator,” as everyone knew, was McConnell.
Some senators might have been embarrassed. But the same sorts of scorched-earth tactics McConnell had used to win elections back home were now turning him into a national conservative antihero. McCain and the others could talk loftily about saving democracy; McConnell invited and embraced their scorn, knowing he was also winning the silent gratitude of many of his fellow senators. In a sense, he made himself a human shield for other Republicans opposed to reform. But he also got a kick out of being vilified. When U.S. News & World Report ran a headline calling McConnell the “Darth Vader” of campaign finance reform, he had it framed and hung in his office.
Lord Vader wasn’t finished. When McCain-Feingold became law, McConnell immediately lent his name to a lawsuit to block the law’s enforcement. In 2003, his suit lost on appeal in a narrow 5-4 decision in the Supreme Court. Undaunted, he then co-founded the James Madison Center for Free Speech in D.C., with arch-conservative lawyer James Bopp, who would bring the Citizens United case that, come 2010, would not only strike down McCain-Feingold but also legalize unlimited corporate contributions. By then, McConnell had been elected Republican leader — and was busy laying minefields in the legislative path of President Obama and the Democratic Congress (Moser 18-20).
In 1990, Ailes helped McConnell paint his Democratic challenger, Harvey Sloane, as a dangerous drug addict. Television ads showed images of pill containers as a narrator warned of Sloane’s reliance on “powerful,” “mood-altering” “depressants” that had been prescribed “without a legal permit.”
…
Most politicians find fund-raising odious, but Alan Simpson, the former Republican senator from Wyoming, who served a dozen years with McConnell, told [biographer] MacGillis that fund-raising was “a joy to him,” adding, “He gets a twinkle in his eye and his step quickens. I mean, he loves it.” McConnell’s donors have found themselves rewarded. ...
…
… In 2000, Jack Spadaro, an engineer for the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, began conducting an investigation in Martin County, Kentucky, after a slurry pond owned by Massey Energy burst open, releasing three hundred million gallons of lavalike coal waste that killed more than a million fish and contaminated the water systems of nearly thirty thousand people. Spadaro and his team were working on a report that documented eight apparent violations of the law, which could have led to charges of criminal negligence and cost Massey hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. But, that November, George W. Bush was elected President, and he soon named [Elaine] Chao [McConnell’s future wife] his Labor Secretary, giving her authority over the Mine Safety and Health Administration. She chose McConnell’s former chief of staff, Steven Law, as her chief of staff. Spadaro told me, “Law had his finger in everything, and was truly running the Labor Department. He was Mitch’s guy.” The day Bush was sworn in, Spadaro was ordered to halt his investigation. Before the Labor Department issued any fines, Massey made a hundred-thousand-dollar donation to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. McConnell himself had run the unit, which raises funds for Senate campaigns, between 1997 and 2000.
Massey ended up paying only fifty-six hundred dollars in federal fines.
…
… He [Spadaro] noted, “Massey gave a lot of money to McConnell over the years. McConnell’s very bright. He took the money and, in return, protected the coal industry. He’s truly the most corrupt politician in the U.S.” Records show that, between 1990 and 2010, McConnell was the recipient of the second-largest amount of federal campaign donations from people and pacs associated with Massey. And when McConnell ran the National Republican Senatorial Committee it took in five hundred and eighty-four thousand dollars from the coal industry.
…
As a backbench senator, McConnell used his fund-raising talents to rise in the Party’s leadership—a path laid out by Lyndon Johnson. Robert A. Caro, the author of a magisterial four-volume biography of Johnson, told me that, “in a stroke of genius,” Johnson, as a Democratic junior congressman, “realizes he has no power, but he has something no other congressman has—the oilmen and big contractors in Texas who need favors in Washington.” By establishing control over the distribution of the donors’ money, Johnson acquired immense power over his peers. …
According to Keith Runyon [editor for The Courier-Journal], McConnell was focused on his political survival from the moment he arrived in Washington. He recalls that, the morning after McConnell was first sworn in to the Senate, McConnell told him that he would be moving to the right from then on, to keep getting re-ëlected. McConnell has denied saying so, but Runyon told me, “He is a flat-out liar.” Another acquaintance who has known McConnell for years said that, “to the extent that he’s conversational, he wore his ambition to become Majority Leader on his sleeve.”
McConnell envied better-known colleagues who were chased down the corridors by news reporters. He wanted to be like them, he later told Carl Hulse, a Times correspondent, who interviewed McConnell for his book “Confirmation Bias,” about fights over Supreme Court nominees. The way McConnell ended up making his name was decidedly unglamorous: blocking campaign-finance reform. Even he derided the subject as rivaling “static cling as an issue most Americans care about.” Dull as campaign financing was, it was vitally important to his peers, and to democracy. Few members wanted to risk appearing corrupt, and so they were grateful to McConnell for fighting one reform after the next—while claiming that it was purely about defending the First Amendment. According to MacGillis, behind closed doors McConnell admitted to his Senate colleagues that undoing the reforms was “in the best interest of Republicans.”
Armed with funding from such billionaire conservatives as the DeVos family, McConnell helped take the quest to kill restraints on spending all the way to the Supreme Court. In 2010, his side won: the Citizens United decision opened the way for corporations, big donors, and secretive nonprofits to pour unlimited and often untraceable cash into elections.
“McConnell loves money, and abhors any controls on it,” Fred Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21, a group that supports campaign-finance reform, said. “Money is the central theme of his career. And, if you want to control Congress, the best way is to control the money.”
Between 1984, when McConnell was first elected to the Senate, and today, the amount of money spent on federal campaigns has increased at least sixfold, excluding outside spending, more and more of which comes from very rich donors. Influence-peddling has grown from a grubby, shameful business into a multi billion-dollar, high-paying industry. McConnell has led the way in empowering those private interests, and in aligning the Republican Party with them. His staff embodied “the revolving door,” as they went from working for one of America’s poorest states to lobbying for America’s richest corporations, while growing rich themselves and helping fund McConnell’s campaigns. Money from the coal industry, tobacco companies, Big Pharma, Wall Street, the Chamber of Commerce, and many other interests flowed into Republican coffers while McConnell blocked federal actions that those interests opposed: climate-change legislation, affordable health care, gun control, and efforts to curb economic inequality.
McConnell, like L.B.J., used fund-raising to help allies and punish enemies. “What he’s done behind the scenes is apply the thing that speaks louder in Washington, D.C., than anything else—money,” [Rick] Wilson, the former Republican consultant, said. “Suddenly, Susan Collins gets a bridge in Maine. Lisa Murkowski suddenly gets a harbor. Oh, what a coincidence!” McConnell has a brilliant grasp of his caucus members’ needs, and he helps them protect their seats with tens of millions of dollars in campaign donations and federal grants … (Mayer 15-20).
Works cited:
Isquith, Elias. "You Think We’re This Dumb?": Inside the Sick, Cynical Mind of Mitch McConnell.” Salon, October 1, 2014. Net. https://www.salon.com/2014/10/01/you_...
Mayer, Jane. “How Mitch McConnell Became Trump’s Enabler-in-Chief.” The New Yorker, April 20, 2020. Net. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
Moser, Bob. “Mitch McConnell: The Man Who Sold America.” Rolling Stone, September 17, 2019. Net. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics...
March 6, 2022
The Amooralists -- Mitch McConnell, Part One -- About Power
[Addison Mitchell McConnell III] was born on February 20, 1942, to Julia Odene "Dean" (Shockley; 1919–1993) and Addison Mitchell "A.M." McConnell II (1917–1990). McConnell was born in Sheffield, Alabama, and grew up in nearby Athens, Alabama, where his grandfather, Robert Hayes McConnell Sr. and his great uncle Addison Mitchell McConnell, owned McConnell Funeral Home. He is of Scots-Irish and English descent. One of his ancestors fought on the American side in the American Revolutionary War.
In 1944, at the age of two, McConnell's upper left leg was paralyzed by a polio attack. He received treatment at the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation. The treatment potentially saved him from being disabled for the rest of his life. McConnell said his family "almost went broke" because of costs related to his illness.
In 1950, when he was eight, McConnell [and his family] moved … from Athens to Augusta, Georgia, where his father, who was in the Army, was stationed at Fort Gordon.
In 1956, his family moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where he attended duPont Manual High School (Wikipedia 2).
… As a junior at Louisville’s Manual High School, McConnell decided to run for student-body president. The hitch, as he confessed to his mother earlier in high school, was that “I don’t have even one friend.” As he recounted in his 2016 memoir, The Long Game, McConnell set out to make his lack of popularity irrelevant — by manipulating those who had it.
“Just like Kentucky candidates today seek the endorsement of the Louisville Courier-Journal,” he wrote, “I began to seek the endorsement of the popular kids, like Janet Boyd, a well-known cheerleader; Bobby Marr, the best high school pitcher in the state; and Pete Dudgeon, an All-City Football player. I was prepared to ask for their vote using the only tool in my arsenal, the one thing teenagers most desire. Flattery” (Moser 5).
[He crammed into the lockers of underclassmen and unpopular students endorsements he had received from popular classmates]
… McConnell tried and failed a couple of times in his early [election] races. But he finally became the vice president of the student council. … (Stein 2).
… “having had my first taste of the responsibility and respect that came with holding elected office,” he wrote, “I was hooked” (Mosar 5).”
He graduated Omicron Delta Kappa from the University of Louisville with a B.A. in political science in 1964 with honors. He was president of the Student Council of the College of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity (Wikipedia 3).
McConnell recognized his future in politics by high school and narrowed his ambitions to the upper chamber by the time he graduated from college; on his law-school applications, according to his authorized biographer, John David Dyche, one of his professors wrote that McConnell ‘‘will be a U.S. Senator.” “I was running for the Senate in ’84 from the moment I was sworn in as county judge on Jan. 1, 1978,” McConnell once said — and he has never aspired to anything outside it. “I think most senators look in the mirror and think they hear ‘Hail to the Chief’ in the background,” Terry Carmack, who has worked for McConnell on and off since his first Senate campaign, told me. “But he always wanted to be in the Senate.” And from early in his Senate career, McConnell later wrote, “I wanted to one day hold a leadership position in my party, helping to call the plays and not just run them” (Homans 6).
[While attending law school] McConnell attended the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave the "I Have a Dream" speech. In 1964, at the age of 22, he attended civil rights rallies, and interned with Senator John Sherman Cooper. He has said his time with Cooper inspired him to run for the Senate later in life (Wikipedia 3).
Mr. McConnell’s interest in race issues was inspired by his upbringing in Kentucky by parents who opposed segregation. It was fermented on the campus of the University of Louisville, where he encouraged students to march with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It was reinforced by his internship in the office of Senator John Sherman Cooper, a Kentucky Republican who helped break the Southern-led filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
…
“I was born in North Alabama, and when I was a little kid, I remember segregated movie theaters, segregated drinking fountains, segregated schools,” he said. “We had a day off for Robert E. Lee’s birthday, along with Lincoln’s. The Civil War was omnipresent.”
During college, he served as an intern in Washington and attended Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 — “You could see a massive throng of humanity down to the memorial” — and wrote a college editorial excoriating opponents of civil rights. He worked … [for Senator] Cooper, opening mail, much of which was from constituents unhappy with the senator’s support for the Civil Rights Act.
Mr. McConnell, 73, recalled, as he often does, asking Mr. Cooper how he could handle the overwhelming pressure. His boss told him, “There are times when you are supposed to lead, and other times to reflect the views of your state, and I think it is time to lead,” he said. “That was pretty inspirational to a young guy just going to law school.”
These experiences combined to have a profound and lasting impact, Mr. McConnell and others said. “Mitch doesn’t reveal a lot,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee and a contemporary of Mr. McConnell. “But we have had discussions about our parallel experiences. You couldn’t be a student in the late ’50s and ’60s without racial injustice staring you in the face.”
Mr. McConnell spoke recently at the John Sherman Cooper Lecture Series, held at Somerset Community College in Kentucky. “He was my hero,” Mr. McConnell said of Mr. Cooper, who died in 1991. “In all my years of public life, there’s been no one from whom I’ve learned more” (Steinhauer 2).
McConnell was a 25-year-old University of Kentucky law student with political aspirations in spring 1967, during the Vietnam War. As his graduation neared, making him eligible for the draft, McConnell secured a coveted post in the U.S. Army Reserve, which President Lyndon Johnson kept out of combat for most of his administration. McConnell enlisted March 21, 1967, and then returned to UK to finish law school. Private McConnell spent little time in uniform. He won a discharge from the Reserve after five weeks of active duty. He trained at Fort Knox from July 9 to Aug. 15, 1967.
McConnell's discharge came five days after U.S. Sen. John Sherman Cooper, R-Ky., for whom he had worked as an intern, sent a letter to the two-star general in command of Fort Knox.
Cooper told Maj. Gen. A.D. Surles that McConnell expected to be released on a medical discharge because of optic neuritis, a painful eye condition that is treated by steroids. The man's papers seemed to be stalled somewhere on base and needed to be forwarded, Cooper wrote. "Mitchell anxious to clear post in order to enroll NYU," the senator told the general on Aug. 10, 1967. "Please advise when final action can be expected." Actually, McConnell never attended New York University. After his discharge, he did a short stint at a local law firm, and then returned to Washington to join the office of Sen. Marlow Cook, R-Ky., where he worked for the next few years. In a 2006 interview with the Herald-Leader, McConnell denied that anyone pulled strings for him in 1967. "No one helped me get into the Reserve, no one helped me get out of the Reserve," McConnell said. McConnell said he was entitled to a medical discharge for his eye problems. His father asked the senator — a family friend — to expedite the discharge, but he eventually would have been granted an early release anyway, McConnell said (Cheves 1).
From 1968 to 1970, McConnell worked as chief legislative assistant to Senator Marlow Cook in Washington, D.C., managing a legislative department consisting of five members as well as assisting with speech writing and constituent services.
In 1971, McConnell returned to Louisville, where he worked for Tom Emberton's candidacy for Governor of Kentucky, which was unsuccessful. McConnell attempted to run for a seat in the state legislature but was disqualified because he did not meet the residency requirements for the office. He then went to work for a Louisville law firm, Segal, Isenberg, Sales and Stewart, for a few years. During the same time period, he taught a night class on political science at the University of Louisville.
In October 1974, McConnell returned to Washington to fill a position as Deputy Assistant Attorney General under President Gerald Ford, where he worked alongside Robert Bork, Laurence Silberman, and Antonin Scalia.
In 1977, McConnell was elected the Jefferson County judge/executive, the top political office in Jefferson County, Kentucky, at the time, defeating incumbent Democrat Todd Hollenbach, III, 53% to 47%. He was re-elected in 1981 against Jefferson County Commissioner Jim "Pop" Malone, 51% to 47%, outspending Malone 3–1, and occupied this office until his election to the U.S. Senate in 1984 (Wikipedia 4).
