McConnell: Trump 'different,' not dangerous | Cross

All Mitch McConnell wanted to be was majority leader of the Senate. In 2014, Kentuckians allowed that by giving him a sixth six-year term, and voters around the country closed the deal by electing a Republican majority.

But now McConnell is more than the usual majority leader. Not only does he lead the legislative chamber where Democrats can block most Republican bills, he has to deal with an erratic new president who accomplished a hostile takeover of the GOP and is leading the party and the nation in different and possibly dangerous directions.

It is a challenge of McConnell’s own making. He was one of the keys to electing Donald Trump, by keeping a Supreme Court seat open and helping Trump make the court an issue that persuaded wavering Republicans in key areas to vote for him instead of Hillary Clinton.

Now he vows that the Senate will confirm Judge Neil Gorsuch to fill the year-old vacancy of Antonin Scalia. He won’t say how but seems determined that if Gorsuch can’t get eight Democratic votes to reach the 60 needed to stop a filibuster, some sort of maneuver will get the job done.

But on other issues, such as trade, sanctions against Russia, and the handling of the temporary ban on residents of seven majority-Muslim countries, McConnell and Trump are nowhere near hand-in-glove. The president is a nationalist, and the senator is a longtime internationalist.

Beyond the issues, Trump is like an excitable child who is always spouting off and making people nervous, while McConnell is a calm adult who measures his words carefully. He followed that mantra in an interview Thursday, speaking circumspectly about Trump, but happily talking about his role in saving the Scalia seat for conservatives and revealing a related move that helped elect Trump.

When Scalia died unexpectedly Feb. 13, McConnell quickly said, “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”

Democrats cried foul, but McConnell said his statement was driven by a belief that Democrats would have done likewise if the roles were reversed. He said it wasn’t until later that he recalled then-Sen. Joe Biden’s 1992 statement that Democrats wouldn’t fill a vacancy that year if one occurred, and that he discovered Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer’s similar statement in 2007.

McConnell usually checks with other Republican senators before issuing edicts, but said he had to make the call on his own because the Senate was in recess and “my members were scattered around the world. . . . I needed to sell it when I got back,” because Democrats were going to use it as an issue in Senate races.

President Obama obliged by waiting a month to nominate moderate Judge Merrick Garland, who did not excite the Democratic base. Democratic attempts to use the issue “kind of fizzled,” McConnell said. “We ended up not having a series of news-peg events like hearings and votes and all the rest, which would have drug the issue into the middle of the election.”

Orchestrating Trump win

Soon after Scalia’s death, Trump became the clear favorite for the nomination, and McConnell reportedly told his colleagues they could “drop him like a hot rock.” But after Trump sewed up the nomination in May, and looked like he could carry big swing states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, McConnell offered help with senators – and, he says, a piece of advice that helped Trump win in November: put out a list of potential Supreme Court nominees.

“It was my suggestion that they come up with a list because there was a big debate internally in Republican circles, you know, ‘Is Trump a conservative? What kind of judge would he appoint?’ It was my suggestion that they consult with the Federalist Society, come up with a list of thoroughly credible, serious possibilities as a way of underscoring to Republicans that, you know, whatever they didn’t agree with Trump on, that on this one he would be solid.”

The list pleased evangelicals and conservatives suspicious of Trump, who until a few years earlier had supported abortion rights. And in the end, his list and the continuing vacancy made a difference in the suburbs of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, longtime “blue” states that narrowly went for Trump and elected him.

“A lot of suburban Republican types were very conflicted about voting for Trump, and this was, we subsequently discovered, was one of the biggest things that brought them home to the point where Trump got 90 percent of the Republican vote, just like Mitt Romney did,” he said.

James Hohmann of The Washington Post wrote similarly Tuesday, saying, “I believe it is possible that Trump would have lost had McConnell not kept Scalia’s seat open. . . . While Obama was playing checkers, McConnell was playing chess.”

Now the big question is whether Gorsuch can get 60 votes, and if not, what McConnell will do to get him on the court. “All I will tell you is that we’re going to get him confirmed, and I’m not going to speculate about how that may ultimately happen,” he told me.

McConnell rejected the notion that Democrats are more resistant to Gorsuch because their base is angry about Trump’s immigration order, but on ABC’s “This Week” last Sunday he strongly implied that Trump had mishandled it: “We need to bear in mind that we don’t have religious tests in this country, and we also need to remember that some of our best allies in the war against Islamic terrorism are Muslims.”

On speaking out

David Brooks, a conservative columnist for The New York Times, recently wrote that congressional Republicans have struck a Faustian bargain with Trump, who poses an existential danger to party and nation, and “It is a problem that demands a response.” I told McConnell that Brooks seemed to be talking about him, and asked what he would say to people who need reassurance about the U.S. role in the world and the stability of its government.

“I have spoken out occasionally on things where it’s pretty obvious that I have a different point of view than the president,” McConnell said, citing his support for NATO and sanctions against Russia. “I’m not going to react to every columnist’s observation about the president.”

McConnell acknowledged Trump is “different” from other politicians, in the same way Andrew Jackson differed from his predecessors. But in a dangerous way? “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think so.”

Al Cross, a former CJ political writer, is director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues and associate professor in the University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Media. His opinions are his own, not UK's.