Measured by how many bills he successfully ushered into law, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who announced Wednesday that he will step down as Republicans’ Senate leader in November, was extraordinarily ineffective.
He famously failed to deliver on the GOP’s years-long promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017, and more recently clashed with hardline House Republicans who refuse to pass bipartisan legislation supported by McConnell. During his time as majority leader, McConnell’s primary legislative accomplishment is the tax law former President Donald Trump signed his first year in office, and not much else.
And yet, McConnell is likely to be remembered as one of the most consequential leaders in the Senate’s history, and for good reason.
McConnell’s legacy is not that he passed historic laws that transformed American society. It’s that he relegated Congress to second-tier status when it comes to deciding some of the biggest issues of our time. And he did it all while still empowering his Republican Party to dominate the policymaking process.
McConnell achieved this outcome in two ways. The first was a dramatic escalation in filibusters. The second is by filling the federal judiciary with movement conservatives who would bypass Congress altogether and implement Republican policies from the bench.
His legacy will be lasting.
How McConnell ground Congress to a halt
The filibuster allows a minority of senators to veto virtually any legislation, unless the majority can convince 60 of the Senate’s 100 members to break that filibuster. Because it is quite rare for either party to control 60 seats in the Senate — the last time it happened was a seven-month period in 2009–10 — this means that the minority party can block nearly all bills.
Filibusters used to be exceedingly rare. One common method used to measure the frequency of filibusters is to count the number of “cloture” votes, the process used to break a…
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