Unlike a lot of conservatives gleefully cheering on Mitch McConnell’s announcement that he will step down as Senate Republican Leader in November, after the election, I actually paid the price for vocally opposing McConnell. In 2014, I used my platform at RedState to back Matt Bevin’s race against McConnell. I was one year into my contract at Fox News. Roger Ailes told me to stop bashing McConnell or stop going on Fox. I was sidelined at Fox for the next two years. And McConnell beat Bevin.

I learned Mitch McConnell does not care. He does not care because he was busy putting points on the board.

McConnell did not care about my complaints or your complaints. He did not care about those who vilified him. He did not care that Republicans would attack him on the campaign trail and denounce him on TV. He did not care that Democrats made McConnell the most disliked national politician in America.

But Mitch McConnell does not care. He is elected by the people of Kentucky who have been returning him to the Senate more than any other senator in the commonwealth’s 232-year history. He cares about Kentucky, not national opinion polls.

As an appropriator, he knew how to cobble together deals and build coalitions. He took that skill to the Republican Leader’s office. He often sacrificed things we conservatives wanted to instead make life comfortable for Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski or any number of other liberal to moderate Republicans who sometimes then made deals that conservatives hated.

They kept McConnell in charge and, in turn, McConnell kept the GOP mostly in the majority and, through that, blocked Democrat judges and rapidly confirmed Republican judges.

Whether you or I care for McConnell does not matter. You can say any Republican would have done what McConnell did, but you would have to ignore a series of Republican Senate Leaders before McConnell who did not ram through judges at breakneck pace and wage jihad against bureaucratic appointees. McConnell was willing to cut the throats Trent Lott and Bill Frist would never dream of cutting.

Because Mitch McConnell does not care about what others think, he was happy to be the bad guy and denied Merrick Garland even an examination. McConnell made himself the villain so other Republicans could denounce McConnell, play nice on television and win reelection.

If you think other Republicans could have or would have done what McConnell did, you display your ignorance of what transpired behind closed doors to keep Jeff Flake of Arizona and Susan Collins of Maine onboard Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination. If you think any other Republican would have or could have done what McConnell did, you have no grasp of the Senate’s operating flow and how McConnell expedited and rammed through Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination in the waning days of Republican Senate control in 2020.

Any Republican President could have picked a Neil Gorsuch, a Brett Kavanaugh or an Amy Coney Barrett. But neither a Frist nor a Lott would have moved heaven and earth to get them all expeditiously to the bench. McConnell did because he cared about that.

As McConnell winds down his tenure and, undoubtedly, his last term in the United States Senate with his health declining and his age advancing, Joe Biden should learn a lesson or two about stepping aside.

But also, as a long-time critic, I am an admirer from afar of a man I have never actually met or spoken to. He won. He kept on winning. He beat my friends. He and his loyal lieutenants ruthlessly advanced.

And what do we have to show for it?

The end of Roe v. Wade, a 6-3 United States Supreme Court, a Republican-appointed majority in six of the Courts of Appeal, near parity in several more, the end of most gun control legislation, blocking the Paris Accord and climate change legislation, and an aggressive culling of regulations imposed by the Obama administration at the end of his term.

In the meantime, Roe is dead. So, thanks, Mitch. You’ve earned your place in the history books as not just the longest-serving senator from the Commonwealth of Kentucky or the longest-serving Republican Leader in the Senate but also as a giant of the American political landscape.

To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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