Jay Weber Show transcript 2-29-24 6:40am
Mitch McConnell has made it official: he’s resigning from his leadership position in the senate as of November. Following the election.
This is overdue.
I wouldn’t say ‘long overdue’...as some mitch haters would. But ‘overdue’. He’s 82 and has had health problems for a while now.
Mitch McConnell said he intends to run for another term, yet, meaning he plans to die in office like Diane Feinstein and some of these other ‘ancients’ who just won’t leave Capitol Hill, but at least he will be out of leadership, and we will have new planners and strategizes atop the senate GOP caucus for the first time in 40 years.
Mitch McConnell took over as the leader of the senate in 1984-the year i graduated from high school. He’s been the GOP leader for 40 years.
I found a clip of him as a younger man-speaking in the senate in 1987-and it’s shocking to see-and hear-mitch McConnell as a brown haired 40-year-old.
He still wasn’t a fast talker, but he was a lot faster than he is now. I’d play a bit of his announcement on the senate floor yesterday, but it’s torture. Genuine torture, for an impatient man like myself to listen to.
Our own senator- Ron Johnson has wanted Mitch McConnell out of this position for several years now...and we’ll speak with him after the news.
He can speak for himself, but my perception of senator Johnson’s beef with McConnell is that- yes-he’s been good at playing defense against the democrats’ worst ideas- but mitch isn’t good on offense-nor has he been interested in being a tough negotiator when it comes to cutting spending or reforming government.
Mitch comes from the old school of ‘both sides get some of what they want’ and spending just keeps going up and up with each new budget. That is-decidedly-not the mindset of most of today’s GOP members.
I have no particular interest in bashing or trashing Mitch McConnell. I’ve been calling the ‘balls and strikes’ on him over the years, as I’ve seen them. And he-has been-very good at playing defense with parliamentary procedures. We’re losing a great tactical mind and an incredible library of institutional knowledge, here.
But Mitch -never did-seem willing to play hardball or go on offense when it came to passing the conservative agenda.
At times, it was infuriating.
The most recent instance in which he-did- decide to go on offense and he really delivered-was with the supreme court appointments.
Whether it was his idea, originally, or not: Mitch’s move to block Obama’s final nominee in Obama’s final year- was genius. He stopped Merrick garland from being put on the court...only to have garland reveal his putridly partisan nature as Biden’s attorney general.
So, first McConnell gambled Trump would win in 2016 and held Scalia’s seat for conservatives-and then he went on offense to ram thru as many conservative judicial appointments as he could- changing the nature of the federal bench at all levels- in a much needed ‘push’ back toward the center. He also had the stones to change the filibuster rules for supreme court justices after Harry Reid had ended them for all lower court judges- as a way for the dems to pack the lower courts.
McConnell could have gone soft and kept them in place for trump’s supreme court appointments-but he and his team said-nope. If the democrats think they can cheat the agreed-upon system-we see no need to adhere to Harry’s remaining rule-and killed off the filibuster for supreme court nominees.
What that did-is allow Trump’s team to nominate the most conservative justices they could find-with no ability for democrat senators to stand in the way of them...as had been the historical norm.
It meant there was no need to ‘bow’ to the dems in any way and pick more moderate justices. Screw it. Obama and Reid wanted to stack the courts with liberals-Trump and McConnell stacked the courts with conservatives.
That-and this 6-3 conservative majority that should last a while-is the most important part of mitch McConnell’s legacy. He knows it-and it’s why-in a rare instance-he went on offense and got it done.
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