Sen. Mitch McConnell’s legacy is the current Supreme Court and a judiciary reshaped by his ‘calculated audacity’

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell departs the Senate chamber on February 28, 2024 in Washington, DC. Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images by Al Cross, University of Kentucky Mitch McConnell, who announced on Feb. 28, 2024, that he would step down as the Senate GOP leader later in the year, used his tenure as the longest-serving Senate leader of any party to remake the federal judiciary from top to bottom. His success could hardly have been predicted when Senate Republicans elected McConnell as their leader in 2006. For most of the 40-plus years I have watched McConnell, first as a reporter covering Kentucky politics and now as a journalism professor focused on rural issues, he seemed to have no great ambition or goals, other than gaining power and keeping it. He always cared about the courts, though. In 1987, after Democrats defeated Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, McConnell warned that if a Democratic president “sends up somebody we don’t like” to a Republican-controlled Senate, the GOP would follow suit. He fulfilled that threat in 2016, refusing to confirm Merrick Garland, Barack Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court. Keeping that vacancy open helped elect Donald Trump. Two people could hardly be more...