“Even as you saw him as a moderate/liberal Republican earlier on [biographer Alec MacGillis recalled], you saw these glimmers of expediency earlier — you can still see that the overriding desire was to win, and to an extent that's unusually strong even compared to other politicians.
“In a way, you could say it even goes back to his high school campaigning years. He was one of those kids always running for office — high school, college — just always running for student government. Doing whatever he had to do to win those races and just taking it all way too seriously.
…
“… at the University of Louisville, he lost a lot. He lost his races in succession for freshman class president, president of the student senate, and president of the student council. He lost all three and took them pretty hard and decided it was so painful he'd never lose ever again. Finally, junior year he wins presidency of the student council.
“He's just running all the time. And when he gets to doing his first real elections — running for county government in Louisville — the expediency comes in two ways. One, he's just incredibly malleable. That's the thing his political consultants marveled at when I talked to them. In ’76, they were amazed by how he was so physically unskilled — totally lacking of natural charisma and natural political skills — but also very aware of that fact and so utterly willing to let them tell him what to do.
“Shooting ads with him was relatively easy. Because as unskilled and hapless as he was, he completely submitted to their instructions far more than most candidates were willing to do.
“As he was leaving his previous job with the Department of Justice in the Ford administration in Washington, he saw that the school busing fight was starting to brew back in Louisville. There had been a big busing fight there in the mid-’70s, and McConnell fires off his resignation to Ford saying, ‘Thanks for having me; I'm going home to Louisville.’ He then threw in a gratuitous paragraph saying, ‘Hey, please, take more notice of how concerned people are about school busing and appoint Supreme Court justices who will be more skeptical of the school busing and integration push.’ It was so clear he was doing this to leave a paper trail he could point to when he was running for office later.
…
“It was an especially crippling drawback for him given that he was running in the upper South, which has a long tradition of charismatic, wisecracking, folksy politicians. That's even more expected there than it is elsewhere in the country, and he completely lacked that ability. As one of his Kentucky pals said to me, ‘He doesn't have the personality to wash a shotgun with.’
“He was very aware of this fact and compensated for it mainly by raising tons of money. His great epiphany early on was that he could overcome this deficiency by raising gobs and gobs of money, and then using that money to [run] ads that would simply tear down the opponent.
“That became his message, over and over. His own popularity was always middling; people were always ambivalent about him because of his lack of natural charm and constituency; he'd just tear down the other guy, so he'd be left standing as the fallback alternative. In his first run for Senate, he worked with Roger Ailes, who came up with this legendary and notorious ad going after the Democrat with the hound dogs for the [Senator’s] missed votes.
“So a lot of it was the money. But the other part was being incredibly willing to stake out positions to help you win that one election — and then abandoning them to a degree most politicians would find shameless.
“In ’76, running for his first job as county executive, he came out in favor of collective bargaining for public employee unions and won the endorsement of the AFL-CIO in Louisville, and Kentucky was a strong union state. He also won the endorsement of the Courier-Journal, a very influential newspaper. He did that by taking a bunch of center-left positions, including campaign finance reform.
“In the years since, he's admitted — openly! — that he took both of those positions for political expediency. That they were completely expedient and taken at the time to gain the support of these influential constituencies in Louisville” (Stein 3-5).
For all the damage he’s inflicted on American democracy, for all the political corpses he’s left in his wake, Mitch McConnell has never betrayed an ounce of shame. To the contrary, like the president he now so faithfully serves, McConnell has always exuded a sense of pride in the lengths to which he’s gone to achieve his ambitions and infuriate his enemies. Unlike Trump, however, McConnell, 77, has always been laser-focused on politics. At age 22, when he interned for Sen. John Sherman Cooper, a genteel Republican of an era long gone, McConnell determined to not only follow his mentor’s path but to surpass him and become Senate majority leader. “It dawned on me early — let’s put it that way,” he told Jonathan Martin of The New York Times. Most senators dream of the White House; all McConnell ever wanted was that gavel, that particular form of power.
…
As an undergraduate at the University of Louisville, and a law student at the University of Kentucky, McConnell would further hone his skills in winning student-body presidencies. In the 1960s, he worked as an intern to Kentucky Rep. Gene Snyder, a hardcore segregationist. But McConnell’s brand of Republicanism — he’d chosen the party because his father fought under Dwight Eisenhower in World War II — was more moderate. Young Mitch was gung-ho for civil rights. In 1963, while an undergraduate, McConnell spoke at a university rally, urging students to join Martin Luther King Jr. in marching to the state capitol. That same year, he wrote an op-ed urging Republicans to eschew the “constitutional” arguments that Barry Goldwater and other conservatives cited as reasons to oppose the Civil Rights Act. “One must view the Constitution as a document adaptable to conditions of contemporary society,” McConnell wrote. Any “strict interpretation” of the founding document was “inherently evil” if it meant that “basic rights are denied to any group.”
In his first bid for office, in 1977, McConnell challenged the Democratic incumbent for Jefferson County judge executive — basically, the official in charge of Greater Louisville’s government. He courted women’s groups by supporting abortion rights, and promised unions that he’d press for collective-bargaining rights for public workers. But for the first time, he also showed how willing he would be to cast aside principles. “Forced busing” had recently been imposed by the courts to desegregate Louisville’s public schools, and McConnell ran in opposition to it; the former civil-rights champion was now pandering to white voters’ anxieties and resentments.
In that first race, he also gave a glimpse of the kinds of campaign tactics he’d use for the next 40 years. McConnell was never much good when it came to mixing with folks on the campaign trail, but he had no compunction about asking big donors for money. They were the popular kids he’d now be using for his own ends. Raising $355,000 for the race, well beyond any amount ever spent in Jefferson County, he hired a top ad maker and pollster. With their help, McConnell zeroed in on the vulnerabilities of his opponent, Todd Hollenbach. He blew up some minor ethical lapses into darkly ominous controversies. And because Hollenbach was going through a divorce, McConnell’s ads were full of smiling family images of the Republican newcomer, his wife, and his daughters. (McConnell’s first wife, who went on to become a noted feminist scholar, divorced him in 1980.) Decades later, Hollenbach was still fuming about McConnell’s tactics, bitterly telling The New York Times Magazine, “He’s whatever he needs to be for the occasion.”
But it worked. McConnell won by six percentage points, and then proceeded to forget about his pro-labor promises once in office. “He burned them and never looked back,” says Mike Broihier, a former newspaper editor who’s running a grassroots Democratic campaign to challenge McConnell in 2020. “That’s the guy.”
It was already becoming clear that, in the political world of Mitch McConnell, convictions and campaign pledges were fungible things, easily tossed aside. Throughout his career, as the Republican Party veered right, and then further right, McConnell moved with it. “It’s always been about power, the political game, and it’s never been about the core values that drive political life,” John Yarmuth, Kentucky’s lone Democratic congressman, told Alec MacGillis, author of the 2014 McConnell biography The Cynic. “There has never been anything that interested him other than winning elections” (Moser 5-10).
Works cited:
Cheves, John. “McConnell Opens Military Record.” Lexington Herald Leader, October 23, 2008. Net. https://www.kentucky.com/latest-news/...
Homans, Charles. “Mitch McConnell Got Everything He Wanted. But at What Cost?” New York Times, January 22, 2019. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/ma...
“Mitch McConnell.” Wikipedia. Net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_M...
Moser, Bob. “Mitch McConnell: The Man Who Sold America.” Rolling Stone, September 17, 2019. Net. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics...
Stein, Jeff. “Mitch McConnell’s Entire Career Has Been about Gaining Power. What Happens Now That He Has It?” Vox, January 2, 2017. Net. https://www.vox.com/2017/1/2/14123496...
Steinhauer, Jennifer. “Mitch McConnell’s Commitment to Civil Rights Sets Him Apart.” New York Times, July 10, 2015. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/us...
In 1944, at the age of two, McConnell's upper left leg was paralyzed by a polio attack. He received treatment at the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation. The treatment potentially saved him from being disabled for the rest of his life. McConnell said his family "almost went broke" because of costs related to his illness.
In 1950, when he was eight, McConnell [and his family] moved … from Athens to Augusta, Georgia, where his father, who was in the Army, was stationed at Fort Gordon.
In 1956, his family moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where he attended duPont Manual High School (Wikipedia 2).
… As a junior at Louisville’s Manual High School, McConnell decided to run for student-body president. The hitch, as he confessed to his mother earlier in high school, was that “I don’t have even one friend.” As he recounted in his 2016 memoir, The Long Game, McConnell set out to make his lack of popularity irrelevant — by manipulating those who had it.
“Just like Kentucky candidates today seek the endorsement of the Louisville Courier-Journal,” he wrote, “I began to seek the endorsement of the popular kids, like Janet Boyd, a well-known cheerleader; Bobby Marr, the best high school pitcher in the state; and Pete Dudgeon, an All-City Football player. I was prepared to ask for their vote using the only tool in my arsenal, the one thing teenagers most desire. Flattery” (Moser 5).
[He crammed into the lockers of underclassmen and unpopular students endorsements he had received from popular classmates]
… McConnell tried and failed a couple of times in his early [election] races. But he finally became the vice president of the student council. … (Stein 2).
… “having had my first taste of the responsibility and respect that came with holding elected office,” he wrote, “I was hooked” (Mosar 5).”
He graduated Omicron Delta Kappa from the University of Louisville with a B.A. in political science in 1964 with honors. He was president of the Student Council of the College of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity (Wikipedia 3).
McConnell recognized his future in politics by high school and narrowed his ambitions to the upper chamber by the time he graduated from college; on his law-school applications, according to his authorized biographer, John David Dyche, one of his professors wrote that McConnell ‘‘will be a U.S. Senator.” “I was running for the Senate in ’84 from the moment I was sworn in as county judge on Jan. 1, 1978,” McConnell once said — and he has never aspired to anything outside it. “I think most senators look in the mirror and think they hear ‘Hail to the Chief’ in the background,” Terry Carmack, who has worked for McConnell on and off since his first Senate campaign, told me. “But he always wanted to be in the Senate.” And from early in his Senate career, McConnell later wrote, “I wanted to one day hold a leadership position in my party, helping to call the plays and not just run them” (Homans 6).
[While attending law school] McConnell attended the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave the "I Have a Dream" speech. In 1964, at the age of 22, he attended civil rights rallies, and interned with Senator John Sherman Cooper. He has said his time with Cooper inspired him to run for the Senate later in life (Wikipedia 3).
Mr. McConnell’s interest in race issues was inspired by his upbringing in Kentucky by parents who opposed segregation. It was fermented on the campus of the University of Louisville, where he encouraged students to march with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It was reinforced by his internship in the office of Senator John Sherman Cooper, a Kentucky Republican who helped break the Southern-led filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
…
“I was born in North Alabama, and when I was a little kid, I remember segregated movie theaters, segregated drinking fountains, segregated schools,” he said. “We had a day off for Robert E. Lee’s birthday, along with Lincoln’s. The Civil War was omnipresent.”
During college, he served as an intern in Washington and attended Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 — “You could see a massive throng of humanity down to the memorial” — and wrote a college editorial excoriating opponents of civil rights. He worked … [for Senator] Cooper, opening mail, much of which was from constituents unhappy with the senator’s support for the Civil Rights Act.
Mr. McConnell, 73, recalled, as he often does, asking Mr. Cooper how he could handle the overwhelming pressure. His boss told him, “There are times when you are supposed to lead, and other times to reflect the views of your state, and I think it is time to lead,” he said. “That was pretty inspirational to a young guy just going to law school.”
These experiences combined to have a profound and lasting impact, Mr. McConnell and others said. “Mitch doesn’t reveal a lot,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee and a contemporary of Mr. McConnell. “But we have had discussions about our parallel experiences. You couldn’t be a student in the late ’50s and ’60s without racial injustice staring you in the face.”
Mr. McConnell spoke recently at the John Sherman Cooper Lecture Series, held at Somerset Community College in Kentucky. “He was my hero,” Mr. McConnell said of Mr. Cooper, who died in 1991. “In all my years of public life, there’s been no one from whom I’ve learned more” (Steinhauer 2).
McConnell was a 25-year-old University of Kentucky law student with political aspirations in spring 1967, during the Vietnam War. As his graduation neared, making him eligible for the draft, McConnell secured a coveted post in the U.S. Army Reserve, which President Lyndon Johnson kept out of combat for most of his administration. McConnell enlisted March 21, 1967, and then returned to UK to finish law school. Private McConnell spent little time in uniform. He won a discharge from the Reserve after five weeks of active duty. He trained at Fort Knox from July 9 to Aug. 15, 1967.
McConnell's discharge came five days after U.S. Sen. John Sherman Cooper, R-Ky., for whom he had worked as an intern, sent a letter to the two-star general in command of Fort Knox.
Cooper told Maj. Gen. A.D. Surles that McConnell expected to be released on a medical discharge because of optic neuritis, a painful eye condition that is treated by steroids. The man's papers seemed to be stalled somewhere on base and needed to be forwarded, Cooper wrote. "Mitchell anxious to clear post in order to enroll NYU," the senator told the general on Aug. 10, 1967. "Please advise when final action can be expected." Actually, McConnell never attended New York University. After his discharge, he did a short stint at a local law firm, and then returned to Washington to join the office of Sen. Marlow Cook, R-Ky., where he worked for the next few years. In a 2006 interview with the Herald-Leader, McConnell denied that anyone pulled strings for him in 1967. "No one helped me get into the Reserve, no one helped me get out of the Reserve," McConnell said. McConnell said he was entitled to a medical discharge for his eye problems. His father asked the senator — a family friend — to expedite the discharge, but he eventually would have been granted an early release anyway, McConnell said (Cheves 1).
From 1968 to 1970, McConnell worked as chief legislative assistant to Senator Marlow Cook in Washington, D.C., managing a legislative department consisting of five members as well as assisting with speech writing and constituent services.
In 1971, McConnell returned to Louisville, where he worked for Tom Emberton's candidacy for Governor of Kentucky, which was unsuccessful. McConnell attempted to run for a seat in the state legislature but was disqualified because he did not meet the residency requirements for the office. He then went to work for a Louisville law firm, Segal, Isenberg, Sales and Stewart, for a few years. During the same time period, he taught a night class on political science at the University of Louisville.
In October 1974, McConnell returned to Washington to fill a position as Deputy Assistant Attorney General under President Gerald Ford, where he worked alongside Robert Bork, Laurence Silberman, and Antonin Scalia.
In 1977, McConnell was elected the Jefferson County judge/executive, the top political office in Jefferson County, Kentucky, at the time, defeating incumbent Democrat Todd Hollenbach, III, 53% to 47%. He was re-elected in 1981 against Jefferson County Commissioner Jim "Pop" Malone, 51% to 47%, outspending Malone 3–1, and occupied this office until his election to the U.S. Senate in 1984 (Wikipedia 4).
