In the true sense of the word, Senator Mitch McConnell never wanted to be an autocrat, such as an emperor or a dictator. Instead, Kentucky’s longest-serving senator wanted to be a political puppeteer. Puppeteers are hidden behind a screen pulling the strings that animate the puppets, thus creating the illusion that the puppets are really putting on the show. For Puppeteer McConnell, his screen was the Senate Majority Leader’s Office. The puppets were the three branches of government. The show was the governing of the United States of America. The illusion he wanted to create would be for the puppets to appear to be functioning constitutionally, that is, three puppeteers operating three sets of strings, when in reality there would be only one puppeteer, Addison Mitchell McConnell, pulling all the strings.

Autocrats sit at the pinnacle of government noticeably exercising absolute power and control, and there is no illusion that the other elements of government have any real power. McConnell knew he could never be that. Rather, he sought a position of political power – not to be confused with Constitutional power – whereby he could orchestrate and manipulate all matters of state which he cared about, across all three branches, to his personal ends. Rule by executive fiat was beyond his reach.

He had to operate invisibly from behind the puppeteer’s screen. To accomplish his ends, he had to abandon any and all allegiance to the fundamental constitutional concept of checks and balances.

He had to operate invisibly from behind the puppeteer’s screen. To accomplish his ends, he had to abandon any and all allegiance to the fundamental constitutional concept of checks and balances. He required an imbalance of power whereby he could check others, while stripping others of any checking power over him. His vision was a type of backdoor autocracy disguised as republican democracy.

McConnell is approaching the end of his political career, his dream unfulfilled, although not from lack of trying. His success depended on a convergence of certain events and circumstances, all happening at just the right time. That never happened, but he once came fairly close. However, along the way he did a lot of damage to Madisonian democracy, so America should never feel sad or sorry to see him go.

Mitch McConnell’s arrived at the Senate on January 3, 1985. In 2007 he rose to the leadership of the Senate’s GOP caucus in 2007, albeit as minority leader. When Republicans took control of the Senate after the 2014 mid-term election, he obtained the ultimate senatorial power when he became Majority Leader. Now, all he needed was a weak, Republican Speaker of the House and a Republican President over whom he could exert significant influence, and, voila, all the strings of government would be within his grasp. That came two years later.

An early clue of McConnell’s attitude toward government was his somewhat irreverent insolent attitude toward the Chief Executive’s Office. When he ascended to Senate leadership in 2007, he was accommodating toward fellow Republican George W. Bush, but barely tolerant of another Republican, Donald Trump, and downright hostile toward Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Take, for example, the famous quote he made early in Obama’s administration: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” That’s not a passive hope that the Obama administration flops under its own faults. He’s saying that he, along with whoever makes up the “we,” must undermine Obama’s presidency, either by making it a failure, or at least making it look that way. A willingness to lead a mutiny against the skipper of the ship of state for the sake of personal political gain was certainly not in our founders’ vision of a more perfect union.

Once McConnell failed to thwart Obama’s re-election, his eyes turned to the mid-term elections of 2014. Meanwhile, just six weeks before Obama’s second inauguration came the horrendous news of the Sandy Hook shooting. McConnell dutifully recited the Republican “thoughts and prayers” mantra and immediately signaled that Republicans would do nothing about preventing the slaughter of little children in their schools. Instead, he renewed his focus on repeal of the Affordable Care Act and pretending to care about the national debt and the budget deficit.

Fortune smiled on McConnell at the mid-term elections of 2014. The Republicans gained nine seats in the Senate, and he rose to Majority Leader, thus grabbing the puppeteer’s first string. About a year after becoming Majority Leader, he pulled that string so ruthlessly, so without precedent, and so anti-Constitutional that no Senator in history had dared to try it. On February 13, 2016, Justice Antonin Scalia suddenly died. Instead of publicly mourning Scalia’s death, he politicized it. Scalia’s body had barely turned cold when McConnell announced that his successor should not be selected during the 269 days remaining until the next presidential election. Notwithstanding McConnell’s shot across the bow, Obama nominated Merrick Garland, a judge McConnell once confessed would be an outstanding choice for the court – but not as a successor to a departing conservative justice.

Flash back to 1991, to the bruising Clarence Thomas confirmation battle. Afterwards, Joe Biden, then chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, mused wistfully that perhaps it’s not a good idea to confirm justices to the Supreme Court during an election year. Twenty-five or so years later, McConnell, remembering Biden’s offhand comment, took to the Senate floor the day after Obama nominated Garland, and gaslighted America with his “Biden Rule” speech, wherein he elevated Biden’s casual comment to a venerable Senate rule. Barely able to contain his glee at finally getting retribution for Obama spoiling McConnell’s plan to make him a one-term President, Leader McConnell claimed he had no choice but to follow the Biden Rule, refused to even give him a hearing, and ran out the clock, thus instigating perhaps the most egregious abuse of regular order in the Senate’s 235-year history.

On January 20, 2017, Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress, installed a Republican in the White House, and was looking at a Supreme Court that would soon be back in Republican hands. McConnell was now poised to seize the reins of power over all three branches. Of all the top leaders of government McConnell was clearly the most experienced, and the most cunning.

Trump was a dilettante politician whom McConnell hoped he could manipulate.

Trump was a dilettante politician whom McConnell hoped he could manipulate. The Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, showed himself to be as weak in leadership as he was reluctant to hold the office. Aided by McConnell’s villainy, a seat on the Supreme Court remained open, and there was the possibility of two more vacancies coming soon (Kennedy was anxious to retire and Ginsburg was ailing).

