Civil Rights Activist: Mitch McConnell?
The Evolution of Mitch McConnell from Supporter of Civil-Rights to Enabler of Voter Suppression
In 1963, a young Capitol Hill intern was watching the vast crowds attending the now historical March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He supported the Civil Rights Movement, and he’d later witness the signing of the Voting Rights Act by Lyndon B. Johnson, and was active on his college campus in promoting civil rights protests to fellow students.
The young intern in 1963 is currently in tacit approval of the vast voter suppression initiatives across the United States being enacted by state legislatures of his own party. He will likely even utilize the filibuster to prevent voter protection bills from being voted in the Senate — the intern was Mitch McConnell.
As voter suppression bills are hitting state legislatures in a time when the Supreme Court gutted key amendments of the original 1965 Voting Rights Act, McConnell’s evolution from civil-rights advocate to a force partially responsible for Trumpism’s rise in America, is as intriguing as it is dispiriting (though certainly not surprising). His early brand of civil-rights activist, liberal Republicanism—a term that wasn’t quite as oxymoronic as it is today—would evolve into a conservatism robust enough to garner the 1985 Reaganite votes and win his Kentucky senate seat, as well as survive both the 2009-10 Tea Party wave and 2016-2020 Trump years.
Throughout McConnell’s career, his political acumen is bannered under his favored personal axiom, “You have to be elected before you can be a statesman.” The paradoxical nature of McConnell’s statesmanship, if the truth be told, has been one whose legislation and senatorial duties have been consumed in the fanatical pursuit in winning each and every election by any means necessary.
It’s believed that an idealist will most likely metamorphose into a calculating cynic upon becoming a politician on Capitol Hill—the vicinity to power can have an acerbic if not corrosive affect on one’s quixotic and moral sensibilities. McConnell, to put it succinctly, doesn’t seem to hold a core.
Although the question on when and how McConnell became McConnell is one that journalists and pundits have mulled on in thought pieces and reports over the years, it generally has wavered between two theories: a) Washington politics had indeed changed him into the chess-player of a politician he is, or b) he arrived to DC already in tow with the Machiavellian modus operandi. The one issue that McConnell pundits have looked to for evidence or some semblance of a man with principles has been around the issue of civil rights.
One tidbit of information that sheds light on where McConnell shifted on civil-rights is his resignation letter as Deputy Assistant Attorney General sent to President Gerald Ford in 1975. In it, he implores Ford to stack the Supreme Court with anti-busing judges. As the letter introduces, integrated busing had become a hot issue in McConnell’s hometown of Louisville, Kentucky—albeit a traditionally moderate state vis-á-vis racial issues.
As Alec MacGillis explains in The Cynic, McConnell was planning on starting his political career by returning to Louisville, and he would run for the County Judge seat by taking advantage of Louisville’s anti-busing buzz. His resignation-letter to Ford was a deliberately laid paper-trail to help bolster his chances at winning an election. He would run and win two-years later in 1977, and thus begins McConnell’s political career.
Despite some who’ve highlighted McConnell’s record around civil rights in a political party that hasn’t been as keen on the issue, the truth is that it’s a bit spotty. When it comes to voting rights throughout McConnell’s senatorial career, his opposition to make the ballot box accessible has been the most consistent norm about him. McConnell staunchly opposed a 1993 voter expansion bill championed by his once-fellow Kentucky Senator, the late Wendell Ford. McConnell would also sponsor his own amendment to the Help America Vote Act of 2002 that would have included voter ID requirements back in 2007.
Other overtures to causes and groups once championed by McConnell early on—his rouses to Louisville’s labor unions in support of collective bargaining, ended with nothing to show for except more votes that McConnell won. These moments mark early public examples of McConnell’s guiding principle: Win elections, no matter the cost. It’s unclear whether McConnell even was as devout as an activist as the record lies out, or his concern for civil-rights was simply part of his own political calculations. Nevertheless McConnell is undoubtedly a far cry from one of his predecessors, as well as former boss, mentor, and McConnell’s avowed ‘hero’ – the late Kentucky Senator John Sherman Cooper
John Sherman Cooper, a liberal Republican Senator representing a conservative Democratic Kentucky, had consistently supported civil rights legislation and opposed the Vietnam War—risky positions for a Senator to take in conservative-leaning state during the 1960s. McConnell interned for the late Senator, and it was Cooper—according to McConnell’s retelling in his memoir The Long Game —who led McConnell to the room where President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. According to McConnell’s memoir, when he asked Cooper following Cooper’s support for the 1964 Civil Rights Act on how he was able to take positions that weren’t popular with his Kentuckian constituents, Cooper responded:
“I not only represent Kentucky; I represent the nation, and there are times you follow, and times when you lead.”
John Sherman Cooper’s record on winning elections would seem to correlate with his Burkean conservatism: his Senate terms were haphazardly split between stints serving in law firms and in US Ambassadorships to India and East Germany upon electoral losses. As for his supposed protégé and successor, McConnell’s foci of fundraising and competing for the Kentucky senate seat are proud aspects for the majority leader. McConnell has won seven consecutive terms, and an exhibit dedicated to him at his alma mater, the University of Louisville, doesn’t display any key legislation he’s authored or bills he passed. They only display every election he’s ever won.
From the time he first ran in 1985 on the coattails of Reagan’s second-term to today, McConnell’s take-no-prisoners campaigning style and tactical legislatorial maneuvering on behalf of his party’s success and reelection chances not only shows McConnell lack of principles, but as a buoy anchored to some moving underwater floor, it also reveals how far-right and anti-democratic the GOP base has gone over the past six decades in America’s drifting, democratic seas.
The John Lewis Voting Rights Act passed the House and is heading toward the Senate. The March of Washington for Jobs and Freedom was fifty-eight years ago, and Mitch McConnell has hopes to return as majority leader come 2022, should the GOP grasp control of the Senate. He has publicly cast his doubts about the GOP’s current voter suppression initiatives across the southern states, and most likely won’t champion voting-rights if it means it hurts himself and his Republican colleagues.
And things are moving quick: Texas also passed its “voter-fraud” legislation, even after Texas House Democrats fled the state to the nation’s capitol. The Republicans now have a faux-movement of their own, singing “We Shall Overcome” to the made-up scourge of voter fraud – all for McConnell’s to maintain his grip on power and the GOP’s chances of winning the midterms and 2024 presidential race.
Unfortunately, if they win, it will be America’s democratic experiment that will lose.