“Even as you saw him as a moderate/liberal Republican earlier on [biographer Alec MacGillis recalled], you saw these glimmers of expediency earlier — you can still see that the overriding desire was to win, and to an extent that's unusually strong even compared to other politicians.
“In a way, you could say it even goes back to his high school campaigning years. He was one of those kids always running for office — high school, college — just always running for student government. Doing whatever he had to do to win those races and just taking it all way too seriously.
…
“… at the University of Louisville, he lost a lot. He lost his races in succession for freshman class president, president of the student senate, and president of the student council. He lost all three and took them pretty hard and decided it was so painful he'd never lose ever again. Finally, junior year he wins presidency of the student council.
“He's just running all the time. And when he gets to doing his first real elections — running for county government in Louisville — the expediency comes in two ways. One, he's just incredibly malleable. That's the thing his political consultants marveled at when I talked to them. In ’76, they were amazed by how he was so physically unskilled — totally lacking of natural charisma and natural political skills — but also very aware of that fact and so utterly willing to let them tell him what to do.
“Shooting ads with him was relatively easy. Because as unskilled and hapless as he was, he completely submitted to their instructions far more than most candidates were willing to do.
“As he was leaving his previous job with the Department of Justice in the Ford administration in Washington, he saw that the school busing fight was starting to brew back in Louisville. There had been a big busing fight there in the mid-’70s, and McConnell fires off his resignation to Ford saying, ‘Thanks for having me; I'm going home to Louisville.’ He then threw in a gratuitous paragraph saying, ‘Hey, please, take more notice of how concerned people are about school busing and appoint Supreme Court justices who will be more skeptical of the school busing and integration push.’ It was so clear he was doing this to leave a paper trail he could point to when he was running for office later.
…
“It was an especially crippling drawback for him given that he was running in the upper South, which has a long tradition of charismatic, wisecracking, folksy politicians. That's even more expected there than it is elsewhere in the country, and he completely lacked that ability. As one of his Kentucky pals said to me, ‘He doesn't have the personality to wash a shotgun with.’
“He was very aware of this fact and compensated for it mainly by raising tons of money. His great epiphany early on was that he could overcome this deficiency by raising gobs and gobs of money, and then using that money to [run] ads that would simply tear down the opponent.
“That became his message, over and over. His own popularity was always middling; people were always ambivalent about him because of his lack of natural charm and constituency; he'd just tear down the other guy, so he'd be left standing as the fallback alternative. In his first run for Senate, he worked with Roger Ailes, who came up with this legendary and notorious ad going after the Democrat with the hound dogs for the [Senator’s] missed votes.
“So a lot of it was the money. But the other part was being incredibly willing to stake out positions to help you win that one election — and then abandoning them to a degree most politicians would find shameless.
“In ’76, running for his first job as county executive, he came out in favor of collective bargaining for public employee unions and won the endorsement of the AFL-CIO in Louisville, and Kentucky was a strong union state. He also won the endorsement of the Courier-Journal, a very influential newspaper. He did that by taking a bunch of center-left positions, including campaign finance reform.
“In the years since, he's admitted — openly! — that he took both of those positions for political expediency. That they were completely expedient and taken at the time to gain the support of these influential constituencies in Louisville” (Stein 3-5).
For all the damage he’s inflicted on American democracy, for all the political corpses he’s left in his wake, Mitch McConnell has never betrayed an ounce of shame. To the contrary, like the president he now so faithfully serves, McConnell has always exuded a sense of pride in the lengths to which he’s gone to achieve his ambitions and infuriate his enemies. Unlike Trump, however, McConnell, 77, has always been laser-focused on politics. At age 22, when he interned for Sen. John Sherman Cooper, a genteel Republican of an era long gone, McConnell determined to not only follow his mentor’s path but to surpass him and become Senate majority leader. “It dawned on me early — let’s put it that way,” he told Jonathan Martin of The New York Times. Most senators dream of the White House; all McConnell ever wanted was that gavel, that particular form of power.
…
As an undergraduate at the University of Louisville, and a law student at the University of Kentucky, McConnell would further hone his skills in winning student-body presidencies. In the 1960s, he worked as an intern to Kentucky Rep. Gene Snyder, a hardcore segregationist. But McConnell’s brand of Republicanism — he’d chosen the party because his father fought under Dwight Eisenhower in World War II — was more moderate. Young Mitch was gung-ho for civil rights. In 1963, while an undergraduate, McConnell spoke at a university rally, urging students to join Martin Luther King Jr. in marching to the state capitol. That same year, he wrote an op-ed urging Republicans to eschew the “constitutional” arguments that Barry Goldwater and other conservatives cited as reasons to oppose the Civil Rights Act. “One must view the Constitution as a document adaptable to conditions of contemporary society,” McConnell wrote. Any “strict interpretation” of the founding document was “inherently evil” if it meant that “basic rights are denied to any group.”
In his first bid for office, in 1977, McConnell challenged the Democratic incumbent for Jefferson County judge executive — basically, the official in charge of Greater Louisville’s government. He courted women’s groups by supporting abortion rights, and promised unions that he’d press for collective-bargaining rights for public workers. But for the first time, he also showed how willing he would be to cast aside principles. “Forced busing” had recently been imposed by the courts to desegregate Louisville’s public schools, and McConnell ran in opposition to it; the former civil-rights champion was now pandering to white voters’ anxieties and resentments.
In that first race, he also gave a glimpse of the kinds of campaign tactics he’d use for the next 40 years. McConnell was never much good when it came to mixing with folks on the campaign trail, but he had no compunction about asking big donors for money. They were the popular kids he’d now be using for his own ends. Raising $355,000 for the race, well beyond any amount ever spent in Jefferson County, he hired a top ad maker and pollster. With their help, McConnell zeroed in on the vulnerabilities of his opponent, Todd Hollenbach. He blew up some minor ethical lapses into darkly ominous controversies. And because Hollenbach was going through a divorce, McConnell’s ads were full of smiling family images of the Republican newcomer, his wife, and his daughters. (McConnell’s first wife, who went on to become a noted feminist scholar, divorced him in 1980.) Decades later, Hollenbach was still fuming about McConnell’s tactics, bitterly telling The New York Times Magazine, “He’s whatever he needs to be for the occasion.”
But it worked. McConnell won by six percentage points, and then proceeded to forget about his pro-labor promises once in office. “He burned them and never looked back,” says Mike Broihier, a former newspaper editor who’s running a grassroots Democratic campaign to challenge McConnell in 2020. “That’s the guy.”
It was already becoming clear that, in the political world of Mitch McConnell, convictions and campaign pledges were fungible things, easily tossed aside. Throughout his career, as the Republican Party veered right, and then further right, McConnell moved with it. “It’s always been about power, the political game, and it’s never been about the core values that drive political life,” John Yarmuth, Kentucky’s lone Democratic congressman, told Alec MacGillis, author of the 2014 McConnell biography The Cynic. “There has never been anything that interested him other than winning elections” (Moser 5-10).
Works cited:
Cheves, John. “McConnell Opens Military Record.” Lexington Herald Leader, October 23, 2008. Net. https://www.kentucky.com/latest-news/...
Homans, Charles. “Mitch McConnell Got Everything He Wanted. But at What Cost?” New York Times, January 22, 2019. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/ma...
“Mitch McConnell.” Wikipedia. Net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_M...
Moser, Bob. “Mitch McConnell: The Man Who Sold America.” Rolling Stone, September 17, 2019. Net. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics...
Stein, Jeff. “Mitch McConnell’s Entire Career Has Been about Gaining Power. What Happens Now That He Has It?” Vox, January 2, 2017. Net. https://www.vox.com/2017/1/2/14123496...
Steinhauer, Jennifer. “Mitch McConnell’s Commitment to Civil Rights Sets Him Apart.” New York Times, July 10, 2015. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/us...
March 3, 2022
The Amoralists -- Tucker Carlson, Part Five -- More Barnsniffle
Fox News host Tucker Carlson is sparking controversy with new claims [August 2019] that white supremacy in America is a “hoax” and “not a real problem.”
Carlson used his TV show Tuesday night to praise President Donald Trump for his response to recent mass shootings, including in El Paso, Texas, where a man killed 22 people to stop a “Hispanic invasion.” He said it is “just a lie” to say Trump ever “endorsed white supremacy or came close to endorsing white supremacy," and further called concerns about white supremacists a “conspiracy theory.”
“If you were to assemble a list, a hierarchy of concerns, problems this country has, where would white supremacy be on the list? Right up there with Russia probably. It’s actually not a real problem in America," Carlson said. “It’s a hoax... Just like the Russia hoax, it’s a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power.”
Carlson added that he’s never met “one person who ascribes to white supremacy” and suggested Trump’s rivals “are making this up” to help in the 2020 election (Herbert 1).
[August 2021] “I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World,” Carlson said during a discussion of immigration on Fox News Primetime on Thursday.
“But they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening, actually!” he exclaimed. “Let’s just say it, that’s true!”
Carlson framed the topic not as a racial issue, but as a “voting rights question.”
“If you change the population you dilute the political power of the people who live there,” he went on. “So every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter.”
The term “replacement” has a dark history. A right-wing conspiracy theory known as the “replacement theory“ or “The Great Replacement” holds that birth rates among white people are too low, and that people of colour are gradually “replacing” their share of the world’s population. The idea is popular with white supremacist groups around the world, including in the United States.
…
Carlson denied that his remarks were racist.
“Everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it,” he said. “No, no, no. This is a voting rights question. I have less political power because they’re importing a brand new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that” (Antisemitic 1-2)?
Fox News host Tucker Carlson [May 2020] railed against continued statewide shutdowns meant to slow the spread of the coronavirus, claiming in a recent TV segment that they did little to flatten the curve and that "the virus just isn’t nearly as deadly as we thought it was."
Citing recent studies from hot spots such as New York, Carlson said the virus is "a full order of magnitude less deadly" than public health officials warned.
"The virus just isn’t nearly as deadly as we thought it was, all of us, including on this show," he said. "Everybody thought it was, but it turned out not to be" (McCarthy 1).
In a monologue on Thursday's edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the Fox News Host [April 2020] argued that COVID-19 posed a "miniscule" threat to people in rural states as he highlighted the dire state of unemployment across the country.
…
After listing off the number of COVID-19 infections and deaths in parts of rural America, along with unemployment figures, Carlson said: "So maybe the lesson of all this is not every place in America is the same. Not everywhere is New York or New Jersey. The threat to rural America from this virus is minuscule, so why are we punishing the people who live outside the cities?
…
"Unfortunately, as far as our leaders are concerned, these are the wrong people. They don't really count” (Walker 1-3).
In 2021, Carlson ran segments that misrepresented the safety of COVID-19 vaccines and asserted that U.S. officials were "lying" about them. He questioned why the CDC was advising vaccinated people to continue mask-wearing and distancing in April 2021, saying, "maybe [the vaccine] doesn't work, and they're simply not telling you that".
Fact checks called Carlson's argument misleading, because COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective in protecting against COVID-19 infections and severe symptoms, and universal masking helps prevent unvaccinated people from spreading the virus.
[Anthony] Fauci called Carlson's remarks a "crazy conspiracy theory." Later Carlson falsely called Fauci "the guy who created Covid". In another segment, Carlson misrepresented federal data to claim that in the previous five months around 30 people per day in the U.S. died after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine.
Carlson's argument was called misleading because the federal database he cited, VAERS, consists of unverified public reports, some of which have been false; post-vaccine deaths can be from unrelated causes; and the CDC had found no connection between COVID-19 vaccinations and deaths based on VAERS. In July 2021, Carlson said plans by the government to provide door-to-door vaccinations were "the greatest scandal in my lifetime, by far" and falsely described them as an attempt to "force people to take medicine they don't want or need". He also likened vaccine passports to segregationist Jim Crow laws. He claimed that a vaccine mandate in the U.S. Armed Forces designed to oust "the sincere Christians in the ranks, the free thinkers, the men with high testosterone levels, and anyone else who doesn't love Joe Biden". On a day when two Fox News hosts, Steve Doocy and Sean Hannity, urged viewers to get vaccinated to protect against the surging Delta variant of the coronavirus,
Carlson said, "There are a lot of people giving you medical advice on television and you should ignore them." Carlson refused to say whether he has been vaccinated, responding to a reporter, "When was the last time you had sex with your wife and in what position? We can trade intimate details." More than 90% of Fox Corporation's full-time employees had been fully vaccinated by September 2021 (Wikipedia 5).
[November 2021] Hannity, Carlson, and Ingraham do their own version of the Fox News two-step: They don’t come out and say outright that Trump is a victim of massive voter fraud that cost him the election while simultaneously defeating Democratic House and Senate candidates. But they argue that it’s plausible. They feed the fire with oxygen.
Fox isn’t the only one playing this game. Much of the Republican Party, from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on down, engages in a similar version: either flat-out suggesting that Trump’s claims are legitimate or at least arguing that he should be able to make those claims and then see what happens (Kafka 2).
[June 2021] Taking his Jan. 6 denialism to another level on Tuesday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson suggested the Capitol insurrection was a false flag orchestrated by the FBI in an effort to “suppress political dissent.”
Almost since the moment that former President Donald Trump incited thousands of MAGA supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol in order to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s election victory, Carlson has downplayed the violent riots, repeatedly insisting there was “no insurrection” and that it was nothing more than a “political protest that got out of hand.”
At the same time, the far-right Fox News star has rallied to the defense of the Capitol rioters, portraying them as largely peaceful protesters while raging against federal prosecutors for the hundreds of criminal charges filed in the wake of the insurrection. With more rioters still facing potential indictments, many have taken to cooperating with the feds to avoid or lessen jail time.
And according to Carlson, the reason why the government has “thrown the book” at some rioters and not others is because of a deep-state plot to control the political narrative.
Taking aim at Attorney General Merrick Garland for announcing a new strategy to combat domestic terrorism and violent extremism in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack, Carlson said this was just further proof that the government wants to “crush anyone who leads opposition to” Biden.
After invoking Russian President Vladimir Putin’s latest whataboutism argument about the Capitol riots which featured Putin referencing Capitol rioter Ashli Babbit’s death to deflect answering a question about jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, Carlson declared that Putin raised “fair questions.”
“Who did shoot Ashli Babbitt and why don’t we know?” Carlson added. “Are anonymous federal agents now allowed to kill unarmed women who protest the regime? That’s okay now? No, it’s not okay.”
Carlson went on to claim that the government is “hiding the identity of many law enforcement officers present at the Capitol on January 6, not just the one that killed” Babbit, stating that the government’s own court filings reveal that officers violently took part in the riot.
…
… strangely, some of the key people who participated on January 6 have not been charged,” he continued. “Look at the documents, the government calls those people unindicted co-conspirators. What does that mean? Well, it means that potentially every single case they were FBI operatives. Really? In the Capitol on January 6?”
