Obama had just begun the last year of his presidency, and McConnell was entering his second year as Senate majority leader. The tale of McConnell’s steal begins in February 2016, when Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, the lion of the judicial right, suddenly and unexpectedly died. Hence his willingness to steal an appointment that by historical practice and precedent belonged to Obama. McConnell was worried that the GOP would fail again, this time under his watch as majority leader.

The GOP had failed for 30 years to fashion a court to its liking, largely, it believed, because too many of its appointees – Sandra Day O’Connor, David Souter, Anthony Kennedy, and even John Roberts – had gone “rogue” on key issues: gay rights, gay marriage, affirmative action, Obamacare and, most of all, abortion. The supreme court, of course, was the biggest prize of all. Thus, across Trump’s presidency, McConnell pushed 175 district court appointments and 54 court of appeals appointments through the congressional confirmation process, far exceeding in numbers what Obama had managed during the second term of his presidency. It was fine, in McConnell’s eyes, for Congress to be paralyzed and ineffectual on most domestic issues, as long as the GOP, when in power, stacked the federal judiciary and the supreme court with conservative judges and justices. Hence the critical role of the federal courts: the federal judiciary, if sufficiently populated by conservative jurists, could constrain and dismantle the power of the federal government in ways in which Congress never would. But it is equally true that McConnell has believed, for decades, that the federal government had grown too large and too strong, that power had to be returned to private enterprise on the one hand and the individual states on the other, and that the legislative process in Washington could not be trusted to accomplish those aims.

McConnell is widely considered to be a cynic about politics, more interested in maintaining and holding power than in advancing a particular agenda. The act to which I refer is McConnell’s theft of Barack Obama’s 2016 appointment to the supreme court, a radical deed that has dimmed somewhat in public consciousness even as it proved crucial to fashioning a rightwing supreme court willing to overturn Roe v Wade and to destabilize American politics and American democracy in the process. It is not entirely surprising that Trump’s coup failed.Īnother brazen GOP action, however, has succeeded – this one engineered by the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, whose chess-like skills of political strategizing put to shame Trump’s powerful but limited game of bluster and bullying. Yet, his deadly serious attempt to upend American democracy also had a slapdash quality to it, reflecting Trump’s own impulsive nature and his reliance on a group of schemers – Rudy Giuliani, Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell, Roger Stone and John Eastman among them – of limited ability.

T he January 6 committee has now revealed how far Donald Trump was willing to go to prevent the peaceful and lawful transfer of power from his presidency to that of Joe Biden.

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