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Jamelle Bouie

By Jamelle Bouie

Opinion Columnist

Late last month, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky announced that he would leave his position as Republican leader after the November elections. He’ll depart as the longest-serving party leader in the Senate’s history. He is also the longest-serving senator in Kentucky history.

There’s no question that McConnell is one of the most consequential politicians of his generation. This isn’t a compliment. McConnell is not consequential for what he accomplished as a legislator or legislative leader — he’s no Robert F. Wagner or Everett Dirksen. He’s consequential for what he’s done to degrade and diminish American democracy.

McConnell, as the journalist Alec MacGillis noted in “The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell,” was never driven by ideology. He was a moderate, pro-choice Republican before he became a hard-right, conservative one. “What has motivated McConnell has not been a particular vision for the government or the country, but the game of politics and career advancement in its own right,” MacGillis wrote in 2014.

It is a politics of the will to power, in which the only thing that matters is partisan victory. “At some point along the way,” MacGillis wrote, “Mitch McConnell decided that his own longevity in Washington trumped all — that he would even be willing to feed the public’s disillusionment with its elected leaders if it would increase his and his party’s odds of success at the polls.”

McConnell’s quest for power, no matter the cost, explains how he became a fierce opponent of campaign finance reform, doing everything he could to help flood American politics with the unaccountable money of anonymous billionaires and other........

© The New York Times