Using the indictment of Oath Keeper Thomas Caldwell as an example, Carlson noted that the documents show two additional people listed who haven’t been charged yet but were organizers of the riot.
“The government knows who they are, but they have not charged them. Why is that? You know why,” Carlson said with a dramatic nod. “They were all certainly working for the FBI. So FBI operatives were organizing the attack on the Capitol, on Jan. 6, according to government documents” (Baragona 1-2).
[ November 2021] The exalting of Kyle Rittenhouse reached new heights on Monday evening when Tucker Carlson used his top-rated Fox News prime time program to lavish even more praise on the teenager.
Before airing his interview with Rittenhouse, Carlson declared, "During the course of our long conversation, Kyle Rittenhouse struck us as bright, decent, sincere, dutiful, and hardworking." Carlson went on to say that Rittenhouse is "exactly the kind of person you would want many more of in your country. He's not especially political. He never wanted to be the symbol of anything." Later in the program, Carlson described Rittenhouse as a "sweet kid."
None of that is particularly surprising, given how Carlson has previously covered the case. But it shows how the dominant sector of right-wing media, led by Carlson, is continuing to work to elevate Rittenhouse as a role model for others. Not only are people like Carlson excusing the general concept of vigilante justice, they are actively encouraging it.
There are some voices in conservative media who have pushed back against this narrative. Notably, Carlson's Fox News colleague, Gillian Turner, pointed out earlier on Monday that while Rittenhouse was acquitted "he's not a hero here." As she said, "There are no heroes, there are no winners. There is no victory lap for Kyle or anybody else to take."
But Turner's microphone pales in comparison to Carlson's. And it's hard to see the interview Carlson conducted with Rittenhouse, in which he (predictably) attacked the news media and others, as something other than a victory lap…
An hour after Rittenhouse's interview with arguably the most prominent right-wing conspiracy theorist in the business aired, his attorney, Mark Richards, appeared on CNN and portrayed his client in a different light. Chris Cuomo asked about Carlson, Fox News, and whether Rittenhouse is aligned with such forces in right-wing media. Richards replied, "I don't think he is. ... I don't think he is a crazy right-winger."
Cuomo then asked Richards about the lionization of Rittenhouse: "What kind of message do you think this sends?" Cuomo asked, noting how some gun shops are promoting sales tied to Rittenhouse's name and how a GOP lawmaker offered him an internship. "Is that something Kyle endorses?"
Richards replied, "I don't think that is something he endorses. I think it sends a message that certain people are morons…" (Darcy 1).
Works cited:
“’Antisemitic, Racist and Toxic’: Tucker Carlson Faces Calls To Resign after Promoting White Supremacist ‘Replacement’ Theory.” Independent, April 9, 2021. Net. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...
Baragona, Justin. “Tucker Carlson Bizarrely Suggests Capitol Insurrection Was Orchestrated by FBI.” Daily Beast, updated June 16, 2021. Net. https://www.thedailybeast.com/tucker-...
Darcy, Oliver. “Tucker Carlson Exalts Kyle Rittenhouse during First Post-Verdict Interview: He's a 'Sweet Did.' CNN, November 23, 2021. Net. https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/23/media/...
Herbert, Geoff. Tucker Carlson: White supremacists Are a Hoax, ‘Not a Real Problem.’ syracuse.com, August 7, 2019. Net. https://www.syracuse.com/us-news/2019...
Kafka, Peter. “Fox News’s Election Fraud Pandering May Be Its Most Dangerous Lie Yet.” Vox, November 13, 2020. Net. https://www.vox.com/recode/21563312/f...
McCarthy, Bill. “Tucker Carlson Says Coronavirus Isn’t as Deadly as We Thought. Experts Disagree.” Politifact, May 4, 2020. Net. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks...
“Tucker Carlson.” Wikipedia. Net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_...
Walker, James. “Fox News Host Tucker Carlson Says Coronavirus Lockdown Is 'Punishing' Rural America, Calls It 'Mindless and Cruel.'” Newsweek, April 24, 2020. Net. https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-tuc...
Carlson used his TV show Tuesday night to praise President Donald Trump for his response to recent mass shootings, including in El Paso, Texas, where a man killed 22 people to stop a “Hispanic invasion.” He said it is “just a lie” to say Trump ever “endorsed white supremacy or came close to endorsing white supremacy," and further called concerns about white supremacists a “conspiracy theory.”
“If you were to assemble a list, a hierarchy of concerns, problems this country has, where would white supremacy be on the list? Right up there with Russia probably. It’s actually not a real problem in America," Carlson said. “It’s a hoax... Just like the Russia hoax, it’s a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power.”
Carlson added that he’s never met “one person who ascribes to white supremacy” and suggested Trump’s rivals “are making this up” to help in the 2020 election (Herbert 1).
[August 2021] “I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World,” Carlson said during a discussion of immigration on Fox News Primetime on Thursday.
“But they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening, actually!” he exclaimed. “Let’s just say it, that’s true!”
Carlson framed the topic not as a racial issue, but as a “voting rights question.”
“If you change the population you dilute the political power of the people who live there,” he went on. “So every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter.”
The term “replacement” has a dark history. A right-wing conspiracy theory known as the “replacement theory“ or “The Great Replacement” holds that birth rates among white people are too low, and that people of colour are gradually “replacing” their share of the world’s population. The idea is popular with white supremacist groups around the world, including in the United States.
…
Carlson denied that his remarks were racist.
“Everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it,” he said. “No, no, no. This is a voting rights question. I have less political power because they’re importing a brand new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that” (Antisemitic 1-2)?
Fox News host Tucker Carlson [May 2020] railed against continued statewide shutdowns meant to slow the spread of the coronavirus, claiming in a recent TV segment that they did little to flatten the curve and that "the virus just isn’t nearly as deadly as we thought it was."
Citing recent studies from hot spots such as New York, Carlson said the virus is "a full order of magnitude less deadly" than public health officials warned.
"The virus just isn’t nearly as deadly as we thought it was, all of us, including on this show," he said. "Everybody thought it was, but it turned out not to be" (McCarthy 1).
In a monologue on Thursday's edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the Fox News Host [April 2020] argued that COVID-19 posed a "miniscule" threat to people in rural states as he highlighted the dire state of unemployment across the country.
…
After listing off the number of COVID-19 infections and deaths in parts of rural America, along with unemployment figures, Carlson said: "So maybe the lesson of all this is not every place in America is the same. Not everywhere is New York or New Jersey. The threat to rural America from this virus is minuscule, so why are we punishing the people who live outside the cities?
…
"Unfortunately, as far as our leaders are concerned, these are the wrong people. They don't really count” (Walker 1-3).
In 2021, Carlson ran segments that misrepresented the safety of COVID-19 vaccines and asserted that U.S. officials were "lying" about them. He questioned why the CDC was advising vaccinated people to continue mask-wearing and distancing in April 2021, saying, "maybe [the vaccine] doesn't work, and they're simply not telling you that".
Fact checks called Carlson's argument misleading, because COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective in protecting against COVID-19 infections and severe symptoms, and universal masking helps prevent unvaccinated people from spreading the virus.
[Anthony] Fauci called Carlson's remarks a "crazy conspiracy theory." Later Carlson falsely called Fauci "the guy who created Covid". In another segment, Carlson misrepresented federal data to claim that in the previous five months around 30 people per day in the U.S. died after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine.
Carlson's argument was called misleading because the federal database he cited, VAERS, consists of unverified public reports, some of which have been false; post-vaccine deaths can be from unrelated causes; and the CDC had found no connection between COVID-19 vaccinations and deaths based on VAERS. In July 2021, Carlson said plans by the government to provide door-to-door vaccinations were "the greatest scandal in my lifetime, by far" and falsely described them as an attempt to "force people to take medicine they don't want or need". He also likened vaccine passports to segregationist Jim Crow laws. He claimed that a vaccine mandate in the U.S. Armed Forces designed to oust "the sincere Christians in the ranks, the free thinkers, the men with high testosterone levels, and anyone else who doesn't love Joe Biden". On a day when two Fox News hosts, Steve Doocy and Sean Hannity, urged viewers to get vaccinated to protect against the surging Delta variant of the coronavirus,
Carlson said, "There are a lot of people giving you medical advice on television and you should ignore them." Carlson refused to say whether he has been vaccinated, responding to a reporter, "When was the last time you had sex with your wife and in what position? We can trade intimate details." More than 90% of Fox Corporation's full-time employees had been fully vaccinated by September 2021 (Wikipedia 5).
[November 2021] Hannity, Carlson, and Ingraham do their own version of the Fox News two-step: They don’t come out and say outright that Trump is a victim of massive voter fraud that cost him the election while simultaneously defeating Democratic House and Senate candidates. But they argue that it’s plausible. They feed the fire with oxygen.
Fox isn’t the only one playing this game. Much of the Republican Party, from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on down, engages in a similar version: either flat-out suggesting that Trump’s claims are legitimate or at least arguing that he should be able to make those claims and then see what happens (Kafka 2).
[June 2021] Taking his Jan. 6 denialism to another level on Tuesday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson suggested the Capitol insurrection was a false flag orchestrated by the FBI in an effort to “suppress political dissent.”
Almost since the moment that former President Donald Trump incited thousands of MAGA supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol in order to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s election victory, Carlson has downplayed the violent riots, repeatedly insisting there was “no insurrection” and that it was nothing more than a “political protest that got out of hand.”
At the same time, the far-right Fox News star has rallied to the defense of the Capitol rioters, portraying them as largely peaceful protesters while raging against federal prosecutors for the hundreds of criminal charges filed in the wake of the insurrection. With more rioters still facing potential indictments, many have taken to cooperating with the feds to avoid or lessen jail time.
And according to Carlson, the reason why the government has “thrown the book” at some rioters and not others is because of a deep-state plot to control the political narrative.
Taking aim at Attorney General Merrick Garland for announcing a new strategy to combat domestic terrorism and violent extremism in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack, Carlson said this was just further proof that the government wants to “crush anyone who leads opposition to” Biden.
After invoking Russian President Vladimir Putin’s latest whataboutism argument about the Capitol riots which featured Putin referencing Capitol rioter Ashli Babbit’s death to deflect answering a question about jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, Carlson declared that Putin raised “fair questions.”
“Who did shoot Ashli Babbitt and why don’t we know?” Carlson added. “Are anonymous federal agents now allowed to kill unarmed women who protest the regime? That’s okay now? No, it’s not okay.”
Carlson went on to claim that the government is “hiding the identity of many law enforcement officers present at the Capitol on January 6, not just the one that killed” Babbit, stating that the government’s own court filings reveal that officers violently took part in the riot.
…
… strangely, some of the key people who participated on January 6 have not been charged,” he continued. “Look at the documents, the government calls those people unindicted co-conspirators. What does that mean? Well, it means that potentially every single case they were FBI operatives. Really? In the Capitol on January 6?”
Using the indictment of Oath Keeper Thomas Caldwell as an example, Carlson noted that the documents show two additional people listed who haven’t been charged yet but were organizers of the riot.
“The government knows who they are, but they have not charged them. Why is that? You know why,” Carlson said with a dramatic nod. “They were all certainly working for the FBI. So FBI operatives were organizing the attack on the Capitol, on Jan. 6, according to government documents” (Baragona 1-2).
[ November 2021] The exalting of Kyle Rittenhouse reached new heights on Monday evening when Tucker Carlson used his top-rated Fox News prime time program to lavish even more praise on the teenager.
Before airing his interview with Rittenhouse, Carlson declared, "During the course of our long conversation, Kyle Rittenhouse struck us as bright, decent, sincere, dutiful, and hardworking." Carlson went on to say that Rittenhouse is "exactly the kind of person you would want many more of in your country. He's not especially political. He never wanted to be the symbol of anything." Later in the program, Carlson described Rittenhouse as a "sweet kid."
None of that is particularly surprising, given how Carlson has previously covered the case. But it shows how the dominant sector of right-wing media, led by Carlson, is continuing to work to elevate Rittenhouse as a role model for others. Not only are people like Carlson excusing the general concept of vigilante justice, they are actively encouraging it.
There are some voices in conservative media who have pushed back against this narrative. Notably, Carlson's Fox News colleague, Gillian Turner, pointed out earlier on Monday that while Rittenhouse was acquitted "he's not a hero here." As she said, "There are no heroes, there are no winners. There is no victory lap for Kyle or anybody else to take."
But Turner's microphone pales in comparison to Carlson's. And it's hard to see the interview Carlson conducted with Rittenhouse, in which he (predictably) attacked the news media and others, as something other than a victory lap…
An hour after Rittenhouse's interview with arguably the most prominent right-wing conspiracy theorist in the business aired, his attorney, Mark Richards, appeared on CNN and portrayed his client in a different light. Chris Cuomo asked about Carlson, Fox News, and whether Rittenhouse is aligned with such forces in right-wing media. Richards replied, "I don't think he is. ... I don't think he is a crazy right-winger."
Cuomo then asked Richards about the lionization of Rittenhouse: "What kind of message do you think this sends?" Cuomo asked, noting how some gun shops are promoting sales tied to Rittenhouse's name and how a GOP lawmaker offered him an internship. "Is that something Kyle endorses?"
Richards replied, "I don't think that is something he endorses. I think it sends a message that certain people are morons…" (Darcy 1).
Works cited:
“’Antisemitic, Racist and Toxic’: Tucker Carlson Faces Calls To Resign after Promoting White Supremacist ‘Replacement’ Theory.” Independent, April 9, 2021. Net. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...
Baragona, Justin. “Tucker Carlson Bizarrely Suggests Capitol Insurrection Was Orchestrated by FBI.” Daily Beast, updated June 16, 2021. Net. https://www.thedailybeast.com/tucker-...
Darcy, Oliver. “Tucker Carlson Exalts Kyle Rittenhouse during First Post-Verdict Interview: He's a 'Sweet Did.' CNN, November 23, 2021. Net. https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/23/media/...
Herbert, Geoff. Tucker Carlson: White supremacists Are a Hoax, ‘Not a Real Problem.’ syracuse.com, August 7, 2019. Net. https://www.syracuse.com/us-news/2019...
Kafka, Peter. “Fox News’s Election Fraud Pandering May Be Its Most Dangerous Lie Yet.” Vox, November 13, 2020. Net. https://www.vox.com/recode/21563312/f...
McCarthy, Bill. “Tucker Carlson Says Coronavirus Isn’t as Deadly as We Thought. Experts Disagree.” Politifact, May 4, 2020. Net. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks...
“Tucker Carlson.” Wikipedia. Net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_...
Walker, James. “Fox News Host Tucker Carlson Says Coronavirus Lockdown Is 'Punishing' Rural America, Calls It 'Mindless and Cruel.'” Newsweek, April 24, 2020. Net. https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-tuc...
