Sen. Mitch McConnell has announced he will not seek reelection next year, ending a 40-year career in Congress that saw the Kentucky Republican serve as the longest-serving Senate party leader in U.S. history.
“Seven times my fellow Kentuckians have sent me to the Senate,” McConnell said on the Senate floor Thursday, his 83rd birthday. “Every day in between, I’ve been humbled by the trust they place in me to do their business right here. Representing our commonwealth has been the honor of a lifetime. I will not seek this honor an eighth time. My current term in the Senate will be my last.”
One of the most consequential and controversial legislators who helped redefine the modern Senate, McConnell stepped down from leadership last year after facing questions about his health. Now 83, he abruptly froze and seemed unable to speak during two news conferences in July and August of 2024. In March of 2023 he fell during a dinner event at a D.C. hotel and spent five days in the hospital.
McConnell’s most lasting legacy will be his efforts to remake the federal judiciary, shifting the balance of the courts toward conservatives, likely for the next generation. Those actions made him a hero of the conservative movement, despite years of attacks questioning his commitment to the cause and a frayed relationship with President Trump.
First elected to the Senate in 1984, McConnell was soon driven by a singular political ambition to become majority leader. A cunning tactician who understood how to accumulate power at home and inside the Beltway, he carved a strategic path through the Senate by securing a seat on the Appropriations Committee that allowed him to drive federal dollars back to help his state and shore up his influence — and reelection chances — back home.
In Washington, McConnell worked his way up the leadership ladder, serving in elected positions including Senate campaign chair, whip and minority leader before being elected majority leader when Republicans won control of the Senate in the 2014 election, some 30 years after he first entered the chamber.
A strained relationship with Trump
For Trump, McConnell was at times his closest ally or his perceived greatest enemy in advancing the president’s agenda. McConnell tried and failed — due to opposition from his old foe, Arizona Sen. John McCain — to force through a 2017 effort to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act.
Throughout his term in office, Trump publicly pressured McConnell to once again invoke the nuclear option to change filibuster rules, but this time on legislation, to make it easier to pass Trump’s agenda. McConnell held the line against the president, in part because he did not have the votes he’d need to do it anyway.
The Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol was a breaking point in their relationship. While McConnell did not vote to convict Trump in the impeachment trial that followed, he made his feelings plain in a Senate floor speech.
“There is no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day. No question about it,” McConnell said, “The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president. And their having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.”
Despite the harsh words, McConnell endorsed Trump’s presidential bid in 2024.
In the first weeks of Trump’s second term, McConnell, no longer in a leadership position, voted against three of Trump’s Cabinet nominees: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
For McConnell, who battled polio as a child, the vote against Kennedy was a personal one. Kennedy faced sharp questions during his confirmation about his history of promoting conspiracy theories and unfounded fears about vaccines and other public health measures. In a statement explaining his vote, McConnell said that “a record of trafficking in dangerous conspiracy theories and eroding trust in public health institutions does not entitle Mr. Kennedy” to lead the Health and Human Services department. Trump called McConnell “a bitter guy” after his vote against Kennedy.
In his floor speech Thursday, McConnell said that “the weight of our power to advise and consent has never been lost on me.”
The Senate is trusted, McConnell said “on behalf of the American people, to participate in the appointment of the federal judiciary, to be the final check on the assembly of power in the courts beyond the reach of representative politics, and to ensure that the men and women who preside over them profess authentic devotion to the rule of law, above all else.”
“When members of this body ignore, discount or pervert this fundamental duty,” he continued, “they do so not just at the peril of the Senate but of the whole nation.”