Notwithstanding this promising convergence of events and circumstances, McConnell’s reach for ultimate power failed. Within days of taking office, Trump began his march to autocracy with his tyrannical Muslim travel ban. Trump wasn’t about to cede control of his office to anyone. Then came the 2018 mid-term elections, and thanks to Trump’s chaotic administration, a blue tsunami occurred in the House of Representatives. Losing 40 seats to the Democrats brought to the Speaker’s podium a tough, savvy San Franciscan, Nancy Pelosi, who proved to be more than a worthy opponent to McConnell. His dream was soon snuffed out in 2020 when Joe Biden was elected President and Democrats now held both houses of Congress. McConnell was forced to vacate the Majority Leader’s office in the Capitol and resume his weakened status as Minority Leader. Nevertheless, that didn’t stop him from making more mischief.

Nevertheless, here are a few more of McConnell’s greatest hits.

His parliamentary machinations caused over 100 seats on the federal bench to remain open when Obama left office, enabling Trump to appoint 234 federal judges, almost 33% more than Obama managed in his second term. He established a virtual conveyor belt for fast-tracking consent, while paying little attention to the Senate’s constitutional duty of “Advise and Consent” on federal judge appointments. His mission was simple: stack the federal bench with as many Federalist Society acolytes as possible – fitness for the job not a necessary qualification. This, in McConnell’s eyes, was perhaps his greatest achievement.

Aside from egregiously flouting Constitutional duties and norms, McConnell wasted considerable political energy trying to kill the Democrats’ most ambitious legislative achievement since Medicare and the Voting Right Act of 1965 – the Affordable Care Act. Although it got off to a rough start, he knew that someday the ACA would prove to be a boon to the Democrats. McConnell needed for it to go away, not because it was bad law, but because it was a good law for which neither he nor the Republicans could claim even a scintilla of credit. He enthusiastically pushed the lie that Republicans had a better law, and the ACA needed to be repealed to make room for it. On every bill or resolution that came before the Senate that would repeal or weaken the Affordable Care Act, McConnell voted “Yes.”

McConnell also spent considerable time on the Senate floor conducting master classes in giving gaslighting speeches. His forte was making America believe the Democrats were at fault for all the bad news coming out of Washington, and no one was better at sabotaging every deed done by the Democrats.

Then, who could forget October of 2020, when McConnell cranked up his judicial confirmation conveyor belt and railroaded Amy Coney Barrett onto the Supreme Court nine days before Election Day. Once again, he hijacked the appointment process which resulted in robbing Democratic Presidents of two Supreme Court appointments which rightfully and ethically belonged to them. Consequently. McConnell is chiefly responsible for giving America the current Supreme Court Supermajority and all the constitutional mischief they are creating today. And does anyone remember the September 2020 press conference when McConnell visibly snickered at the suggestion that there ever was such a thing as the Biden Rule?

McConnell was also notorious for his omissions:

He was repeatedly deaf to the cries of gun violence victims, even those in his home state which ranked 15^th nationally in the rate of gun violence incidents.

…although he privately loathed Trump, McConnell is no doubt chiefly responsible for allowing Trump to have another run at the presidency in 2024.

Next, although he privately loathed Trump, McConnell is no doubt chiefly responsible for allowing Trump to have another run at the presidency in 2024. As Trump’s second impeachment trial approached, McConnell publicly opined that a President can’t be impeached after leaving office, even though many Constitutional experts disagreed. Therefore, despite overwhelming evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors, he refused to vote to convict Trump. McConnell’s omission to follow the evidence and the law may have been the reason an insurrectionist was not convicted and prevented by the 14^th Amendment from ever seeking the presidency again. Republicans, if Trump loses the 2024 election, it just may be McConnell to blame.

Then there was McConnell’s support for any Republican candidate for the Senate, not matter how unfit and unqualified that person may be. He’s never yearned for a Senate filled with classics-trained statespersons intelligently and civilly deliberating the important issues in bipartisan fashion (which is how James Madison had imagined it). He just wanted votes he could control. Most notably, he supported Herschel Walker for the Senate from Georgia in 2022. Although Walker was as incompetent and inept at politics as he was stellar at football, McConnell didn’t care.

Finally, the Tommy Tuberville fiasco. The feckless Alabama Senator held up over 400 military promotions for ten months because he opposed the military’s policy of granting leave to military women to exercise their reproductive freedoms. Leader McConnell could have ended the senseless stalemate, but he didn’t, allowing national security to be weakened all those months.

Aside from having to put up with McConnell demeaning the prestige of the Senate, we, in our lifetimes, have had the additional misfortunes of (1) bearing witness to the worst President in history; (2) enduring, without recourse, the worst Supreme Court anyone could have possibly imagined; and (3) suffering the shame and disgust with having a clownish, tax-wasting House of Representatives monumentally failing to do the nation’s business while chasing after conspiracy theories. Thankfully, Mitch McConnell’s inexcusable leadership won’t be in play much longer.

Soon we will bid an it’s-about-time farewell to the man who, more than anyone alive today, best exemplifies the attitude of putting party over country without counting the cost of the harm it causes. The senator who fashions himself as Kentucky’s heir to the legacy of Henry Clay will not go down in history as the most despicable United States Senator in American history. That dishonor goes, first and foremost to Joe McCarthy, followed by the pro-slavery, pro-Jim Crow and pro-Nazi senators. But he is without question the most partisan, conniving, sly and crafty party caucus leader of our lifetime and perhaps in the entire history of the United States Senate. To be clear Mitch, don’t take that as a compliment.

NOTE: For an in-depth analysis proving conclusively just how awful a Senate leader McConnell is, I recommend The Betrayal: How Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans Abandoned America, by Ira Shapiro.