February 27, 2022
The Amoralists -- Tucker Carlson, Part Four -- Huckster
As TV talking heads go, Tucker Carlson was, even before the Media Matters recordings aired, less a respectable polemicist than an exhausting archetype. His persona has long been the “debate guy.” You know the one: He’s the dude in college who liked to play devil’s advocate by defending unpopular or terrible ideas on the grounds that real philosophical inquiry demands it. But it’s actually a game to be won to him, and he takes obvious pleasure—even pride—in keeping a cool head while watching people with genuine investments get “irrationally” worked up. And he acted the part.
Most of Carlson’s signature moves—the blinky open-mouthed listening, his gently patronizing “now hold on,” the chuckles at his guests’ frustration when he interrupts, the borrowed dignity with which he furrows his brows—are gestural shortcuts for reasonableness. And they’re part of a Carlsonian tool set that’s frankly pretty derivative: Carlson yells like a younger Bill O’Reilly and spars like a slower Jon Stewart, all while carefully insisting he’s “not defending” everything from Trump to Christopher Columbus to the Daily Stormer.
…
The “debate-guy” persona is a fraud, but Carlson’s strategy of projecting it has mostly worked. At the heart of his success is a strategic refusal to commit to any one identity, even within the same show. He bills himself as the devil’s advocate, the just-for-the-sake-of-argument dude with no real investment in an argument’s outcome. At other times he acts like a moralizing truth teller. These identities should theoretically be at odds. That they aren’t, and that both are in any case obviously fictions, has not seemed to matter to his viewers. How did the guy who called Elena Kagan ugly and child rape a “lifestyle” successfully bill himself a defender of American families? Why has this shabby schtick worked?
…
… His modus operandi is to inflame his viewers to howling heights of anger while excoriating sincerity of any kind as “preening” and insisting that nothing he says really matters. “There’s this illusion, and it’s created by the people who live here, that everything is meaningful, everything important,” Carlson told GQ. “It’s not.” This is less a humble admission of irrelevance than a deflection of responsibility, and it’s a strategy he shares with much of the far right, which has spent the past two years insisting that the things the president says and tweets don’t actually matter (except, of course, when they do).
But Carlson does have one unique gift, and it’s the remarkable sleight of hand with which he transitions from a sputtering Daffy to a rascally Bugs without letting his viewers notice the Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation. His sincerity (like his outrage) is a game, so he whizzes from one affect to another, and the effect is confusing enough that viewers start to see actual hate speech as coextensive with dickish jokes. So what if he says immigrants make America “poorer and dirtier.” So what if he called Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys” years ago—or alluded two months ago to “some obscure Middle Eastern hellhole our leaders claim we should be policing forever.” ...
Carlson is basically a rich huckster, and America loves few things more than the jolly rule bender who winks while he cheats. This figure is all over the place in American culture, from Frank Abagnale to Saul Goodman to crooked televangelists to, of course, our current president—talking people into bad decisions via confusion and charisma, bombast and speed. The huckster can turn on a dime to be surprising, funny, aggressive, demanding. He’ll tap into wells of fear and fellow feeling, find a way to earn your trust, make you feel he’s on your side, and then the con is on. Now that he’s facing criticism and losing advertisers, Carlson issued a statement: “We will never bow to the leftist mob’s attempts to silence us,” he said, the millionaire posing as an embattled Everyman. Only a practiced grifter could capably reframe his real selfish and grasping message—“my problems are yours”—into a martyr’s “your problems are mine.”
For many media types, the conventional-wisdom read on Carlson has long been that he was once a good reporter, has an interesting mind and a knack for performance, and might not actually believe what he says. The bigotry and fear mongering could just be a spectacle for ratings. After all, this is a guy who, in 2009, urged conservatives to be more careful with facts and suggested that the right-wing media should aspire to the standards of the New York Times. That this has earned him some plausible deniability—causing many to regard him more as a polemical clown whose actual ideology is hard to divine rather than a bona fide white supremacist—is a testament to just how available this grift has historically been to men predisposed to exploit it (Loofbourow 1-3).
What He’s Said
[April 2019] Tucker said Wednesday the Democratic Party’s “love” of abortion is to ensure that “women can be obedient workers, rather than harried mothers.”
The Fox News host … turned up his rhetoric against abortion-rights supporters as he commented on Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams’ remarks about abortion and women in the workplace.
“This is about business, it’s about making sure that women can be obedient workers, rather than harried mothers,” … (Dicker 1).
On Jan. 2, [2019] a searing Tucker Carlson monologue on Fox News resonated across every corner of the conservative movement.
“The goal for America is both simpler and more elusive than mere prosperity,” Carlson told his audience. “Dignity. Purpose. Self-control. Independence. Above all, deep relationships with other people.”
…
“Our leaders don’t care. We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule. They’re day traders. Substitute teachers. They’re just passing through. They have no skin in this game, and it shows. They can’t solve our problems. They don’t even bother to understand our problems.”
Carlson, who is in a ratings race with both his Fox colleague Sean Hannity and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, argued that many conservatives have scant understanding of the adversity faced by members of the working and lower middle class in America:
“The idea that families are being crushed by market forces seems never to occur to them. They refuse to consider it. Questioning markets feels like apostasy. Both sides miss the obvious point: Culture and economics are inseparably intertwined. Certain economic systems allow families to thrive. Thriving families make market economies possible.”
Carlson pointed specifically to problems faced by rural white America, the crucial base of Republican voters: “Stunning out of wedlock birthrates. High male unemployment. A terrifying drug epidemic.” How, Carlson asked, “did this happen?”
“You’d think our ruling class would be interested in knowing the answer. But mostly they’re not. They don’t have to be interested. It’s easier to import foreign labor to take the place of native-born Americans who are slipping behind.”
Despite this failing of conservatism, Carlson contended that only the Republican Party can lead the country back to salvation:
“There’s no option at this point. But first, Republican leaders will have to acknowledge that market capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. You’d have to be a fool to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.” (Edsall 1-2).
[ September 2020] Fox News host Tucker Carlson equates climate change to racism saying only liberals believe they exist.
On Friday, while anchoring a segment on the wildfires affecting the West Coast, Fox News host Tucker Carlson blamed Democratic politicians for turning the massive devastation into a political opportunity.
“Climate change they said caused these fires, they didn’t explain how exactly that happened… but they just kept saying it,” the host said during Tucker Carlson Tonight.
“At the hands of Democratic politicians climate change is like systemic racism in the sky. You can’t see it but rest assured it’s everywhere and it’s deadly and like systemic racism, it’s your fault.”
He continued, saying “The American middle class did it. They caused climate change. They ate too many hamburgers. They drove too many SUVs. They had too many children” (Dibia 1).
[October 2021] In a week in which he broadcast nightly from Budapest, the American talk show host Tucker Carlson posed for pictures with and interviewed Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban, and took a helicopter to inspect a Hungarian border fence designed to keep out migrants.
…
For Mr. Carlson, the Hungary trip was an opportunity to put Mr. Orban, whom he admires, on the map for his viewers back home, a conservative audience that may be open to the sort of illiberalism promoted by the Hungarian leader. On Wednesday’s show, Mr. Carlson praised Hungary as a “small country with a lot of lessons for the rest of us.”
Mr. Carlson’s Fox News program espouses some hard-right views, especially on immigration, where he and Mr. Orban share common ground. The host has held up Hungary’s hard-line policy on rejecting asylum seekers as a model for an American immigration system that he believes is too lenient and has weakened the power of native-born citizens, an argument that Mr. Carlson’s critics say overlaps with white supremacist ideology (Novak and Grynbaum 1).
[January 2022] The film opens with soaring music, footage of white children laughing and playing, beautiful vistas of classical European architecture. Fifteen seconds in, the music turns dark. We see images of dark-skinned youth, chaos, and blood. Then there’s a foreboding black-and-white shot of a man in profile, hunched at a desk, the curvature of his nose prominent in silhouette.
He’s the one responsible for all of this, the brown assault on white tranquility. Europe, we are told, is this predator’s “main hunting area.”
This is the beginning of Tucker Carlson’s new “documentary” for Fox Nation, the right-wing media giant’s streaming service. It is titled Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization, and it purports to tell the story of how a plucky little democracy in Central Europe has carved out a conservative model in the face of a relentless assault by the forces of global liberalism personified by George Soros, the Hungarian-American financier.
The story is a lie. Hungary is nominally a democracy but it has made a turn toward authoritarianism in the last decade; Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has painted Soros as a scapegoat whose allegedly nefarious influence justifies Orbán’s anti-democratic moves. The documentary amplifies this propaganda, treating the Jewish philanthropist as the spider at the center of a global web of conspiracy.
“It’s appalling to see Tucker Carlson & Fox invoke the kind of anti-Semitic tropes typically found in white supremacist media,” writes Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (an anti-hate group). “There’s no excuse for this kind of fearmongering, especially in light of intensifying anti-Semitism.”
Neither anti-immigrant demagoguery nor whitewashing Hungary’s descent into autocracy is new for Carlson. What’s striking about the report — part of a series dubbed “Tucker Carlson Originals” — is how it uses conspiratorial, bigoted ideas previously consigned to the far-right fringe to make the explicit case that the American government should emulate an authoritarian regime.
…
“In 2015, Soros got to play a role in transforming the continent of Europe,” Carlson intones. “Soros lobbied European leaders directly to get them to open their borders to impoverished people from around the world, and they did.” He points to “leaked documents” showing a $600,000 investment in pro-refugee public advocacy by an unspecified Soros-backed organization as evidence. (It is evidence — that Soros invests in pro-refugee public advocacy.)
It’s the imagery that gives away the game. Soros, shown repeatedly in stark black-and-white, is painted as that most hoary of villains — the Jewish financier pulling the strings attached to the world’s leaders.
…
But one thing we keep learning and re-learning about America is that there is a real constituency for this sort of thing. And that is something worth worrying about (Beauchamp 1-3, 7).
Fox News host Tucker Carlson celebrated the firing of hawkish White House national security advisor John Bolton on his show Tuesday night, having reportedly urged the president to remove him.
Carlson hailed the firing as "great news for America."
"Especially for the large number of young people who would have been killed in pointless wars if Bolton had stayed on the job," he said.
…
During his show, Carlson went on to attack the hawkish former adviser, who served in the administrations of Republican presidents Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush and George W Bush, calling him "a man of the left."
"If you're wondering why so many progressives are mourning Bolton's firing tonight, it's because Bolton himself fundamentally was a man of the left," said Carlson.
"There was not a human problem John Bolton wasn't totally convinced could be solved with the brute force of government. That's an assumption of the left, not the right.
"Don't let the mustache fool you. John Bolton was one of the most progressive people in the Trump administration."
He went on to accuse Bolton of promoting "Obama loyalists" within the National Security Council (Porter 1-2).
In addition to being a critic of GOP hawkishness, [July 2017] Carlson is also an apologist for Donald Trump on the Russia scandal. On Tuesday, before his showdown [interview] with Ralph Peters, he called the furor over Donald Trump Jr.’s willingness to accept anti-Clinton information from the Russian government a “new level of hysteria.” Trump Jr., he insisted, had merely been “gossiping with foreigners.” If that “now qualifies as treason … you ought to think about that before you allow an exchange student to live in your house.”
Carlson’s attempts to dismiss the Trump-Russia scandal aren’t just absurd. (Helping a foreign government subvert an American election isn’t merely “gossiping with foreigners.”) They also undermine his perspective on foreign policy. In his interview with Peters, Carlson said it’s “hard to see why” Putin is “a threat to us.” He told [Max] Boot that “the idea that Russia is in the top five” threats to America “is absurd.”
…
When it comes to Russia, America’s overriding interest lies in ensuring that Putin doesn’t threaten our democracy. By comparison, Syria is an afterthought. Carlson’s argument about the need for priorities is important. But his defense of Trump wildly distorts his understanding of what those priorities should be. The number one goal in American foreign policy today should be to deter Russia from attacking America’s next election. …
…
Tucker Carlson can be a provocative, necessary voice on foreign policy. Or he can be an apologist for Donald Trump. He can’t be both (Beinart 1-2).
[January 2022] Republicans running in high-profile primary races aren't racing to defend Ukraine against a possible Russian invasion. They're settling on a different line of attack: Blame Biden, not Putin.
…
Carlson has had a profound effect on how Republican candidates talk about the Russia-Ukraine issue, according to GOP operatives working on primary races.
GOP offices have been fielding numerous calls from voters echoing arguments they heard on Carlson's 8 p.m. ET show. Carlson has been telling his viewers there is no reason why the U.S. should help Ukraine fight Russia.
Even Democratic offices have been fielding these calls from Carlson's viewers. Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.) tweeted that he got "calls from folks who say they watch Tucker Carlson and are upset that we're not siding with Russia in its threats to invade Ukraine, and who want me to support Russia's 'reasonable' positions."
…
Carlson has noticed the changes in how Republicans talk about Russia specifically and foreign intervention in general, but he thinks the party isn't changing fast enough.
"I just want to go on the record and say I could care less if they call me a pawn of Putin," Carlson told Axios. "It's too stupid. I don't speak Russian. I've never been to Russia. I'm not that interested in Russia. All I care about is the fortunes of the United States because I have four children who live here."
"I really hope that Republican primary voters are ruthless about this," Carlson told Axios, and vote out any Republican "who believes Ukraine's borders are more important than our borders" (Swan and Solender 1-3).
Works cited:
Beauchamp, Zack. “Why Tucker Carlson’s Special on Hungary and Soros Matters.” Vox, January 29, 2022. Net. https://www.vox.com/22904444/tucker-c...
Beinart, Peter. “Tucker Carlson Is Doing Something Extraordinary.” The Atlantic, July 13, 2017. Net. https://www.theatlantic.com/internati...
Dibia, Emeka. “Fox News Host Tucker Carlson Says Only Liberals Believe Climate Change and Systemic Racism Are Real.” Yahoo, September 13, 2020. Net. https://www.yahoo.com/now/fox-news-ho...
Dicker, Ron. “Tucker Carlson: Abortion Ensures 'Women Can Be Obedient Workers'.” Huff Post, April 18, 2019. Net. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tucker...
Edsall, Thomas B. “What Does Tucker Carlson Know That the Republican Party Doesn’t?” New York Times, February 6, 2019. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/op...
Loofbourow, Lili. “Tucker Carlson and the ‘Debate Guy’ Racket.” Slate, March 22, 2009. Net. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2...
Novak, Benjamin and Grynbaum, Michael M. “Conservative Fellow Travelers: Tucker Carlson Drops In on Viktor Orban.” New York Times, updated October 4, 2021. Net. https://ghostarchive.org/archive/74UNj
Porter, Tom. “ Tucker Carlson Took a Victory Lap over John Bolton's Ousting, after Reports He Lobbied Trump To Fire Him.” Business Insider, September 11, 2009. Net. https://www.businessinsider.com/tucke...
Swan, Jonathan and Solender, Andrew. “Tucker Carlson-Fueled Republicans Drop Tough-On-Russia Stance.” Axios, January 27, 2022. Net. https://www.axios.com/tucker-carlson-...
Most of Carlson’s signature moves—the blinky open-mouthed listening, his gently patronizing “now hold on,” the chuckles at his guests’ frustration when he interrupts, the borrowed dignity with which he furrows his brows—are gestural shortcuts for reasonableness. And they’re part of a Carlsonian tool set that’s frankly pretty derivative: Carlson yells like a younger Bill O’Reilly and spars like a slower Jon Stewart, all while carefully insisting he’s “not defending” everything from Trump to Christopher Columbus to the Daily Stormer.
…
The “debate-guy” persona is a fraud, but Carlson’s strategy of projecting it has mostly worked. At the heart of his success is a strategic refusal to commit to any one identity, even within the same show. He bills himself as the devil’s advocate, the just-for-the-sake-of-argument dude with no real investment in an argument’s outcome. At other times he acts like a moralizing truth teller. These identities should theoretically be at odds. That they aren’t, and that both are in any case obviously fictions, has not seemed to matter to his viewers. How did the guy who called Elena Kagan ugly and child rape a “lifestyle” successfully bill himself a defender of American families? Why has this shabby schtick worked?
…
… His modus operandi is to inflame his viewers to howling heights of anger while excoriating sincerity of any kind as “preening” and insisting that nothing he says really matters. “There’s this illusion, and it’s created by the people who live here, that everything is meaningful, everything important,” Carlson told GQ. “It’s not.” This is less a humble admission of irrelevance than a deflection of responsibility, and it’s a strategy he shares with much of the far right, which has spent the past two years insisting that the things the president says and tweets don’t actually matter (except, of course, when they do).
But Carlson does have one unique gift, and it’s the remarkable sleight of hand with which he transitions from a sputtering Daffy to a rascally Bugs without letting his viewers notice the Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation. His sincerity (like his outrage) is a game, so he whizzes from one affect to another, and the effect is confusing enough that viewers start to see actual hate speech as coextensive with dickish jokes. So what if he says immigrants make America “poorer and dirtier.” So what if he called Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys” years ago—or alluded two months ago to “some obscure Middle Eastern hellhole our leaders claim we should be policing forever.” ...
Carlson is basically a rich huckster, and America loves few things more than the jolly rule bender who winks while he cheats. This figure is all over the place in American culture, from Frank Abagnale to Saul Goodman to crooked televangelists to, of course, our current president—talking people into bad decisions via confusion and charisma, bombast and speed. The huckster can turn on a dime to be surprising, funny, aggressive, demanding. He’ll tap into wells of fear and fellow feeling, find a way to earn your trust, make you feel he’s on your side, and then the con is on. Now that he’s facing criticism and losing advertisers, Carlson issued a statement: “We will never bow to the leftist mob’s attempts to silence us,” he said, the millionaire posing as an embattled Everyman. Only a practiced grifter could capably reframe his real selfish and grasping message—“my problems are yours”—into a martyr’s “your problems are mine.”
For many media types, the conventional-wisdom read on Carlson has long been that he was once a good reporter, has an interesting mind and a knack for performance, and might not actually believe what he says. The bigotry and fear mongering could just be a spectacle for ratings. After all, this is a guy who, in 2009, urged conservatives to be more careful with facts and suggested that the right-wing media should aspire to the standards of the New York Times. That this has earned him some plausible deniability—causing many to regard him more as a polemical clown whose actual ideology is hard to divine rather than a bona fide white supremacist—is a testament to just how available this grift has historically been to men predisposed to exploit it (Loofbourow 1-3).
What He’s Said
[April 2019] Tucker said Wednesday the Democratic Party’s “love” of abortion is to ensure that “women can be obedient workers, rather than harried mothers.”
The Fox News host … turned up his rhetoric against abortion-rights supporters as he commented on Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams’ remarks about abortion and women in the workplace.
“This is about business, it’s about making sure that women can be obedient workers, rather than harried mothers,” … (Dicker 1).
On Jan. 2, [2019] a searing Tucker Carlson monologue on Fox News resonated across every corner of the conservative movement.
“The goal for America is both simpler and more elusive than mere prosperity,” Carlson told his audience. “Dignity. Purpose. Self-control. Independence. Above all, deep relationships with other people.”
…
“Our leaders don’t care. We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule. They’re day traders. Substitute teachers. They’re just passing through. They have no skin in this game, and it shows. They can’t solve our problems. They don’t even bother to understand our problems.”
Carlson, who is in a ratings race with both his Fox colleague Sean Hannity and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, argued that many conservatives have scant understanding of the adversity faced by members of the working and lower middle class in America:
“The idea that families are being crushed by market forces seems never to occur to them. They refuse to consider it. Questioning markets feels like apostasy. Both sides miss the obvious point: Culture and economics are inseparably intertwined. Certain economic systems allow families to thrive. Thriving families make market economies possible.”
Carlson pointed specifically to problems faced by rural white America, the crucial base of Republican voters: “Stunning out of wedlock birthrates. High male unemployment. A terrifying drug epidemic.” How, Carlson asked, “did this happen?”
“You’d think our ruling class would be interested in knowing the answer. But mostly they’re not. They don’t have to be interested. It’s easier to import foreign labor to take the place of native-born Americans who are slipping behind.”
Despite this failing of conservatism, Carlson contended that only the Republican Party can lead the country back to salvation:
“There’s no option at this point. But first, Republican leaders will have to acknowledge that market capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. You’d have to be a fool to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.” (Edsall 1-2).
[ September 2020] Fox News host Tucker Carlson equates climate change to racism saying only liberals believe they exist.
On Friday, while anchoring a segment on the wildfires affecting the West Coast, Fox News host Tucker Carlson blamed Democratic politicians for turning the massive devastation into a political opportunity.
“Climate change they said caused these fires, they didn’t explain how exactly that happened… but they just kept saying it,” the host said during Tucker Carlson Tonight.
“At the hands of Democratic politicians climate change is like systemic racism in the sky. You can’t see it but rest assured it’s everywhere and it’s deadly and like systemic racism, it’s your fault.”
He continued, saying “The American middle class did it. They caused climate change. They ate too many hamburgers. They drove too many SUVs. They had too many children” (Dibia 1).
[October 2021] In a week in which he broadcast nightly from Budapest, the American talk show host Tucker Carlson posed for pictures with and interviewed Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban, and took a helicopter to inspect a Hungarian border fence designed to keep out migrants.
…
For Mr. Carlson, the Hungary trip was an opportunity to put Mr. Orban, whom he admires, on the map for his viewers back home, a conservative audience that may be open to the sort of illiberalism promoted by the Hungarian leader. On Wednesday’s show, Mr. Carlson praised Hungary as a “small country with a lot of lessons for the rest of us.”
Mr. Carlson’s Fox News program espouses some hard-right views, especially on immigration, where he and Mr. Orban share common ground. The host has held up Hungary’s hard-line policy on rejecting asylum seekers as a model for an American immigration system that he believes is too lenient and has weakened the power of native-born citizens, an argument that Mr. Carlson’s critics say overlaps with white supremacist ideology (Novak and Grynbaum 1).
[January 2022] The film opens with soaring music, footage of white children laughing and playing, beautiful vistas of classical European architecture. Fifteen seconds in, the music turns dark. We see images of dark-skinned youth, chaos, and blood. Then there’s a foreboding black-and-white shot of a man in profile, hunched at a desk, the curvature of his nose prominent in silhouette.
He’s the one responsible for all of this, the brown assault on white tranquility. Europe, we are told, is this predator’s “main hunting area.”
This is the beginning of Tucker Carlson’s new “documentary” for Fox Nation, the right-wing media giant’s streaming service. It is titled Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization, and it purports to tell the story of how a plucky little democracy in Central Europe has carved out a conservative model in the face of a relentless assault by the forces of global liberalism personified by George Soros, the Hungarian-American financier.
The story is a lie. Hungary is nominally a democracy but it has made a turn toward authoritarianism in the last decade; Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has painted Soros as a scapegoat whose allegedly nefarious influence justifies Orbán’s anti-democratic moves. The documentary amplifies this propaganda, treating the Jewish philanthropist as the spider at the center of a global web of conspiracy.
“It’s appalling to see Tucker Carlson & Fox invoke the kind of anti-Semitic tropes typically found in white supremacist media,” writes Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (an anti-hate group). “There’s no excuse for this kind of fearmongering, especially in light of intensifying anti-Semitism.”
Neither anti-immigrant demagoguery nor whitewashing Hungary’s descent into autocracy is new for Carlson. What’s striking about the report — part of a series dubbed “Tucker Carlson Originals” — is how it uses conspiratorial, bigoted ideas previously consigned to the far-right fringe to make the explicit case that the American government should emulate an authoritarian regime.
…
“In 2015, Soros got to play a role in transforming the continent of Europe,” Carlson intones. “Soros lobbied European leaders directly to get them to open their borders to impoverished people from around the world, and they did.” He points to “leaked documents” showing a $600,000 investment in pro-refugee public advocacy by an unspecified Soros-backed organization as evidence. (It is evidence — that Soros invests in pro-refugee public advocacy.)
It’s the imagery that gives away the game. Soros, shown repeatedly in stark black-and-white, is painted as that most hoary of villains — the Jewish financier pulling the strings attached to the world’s leaders.
…
But one thing we keep learning and re-learning about America is that there is a real constituency for this sort of thing. And that is something worth worrying about (Beauchamp 1-3, 7).
Fox News host Tucker Carlson celebrated the firing of hawkish White House national security advisor John Bolton on his show Tuesday night, having reportedly urged the president to remove him.
Carlson hailed the firing as "great news for America."
"Especially for the large number of young people who would have been killed in pointless wars if Bolton had stayed on the job," he said.
…
During his show, Carlson went on to attack the hawkish former adviser, who served in the administrations of Republican presidents Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush and George W Bush, calling him "a man of the left."
"If you're wondering why so many progressives are mourning Bolton's firing tonight, it's because Bolton himself fundamentally was a man of the left," said Carlson.
"There was not a human problem John Bolton wasn't totally convinced could be solved with the brute force of government. That's an assumption of the left, not the right.
"Don't let the mustache fool you. John Bolton was one of the most progressive people in the Trump administration."
He went on to accuse Bolton of promoting "Obama loyalists" within the National Security Council (Porter 1-2).
In addition to being a critic of GOP hawkishness, [July 2017] Carlson is also an apologist for Donald Trump on the Russia scandal. On Tuesday, before his showdown [interview] with Ralph Peters, he called the furor over Donald Trump Jr.’s willingness to accept anti-Clinton information from the Russian government a “new level of hysteria.” Trump Jr., he insisted, had merely been “gossiping with foreigners.” If that “now qualifies as treason … you ought to think about that before you allow an exchange student to live in your house.”
Carlson’s attempts to dismiss the Trump-Russia scandal aren’t just absurd. (Helping a foreign government subvert an American election isn’t merely “gossiping with foreigners.”) They also undermine his perspective on foreign policy. In his interview with Peters, Carlson said it’s “hard to see why” Putin is “a threat to us.” He told [Max] Boot that “the idea that Russia is in the top five” threats to America “is absurd.”
…
When it comes to Russia, America’s overriding interest lies in ensuring that Putin doesn’t threaten our democracy. By comparison, Syria is an afterthought. Carlson’s argument about the need for priorities is important. But his defense of Trump wildly distorts his understanding of what those priorities should be. The number one goal in American foreign policy today should be to deter Russia from attacking America’s next election. …
…
Tucker Carlson can be a provocative, necessary voice on foreign policy. Or he can be an apologist for Donald Trump. He can’t be both (Beinart 1-2).
[January 2022] Republicans running in high-profile primary races aren't racing to defend Ukraine against a possible Russian invasion. They're settling on a different line of attack: Blame Biden, not Putin.
…
Carlson has had a profound effect on how Republican candidates talk about the Russia-Ukraine issue, according to GOP operatives working on primary races.
GOP offices have been fielding numerous calls from voters echoing arguments they heard on Carlson's 8 p.m. ET show. Carlson has been telling his viewers there is no reason why the U.S. should help Ukraine fight Russia.
Even Democratic offices have been fielding these calls from Carlson's viewers. Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.) tweeted that he got "calls from folks who say they watch Tucker Carlson and are upset that we're not siding with Russia in its threats to invade Ukraine, and who want me to support Russia's 'reasonable' positions."
…
Carlson has noticed the changes in how Republicans talk about Russia specifically and foreign intervention in general, but he thinks the party isn't changing fast enough.
"I just want to go on the record and say I could care less if they call me a pawn of Putin," Carlson told Axios. "It's too stupid. I don't speak Russian. I've never been to Russia. I'm not that interested in Russia. All I care about is the fortunes of the United States because I have four children who live here."
"I really hope that Republican primary voters are ruthless about this," Carlson told Axios, and vote out any Republican "who believes Ukraine's borders are more important than our borders" (Swan and Solender 1-3).
Works cited:
Beauchamp, Zack. “Why Tucker Carlson’s Special on Hungary and Soros Matters.” Vox, January 29, 2022. Net. https://www.vox.com/22904444/tucker-c...
Beinart, Peter. “Tucker Carlson Is Doing Something Extraordinary.” The Atlantic, July 13, 2017. Net. https://www.theatlantic.com/internati...
Dibia, Emeka. “Fox News Host Tucker Carlson Says Only Liberals Believe Climate Change and Systemic Racism Are Real.” Yahoo, September 13, 2020. Net. https://www.yahoo.com/now/fox-news-ho...
Dicker, Ron. “Tucker Carlson: Abortion Ensures 'Women Can Be Obedient Workers'.” Huff Post, April 18, 2019. Net. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tucker...
Edsall, Thomas B. “What Does Tucker Carlson Know That the Republican Party Doesn’t?” New York Times, February 6, 2019. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/op...
Loofbourow, Lili. “Tucker Carlson and the ‘Debate Guy’ Racket.” Slate, March 22, 2009. Net. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2...
Novak, Benjamin and Grynbaum, Michael M. “Conservative Fellow Travelers: Tucker Carlson Drops In on Viktor Orban.” New York Times, updated October 4, 2021. Net. https://ghostarchive.org/archive/74UNj
Porter, Tom. “ Tucker Carlson Took a Victory Lap over John Bolton's Ousting, after Reports He Lobbied Trump To Fire Him.” Business Insider, September 11, 2009. Net. https://www.businessinsider.com/tucke...
Swan, Jonathan and Solender, Andrew. “Tucker Carlson-Fueled Republicans Drop Tough-On-Russia Stance.” Axios, January 27, 2022. Net. https://www.axios.com/tucker-carlson-...
February 24, 2022
The Amoralists -- Tucker Carlson, Part Three -- Trump
Tucker Carlson will take over for Megyn Kelly on Fox News next week, the network announced Thursday [January 5, 2017].
Carlson, a conservative commentator and founder of The Daily Caller web site, is well-known to Fox fans. His two-month-old show "Tucker Carlson Tonight," an out-of-the-box ratings success at 7 p.m., will move to the 9 p.m. hour.
…
Ever since the show debuted on November 14, Carlson has shown a knack for selecting topics of interest to conservative viewers; hosting fiery debates with liberals; and criticizing Fox's rivals in the mainstream media.
At the end of every show, Carlson says his broadcast is "the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness, and groupthink."
Many of his segments and fights have gone viral. A sampling of recent headlines from the show: "How liberals are slowly killing colleges," "Journalists exposed by WikiLeaks to cover Trump White House," and "Tucker vs. student who says Trump shouldn't be given chance."
[Roger] Murdoch said in a statement that "Tucker has taken cable news by storm with his spirited interviews and consistently strong performance."
Donald Trump's election has contributed to a ratings surge at Fox News, and Carlson has been able to capitalize on it. At 7 p.m., he has averaged about 2.8 million viewers, and more than 500,000 in the advertiser-friendly 25- to 54-year-old demographic.
Unlike Fox's 8 p.m. host Bill O'Reilly and 10 p.m. host Sean Hannity, Carlson does not have a friendly relationship with Trump dating back decades. He said in a January 2016 column that "Trump might not be my first choice for president."
But he is open-minded about Trump and doesn't have the antagonistic relationship that Kelly had with him.
Online comments and emails to Fox showed that some Fox loyalists turned against Kelly after Trump publicly ridiculed her in late 2015 and early 2016. Kelly's ratings remained high, but the anger was palpable (Stelter 1).
He may have played it safe on Dancing with the Stars, going with a classic “cha-cha” routine, but when he’s behind the desk with a camera in his face, he goes much harder, saying things that have white supremacists cheering him on.
“How precisely is diversity our strength? Since you’ve made this our new national model, please be specific as you explain it,” said Carlson. “Can you think, for example, if other institutions, such as marriage or military units, in which the less people have in common, the more cohesive they are. Do you get along better with your neighbors or coworkers if you can’t understand each other? Or share no common values? Please be honest as you answer this question.”
Among the 91% white audience tuning in to Fox, a few stand out—as a Vox explainer first noted. First, former Grand Wizard of the KKK, David Duke. He’s tweeted his support for Carlson numerous times. Duke’s called Carlson a “hero” for exposing white ethnic cleansing, and he even has a nickname for his favorite host: Tucker ‘Knows’ Carlson.
…
With viewership like that, it’s not surprising that the president also tunes in. A source close to Trump said, “They aren’t personally close. He’s not getting strategic advice from him directly the way he might from a Hannity. But they do chat on occasion, mostly Trump complimenting a segment here and there. He definitely likes him, and…it’s not unusual for him to be exposed to issues through Tucker’s show and others.”
…
In 2016 Carlson wrote, “About 15 years ago, I said something nasty on CNN about Donald Trump’s hair, I can’t now remember the context, assuming there was one. In any case, Trump saw it and left a message the next day saying, “It’s true you have better hair than I do, but I get more pussy than you do.’” The future president hung up.
Carlson has since argued this assumption.
Interviewer: “How many women have you had sex with in your life?”
Carlson: “A lot. Hundreds… It was a short window, but I packed it full… Carpet bombed” (Levine 1).
He’s one of Donald Trump’s most vociferous backers. But Tucker Carlson has told multiple people that he voted for pop star Kanye West last year instead.
Shortly after the presidential election, the Fox News host started telling some program guests that he had cast his ballot for West, according to two people familiar with those conversations. Given Carlson’s fierce on-air commentary in favor of Trump, the guests were left wondering if Carlson was serious or merely joking.
“It’s his way of saying that he’s not just another Trumpette at Fox News like Sean Hannity,” one of the sources said, referring to Carlson’s fellow prime time opinion host and reputed internal rival.
Other Carlson associates said the affinity between the two men — one a longtime conservative commentator who once wore a bowtie and moved seamlessly within liberal political and media circles, the other an eccentric music celebrity whose tumultuous relationship with Kim Kardashian recently ended in divorce — is real.
Prior to the election, Carlson said he would vote for West, according to a third person who knows Carlson. “He and Kanye get along. They both regularly find themselves in the cross hairs. They’re both pro-life,” this associate said.
…
An outspoken populist whose eponymous program has become the most popular show on cable news, Carlson won credit on the left for helping persuade Trump in early 2020 to not attack Iran. He’s also been critical of some of Trump’s policies, such as criminal justice reform. But his remarks on racial issues and immigration have earned him widespread condemnation by liberals who accuse Carlson of spreading toxic, divisive ideas (Lippman 1-2).
Fox News host Tucker Carlson called former President Donald Trump, then a real-estate mogul toying with a presidential bid, the "most repulsive person on the planet" and "so horrible" in a 1999 post on the website Slate.
Carlson, then an early-career conservative writer and commentator, made the judgment in an exchange with fellow Slate blogger, Evan Smith, who first labeled Trump a "repulsive" character.
"I'd love to add something even meaner to your description of Donald Trump — he's the sort of person I want to keep kicking once he's down–but I don't think I can," Carlson wrote in his exchange with Smith. "You've said it all: He is the single most repulsive person on the planet."
But Carlson acknowledged that Trump, who was considering a 2000 run as a Reform Party candidate, was more "interesting" than many others in politics.
"That said, I still plan to write about him some time. I don't think I'll be able to help it. Horrible as he is (or perhaps because he is so horrible), Trump is interesting, or at least more so than most candidates," he wrote, adding that the Trump and the Reform Party lacked any political "ideology" and were "just a bunch of wackos with a Web site and federal matching funds."
The Washington Post resurfaced Carlson's comments in an investigative piece published Wednesday exploring his history of pushing white grievance politics and opposing efforts to promote diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism.
Carlson, who later became a key Trump ally, couldn't have predicted in the 90s that his career as a right-wing TV personality would thrive under a Trump presidency. His Fox News primetime show, "Tucker Carlson Tonight," debuted shortly after Trump's election in 2016 and has become the most-watched cable news show in the country.
A spokesperson for Fox News declined to comment, but pointed Insider to a 2016 Politico column Carlson wrote in which he calls Trump "imperfect" and stops short of endorsing him for the GOP presidential nomination, while simultaneously lavishing praise on his populist politics (Relman 1-2).
Suddenly you’re digging him. At least a little bit. I know, I’ve seen the tweets, read the commentary, heard the chatter, detected the barely suppressed cheer: Hurrah for Tucker Carlson. If only we had more brave, principled Republicans like him.
Right out of the gate, he protested President Trump’s decision to kill Qassim Suleimani, the Iranian military commander, noting that it didn’t square with the president’s determination not to get bogged down in the Middle East and warning of the possibility and horror of full-blown war. Your pulse quickened. You perked up.
He sounded that same alarm on his next show and the show after that. Every night at 8 p.m., he worried about the bellicose itch of our leaders. When all around him on Fox News were playing their usual roles (indeed, his usual role) as masseurs for the president’s tender ego, he administered slaps, hard ones, the kind that leave angry red handprints. Ouch — and don’t stop.
You rejoiced. It’s one thing when Democrats challenge what looks like a rush to war by a Republican president. It’s another when typically fawning members of his own party do.
…
Carlson to the rescue!
Oh, please.
… In lieu of a normally functioning White House communications department or a press secretary who holds actual press briefings (what a thought!), we have “Fox & Friends” in the morning and Carlson’s and Sean Hannity’s shows in the evening.
They don’t chronicle this presidency. They shape it, not just in terms of the volume of their applause for Trump, who craves the loudest possible clapping, but in terms of actual interactions. Carlson — like Hannity and another Fox fixture, Lou Dobbs — has in fact advised him behind the scenes.
…
Carlson, mind you, has not disavowed Trump. In fact he performed semantic acrobatics to denounce America’s military maneuvers against Iran without precisely blaming Trump.
Those slaps I mentioned landed more forcefully on the administration in general than on the man-child at its apex, who is, in Carlson’s tortured rendition, a gullible marionette, his strings pulled by inveterate, habitual warmongers. If these profiteering elites would just let Trump be Trump and train his wrath on Mexicans instead of Iranians, a great presidency would get its groove back.
During his Tuesday show, Carlson performed political jujitsu and held two of the president’s principal Democratic adversaries responsible for exacerbated tensions with Iran. Referring to the Washington establishment and singling out Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, he said, “These are people who have been basically advocating for a kind of war against Iran for an awfully long time.”
“It’s infuriating,” he added. “It’s because of Schumer and Pelosi and people like them that we got into Iraq in the first place.”
Come again? A Republican president, George W. Bush, urged and oversaw the invasion of Iraq, and while Schumer authorized it, Pelosi voted against it, as did many more Democrats than Republicans.
…
Carlson remains true to Carlson: selective with facts, slanted with truths and — this is the most important part — committed to his vision of America as a land imperiled by nefarious Democrats and the dark-skinned invaders they would open the gates to if not for sentries like him and Trump.
… in the mind-set of Carlson and many of his fans on the far right, energy spent on missions in another hemisphere is energy not spent on our southern border. …
… Carlson asked his audience, “Why are we continuing to ignore the decline of our own country in favor of jumping into another quagmire?”
Carlson is defined not by a bold willingness to check Trump’s excesses or ugliest impulses but by his indulgence — no, his fervent encouragement — of those impulses as they pertain to racism and immigration. …
Carlson repeatedly uses variations of the word “invasion” to characterize migrants from Central America. He insists that “white supremacy is a fiction, a hoax. He has used language that buys into and promotes “replacement theory” — a far-right fixation on the idea that declining birthrates among whites will cause a nonwhite takeover — and recently castigated immigrants for litter along the Potomac River (Bruni “Tucker” 1-3).
… He’s the new Trump. Not Ron DeSantis. Not Josh Hawley. Not Rick Scott. Certainly not Ted Cruz.
Those other men are vying merely for Trump’s political mantle, with the occasional side trip to Cancún.
…
Moving to fill the empty space created by Trump’s ejection from the White House, his banishment from social media and his petulant quasi-hibernation, Carlson is triggering the libs like Trump triggered the libs. He’s animating the pundits like Trump animated the pundits.
Case in point: Carlson’s endlessly denounced, exhaustively parsed jeremiad against masks on his Fox News show on Monday night.
“Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from your response to seeing someone beat a kid at Walmart,” Carlson railed. “Call the police immediately. Contact child protective services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What you’re looking at is abuse. It’s child abuse.”
What lunatic hyperbole. What ludicrous histrionics. And what timing. Carlson shares Trump’s knack for that — for figuring out precisely when, for maximum effect, to pour salt into a civic wound.
His free-the-children bunk played on the weariness of more than a year of coronavirus vigilance. It came just as Americans were puzzling over the need for masks once they’re vaccinated or when they’re outdoors. It was juiced by arguments about what degree of caution remains necessary and what’s just muscle memory or virtue signaling.
And it was helpfully succinct and tidily packaged so that other commentators could tee off on it. Carlson understands what Trump always has and what every practiced provocateur does: You don’t just give your detractors agita. You give them material. That way, everything you say has a lengthy half-life and durable shelf life.
Several shows on MSNBC covered Carlson’s rant. Several shows on CNN, too. “The View” waded in. So did Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel. When you’re the subject of late-night comedians’ monologues, you’ve really made it.
Just two and a half weeks earlier, another of Carlson’s soliloquies — in which he peddled the far-right paranoia about a Democratic Party scheme to have dark-skinned invaders from developing countries supplant white Christian Americans — became its own news story, making him more of an actor in our national drama than a chronicler of it.
It was hardly his first lament about immigration, and he had dabbled in the “great replacement theory” before. But this time around it was more helpfully succinct, more tidily packaged, more honed. “Every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter,” he fumed. “I have less political power because they are importing a brand-new electorate.”
He made voters sound like Mazdas and America like a car lot.
…
To give him attention is to play into his hands, but to do the opposite is to play ostrich. In April, his 8 p.m. Eastern show drew an average nightly audience of about three million viewers. That made him the most-watched of any cable news host — ahead of Sean Hannity, ahead of Rachel Maddow — and it meant that he was both capturing and coloring how many Americans felt about current events. His outbursts, no matter how ugly, are relevant.
…
… we need not just villains but also certain kinds of villains: ones whose unabashed smugness, unfettered cruelty and undisguised sense of superiority allow us to return fire unsparingly and work out our own rage. Carlson, again like Trump, is cathartic.
Trump’s dominance was so profound from early 2016 through early 2021 that there’s now something of an obsession with naming his successor, even though it’s not at all clear that he’s willing to be succeeded. All the men I mentioned earlier covet that crown. But not all of them fully understand that Trump’s métier wasn’t politics. It was performance.
Carlson gets that. If advancing arguments was his exclusive or primary goal, he wouldn’t allow for so much confusion regarding the flavor of his invective. But debates about whether he’s genuinely making points or disingenuously pressing buttons might well be a ratings boon. To keep people guessing is to keep people tuned in.
I’m not saying that he’s Trump’s doppelgänger. He’s neither orange nor ostentatious enough. He can be as verbally dexterous as Trump is oratorically incontinent, as brimming with information as Trump is barren of it. Carlson reminds you of a prep school debate team captain all puffed up at his lectern. Trump reminds you of a puffy reality-show ham — what he was before he rode that escalator downward, a harbinger of the country’s trajectory under him.
But both barge through the contradictions of being both populists and plutocrats. Both pretend to be bad boys while living like good old boys. Both market bullying as bravery.
…
Then came television and then high-decibel duels on television and then Trump, the shark to Carlson’s pilot fish. Carlson, who flattered him, got the time slot on Fox News that had belonged to Megyn Kelly, who feuded with Trump.
And now? The pilot fish has grown his own mighty jaws, and the ocean’s only a little bit safer (Bruni “New” 1-4).
Works cited:
Bruni, Frank. “The New Trump? Easy. It’s Tucker.” New York Times, May 1, 2021. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/01/op...
Bruni, Frank. “Tucker Carlson Is Not Your New Best Friend.” New York Times, January 11, 2020. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/11/op...
Levine, Samm. “WHO IS: Tucker Carlson?” nowthisnews.com, October 24, 2019. Net. https://nowthisnews.com/politics/who-...
Lippman, Daniel. “Tucker Carlson Told Associates He Voted for Kanye, Not Trump.” Politico, July 1, 2021. Net. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07...
Relman, Eliza. “Tucker Carlson Called Trump 'the Single Most Repulsive Person on the Planet' and a 'Wacko' in 1999.” Business Insider, July 14, 2021. Net. https://www.businessinsider.com/tucke...
Stelter, Brian. “Fox News Picks Tucker Carlson To Take Over for Megyn Kelly.” CNN, January 5, 2017. Net. https://money.cnn.com/2017/01/05/medi...
Carlson, a conservative commentator and founder of The Daily Caller web site, is well-known to Fox fans. His two-month-old show "Tucker Carlson Tonight," an out-of-the-box ratings success at 7 p.m., will move to the 9 p.m. hour.
…
Ever since the show debuted on November 14, Carlson has shown a knack for selecting topics of interest to conservative viewers; hosting fiery debates with liberals; and criticizing Fox's rivals in the mainstream media.
At the end of every show, Carlson says his broadcast is "the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness, and groupthink."
Many of his segments and fights have gone viral. A sampling of recent headlines from the show: "How liberals are slowly killing colleges," "Journalists exposed by WikiLeaks to cover Trump White House," and "Tucker vs. student who says Trump shouldn't be given chance."
[Roger] Murdoch said in a statement that "Tucker has taken cable news by storm with his spirited interviews and consistently strong performance."
Donald Trump's election has contributed to a ratings surge at Fox News, and Carlson has been able to capitalize on it. At 7 p.m., he has averaged about 2.8 million viewers, and more than 500,000 in the advertiser-friendly 25- to 54-year-old demographic.
Unlike Fox's 8 p.m. host Bill O'Reilly and 10 p.m. host Sean Hannity, Carlson does not have a friendly relationship with Trump dating back decades. He said in a January 2016 column that "Trump might not be my first choice for president."
But he is open-minded about Trump and doesn't have the antagonistic relationship that Kelly had with him.
Online comments and emails to Fox showed that some Fox loyalists turned against Kelly after Trump publicly ridiculed her in late 2015 and early 2016. Kelly's ratings remained high, but the anger was palpable (Stelter 1).
He may have played it safe on Dancing with the Stars, going with a classic “cha-cha” routine, but when he’s behind the desk with a camera in his face, he goes much harder, saying things that have white supremacists cheering him on.
“How precisely is diversity our strength? Since you’ve made this our new national model, please be specific as you explain it,” said Carlson. “Can you think, for example, if other institutions, such as marriage or military units, in which the less people have in common, the more cohesive they are. Do you get along better with your neighbors or coworkers if you can’t understand each other? Or share no common values? Please be honest as you answer this question.”
Among the 91% white audience tuning in to Fox, a few stand out—as a Vox explainer first noted. First, former Grand Wizard of the KKK, David Duke. He’s tweeted his support for Carlson numerous times. Duke’s called Carlson a “hero” for exposing white ethnic cleansing, and he even has a nickname for his favorite host: Tucker ‘Knows’ Carlson.
…
With viewership like that, it’s not surprising that the president also tunes in. A source close to Trump said, “They aren’t personally close. He’s not getting strategic advice from him directly the way he might from a Hannity. But they do chat on occasion, mostly Trump complimenting a segment here and there. He definitely likes him, and…it’s not unusual for him to be exposed to issues through Tucker’s show and others.”
…
In 2016 Carlson wrote, “About 15 years ago, I said something nasty on CNN about Donald Trump’s hair, I can’t now remember the context, assuming there was one. In any case, Trump saw it and left a message the next day saying, “It’s true you have better hair than I do, but I get more pussy than you do.’” The future president hung up.
Carlson has since argued this assumption.
Interviewer: “How many women have you had sex with in your life?”
Carlson: “A lot. Hundreds… It was a short window, but I packed it full… Carpet bombed” (Levine 1).
He’s one of Donald Trump’s most vociferous backers. But Tucker Carlson has told multiple people that he voted for pop star Kanye West last year instead.
Shortly after the presidential election, the Fox News host started telling some program guests that he had cast his ballot for West, according to two people familiar with those conversations. Given Carlson’s fierce on-air commentary in favor of Trump, the guests were left wondering if Carlson was serious or merely joking.
“It’s his way of saying that he’s not just another Trumpette at Fox News like Sean Hannity,” one of the sources said, referring to Carlson’s fellow prime time opinion host and reputed internal rival.
Other Carlson associates said the affinity between the two men — one a longtime conservative commentator who once wore a bowtie and moved seamlessly within liberal political and media circles, the other an eccentric music celebrity whose tumultuous relationship with Kim Kardashian recently ended in divorce — is real.
Prior to the election, Carlson said he would vote for West, according to a third person who knows Carlson. “He and Kanye get along. They both regularly find themselves in the cross hairs. They’re both pro-life,” this associate said.
…
An outspoken populist whose eponymous program has become the most popular show on cable news, Carlson won credit on the left for helping persuade Trump in early 2020 to not attack Iran. He’s also been critical of some of Trump’s policies, such as criminal justice reform. But his remarks on racial issues and immigration have earned him widespread condemnation by liberals who accuse Carlson of spreading toxic, divisive ideas (Lippman 1-2).
Fox News host Tucker Carlson called former President Donald Trump, then a real-estate mogul toying with a presidential bid, the "most repulsive person on the planet" and "so horrible" in a 1999 post on the website Slate.
Carlson, then an early-career conservative writer and commentator, made the judgment in an exchange with fellow Slate blogger, Evan Smith, who first labeled Trump a "repulsive" character.
"I'd love to add something even meaner to your description of Donald Trump — he's the sort of person I want to keep kicking once he's down–but I don't think I can," Carlson wrote in his exchange with Smith. "You've said it all: He is the single most repulsive person on the planet."
But Carlson acknowledged that Trump, who was considering a 2000 run as a Reform Party candidate, was more "interesting" than many others in politics.
"That said, I still plan to write about him some time. I don't think I'll be able to help it. Horrible as he is (or perhaps because he is so horrible), Trump is interesting, or at least more so than most candidates," he wrote, adding that the Trump and the Reform Party lacked any political "ideology" and were "just a bunch of wackos with a Web site and federal matching funds."
The Washington Post resurfaced Carlson's comments in an investigative piece published Wednesday exploring his history of pushing white grievance politics and opposing efforts to promote diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism.
Carlson, who later became a key Trump ally, couldn't have predicted in the 90s that his career as a right-wing TV personality would thrive under a Trump presidency. His Fox News primetime show, "Tucker Carlson Tonight," debuted shortly after Trump's election in 2016 and has become the most-watched cable news show in the country.
A spokesperson for Fox News declined to comment, but pointed Insider to a 2016 Politico column Carlson wrote in which he calls Trump "imperfect" and stops short of endorsing him for the GOP presidential nomination, while simultaneously lavishing praise on his populist politics (Relman 1-2).
Suddenly you’re digging him. At least a little bit. I know, I’ve seen the tweets, read the commentary, heard the chatter, detected the barely suppressed cheer: Hurrah for Tucker Carlson. If only we had more brave, principled Republicans like him.
Right out of the gate, he protested President Trump’s decision to kill Qassim Suleimani, the Iranian military commander, noting that it didn’t square with the president’s determination not to get bogged down in the Middle East and warning of the possibility and horror of full-blown war. Your pulse quickened. You perked up.
He sounded that same alarm on his next show and the show after that. Every night at 8 p.m., he worried about the bellicose itch of our leaders. When all around him on Fox News were playing their usual roles (indeed, his usual role) as masseurs for the president’s tender ego, he administered slaps, hard ones, the kind that leave angry red handprints. Ouch — and don’t stop.
You rejoiced. It’s one thing when Democrats challenge what looks like a rush to war by a Republican president. It’s another when typically fawning members of his own party do.
…
Carlson to the rescue!
Oh, please.
… In lieu of a normally functioning White House communications department or a press secretary who holds actual press briefings (what a thought!), we have “Fox & Friends” in the morning and Carlson’s and Sean Hannity’s shows in the evening.
They don’t chronicle this presidency. They shape it, not just in terms of the volume of their applause for Trump, who craves the loudest possible clapping, but in terms of actual interactions. Carlson — like Hannity and another Fox fixture, Lou Dobbs — has in fact advised him behind the scenes.
…
Carlson, mind you, has not disavowed Trump. In fact he performed semantic acrobatics to denounce America’s military maneuvers against Iran without precisely blaming Trump.
Those slaps I mentioned landed more forcefully on the administration in general than on the man-child at its apex, who is, in Carlson’s tortured rendition, a gullible marionette, his strings pulled by inveterate, habitual warmongers. If these profiteering elites would just let Trump be Trump and train his wrath on Mexicans instead of Iranians, a great presidency would get its groove back.
During his Tuesday show, Carlson performed political jujitsu and held two of the president’s principal Democratic adversaries responsible for exacerbated tensions with Iran. Referring to the Washington establishment and singling out Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, he said, “These are people who have been basically advocating for a kind of war against Iran for an awfully long time.”
“It’s infuriating,” he added. “It’s because of Schumer and Pelosi and people like them that we got into Iraq in the first place.”
Come again? A Republican president, George W. Bush, urged and oversaw the invasion of Iraq, and while Schumer authorized it, Pelosi voted against it, as did many more Democrats than Republicans.
…
Carlson remains true to Carlson: selective with facts, slanted with truths and — this is the most important part — committed to his vision of America as a land imperiled by nefarious Democrats and the dark-skinned invaders they would open the gates to if not for sentries like him and Trump.
… in the mind-set of Carlson and many of his fans on the far right, energy spent on missions in another hemisphere is energy not spent on our southern border. …
… Carlson asked his audience, “Why are we continuing to ignore the decline of our own country in favor of jumping into another quagmire?”
Carlson is defined not by a bold willingness to check Trump’s excesses or ugliest impulses but by his indulgence — no, his fervent encouragement — of those impulses as they pertain to racism and immigration. …
Carlson repeatedly uses variations of the word “invasion” to characterize migrants from Central America. He insists that “white supremacy is a fiction, a hoax. He has used language that buys into and promotes “replacement theory” — a far-right fixation on the idea that declining birthrates among whites will cause a nonwhite takeover — and recently castigated immigrants for litter along the Potomac River (Bruni “Tucker” 1-3).
… He’s the new Trump. Not Ron DeSantis. Not Josh Hawley. Not Rick Scott. Certainly not Ted Cruz.
Those other men are vying merely for Trump’s political mantle, with the occasional side trip to Cancún.
…
Moving to fill the empty space created by Trump’s ejection from the White House, his banishment from social media and his petulant quasi-hibernation, Carlson is triggering the libs like Trump triggered the libs. He’s animating the pundits like Trump animated the pundits.
Case in point: Carlson’s endlessly denounced, exhaustively parsed jeremiad against masks on his Fox News show on Monday night.
“Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from your response to seeing someone beat a kid at Walmart,” Carlson railed. “Call the police immediately. Contact child protective services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What you’re looking at is abuse. It’s child abuse.”
What lunatic hyperbole. What ludicrous histrionics. And what timing. Carlson shares Trump’s knack for that — for figuring out precisely when, for maximum effect, to pour salt into a civic wound.
His free-the-children bunk played on the weariness of more than a year of coronavirus vigilance. It came just as Americans were puzzling over the need for masks once they’re vaccinated or when they’re outdoors. It was juiced by arguments about what degree of caution remains necessary and what’s just muscle memory or virtue signaling.
And it was helpfully succinct and tidily packaged so that other commentators could tee off on it. Carlson understands what Trump always has and what every practiced provocateur does: You don’t just give your detractors agita. You give them material. That way, everything you say has a lengthy half-life and durable shelf life.
Several shows on MSNBC covered Carlson’s rant. Several shows on CNN, too. “The View” waded in. So did Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel. When you’re the subject of late-night comedians’ monologues, you’ve really made it.
Just two and a half weeks earlier, another of Carlson’s soliloquies — in which he peddled the far-right paranoia about a Democratic Party scheme to have dark-skinned invaders from developing countries supplant white Christian Americans — became its own news story, making him more of an actor in our national drama than a chronicler of it.
It was hardly his first lament about immigration, and he had dabbled in the “great replacement theory” before. But this time around it was more helpfully succinct, more tidily packaged, more honed. “Every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter,” he fumed. “I have less political power because they are importing a brand-new electorate.”
He made voters sound like Mazdas and America like a car lot.
…
To give him attention is to play into his hands, but to do the opposite is to play ostrich. In April, his 8 p.m. Eastern show drew an average nightly audience of about three million viewers. That made him the most-watched of any cable news host — ahead of Sean Hannity, ahead of Rachel Maddow — and it meant that he was both capturing and coloring how many Americans felt about current events. His outbursts, no matter how ugly, are relevant.
…
… we need not just villains but also certain kinds of villains: ones whose unabashed smugness, unfettered cruelty and undisguised sense of superiority allow us to return fire unsparingly and work out our own rage. Carlson, again like Trump, is cathartic.
Trump’s dominance was so profound from early 2016 through early 2021 that there’s now something of an obsession with naming his successor, even though it’s not at all clear that he’s willing to be succeeded. All the men I mentioned earlier covet that crown. But not all of them fully understand that Trump’s métier wasn’t politics. It was performance.
Carlson gets that. If advancing arguments was his exclusive or primary goal, he wouldn’t allow for so much confusion regarding the flavor of his invective. But debates about whether he’s genuinely making points or disingenuously pressing buttons might well be a ratings boon. To keep people guessing is to keep people tuned in.
I’m not saying that he’s Trump’s doppelgänger. He’s neither orange nor ostentatious enough. He can be as verbally dexterous as Trump is oratorically incontinent, as brimming with information as Trump is barren of it. Carlson reminds you of a prep school debate team captain all puffed up at his lectern. Trump reminds you of a puffy reality-show ham — what he was before he rode that escalator downward, a harbinger of the country’s trajectory under him.
But both barge through the contradictions of being both populists and plutocrats. Both pretend to be bad boys while living like good old boys. Both market bullying as bravery.
…
Then came television and then high-decibel duels on television and then Trump, the shark to Carlson’s pilot fish. Carlson, who flattered him, got the time slot on Fox News that had belonged to Megyn Kelly, who feuded with Trump.
And now? The pilot fish has grown his own mighty jaws, and the ocean’s only a little bit safer (Bruni “New” 1-4).
Works cited:
Bruni, Frank. “The New Trump? Easy. It’s Tucker.” New York Times, May 1, 2021. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/01/op...
Bruni, Frank. “Tucker Carlson Is Not Your New Best Friend.” New York Times, January 11, 2020. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/11/op...
Levine, Samm. “WHO IS: Tucker Carlson?” nowthisnews.com, October 24, 2019. Net. https://nowthisnews.com/politics/who-...
Lippman, Daniel. “Tucker Carlson Told Associates He Voted for Kanye, Not Trump.” Politico, July 1, 2021. Net. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07...
Relman, Eliza. “Tucker Carlson Called Trump 'the Single Most Repulsive Person on the Planet' and a 'Wacko' in 1999.” Business Insider, July 14, 2021. Net. https://www.businessinsider.com/tucke...
Stelter, Brian. “Fox News Picks Tucker Carlson To Take Over for Megyn Kelly.” CNN, January 5, 2017. Net. https://money.cnn.com/2017/01/05/medi...
