When Pete Hegseth was approved last week in the tightest confirmation vote for any Defense Secretary in history, three Republican senators voted against him.
President Trump was not surprised that Mitch McConnell — who remains a Kentucky senator after stepping down as Senate Republican leader — was one of them. “Of course, Mitch is always a ‘no’ vote,” he told reporters.
But I was somewhat surprised. Not only because Trump’s statement isn’t quite true (McConnell rarely, if ever, broke with Trump on a major vote in his first term) but also because the vote came just as I was putting the finishing touches on this interview with McConnell biographer Michael Tackett.
In our interview — which was conducted shortly before Trump’s inauguration, and before the Hegseth vote — Tackett expressed skepticism that McConnell would vote against any Trump nominees unless he knew the pick was doomed to be defeated. “He’s not a big fan of futile gestures,” Tackett told me. “So he’s not going to be the lone vote against a nominee, because what’s the point?”
And yet, there McConnell was, making a futile gesture.
The Hegseth vote suggests that McConnell’s final chapter in the Senate might be more dramatic than even his closest observers forecasted.
Tackett’s prediction may not have proved correct, but his book — “The Price of Power: How Mitch McConnell Mastered the Senate, Changed America, and Lost His Party,” published late last year — contains plenty of clues for what McConnell might do next, which makes it a must-read for anyone curious about the enigmatic Kentucky senator.
One of the more interesting threads in Tackett’s book, for example, is McConnell’s devotion to the late Sen. John Sherman Cooper, the Kentucky Republican for whom McConnell interned as a college student and views as one of his few political heroes. Cooper was an early supporter of civil rights legislation, a backer of Medicare, and one of the first to call for Joe McCarthy to be censured; in his first term, he voted with his party only 51% of the time.
“He was a highly independent decision-maker, who, on big issues, frequently went against the flow, and I liked that, admired that, and have done that frequently myself,” McConnell said in an 1998 oral history interview, made available exclusively to Tackett.
Few outside observers would probably agree with that assessment of McConnell’s career — but it’s revealing that it’s his self-perception. At one point in the book, McConnell grapples with whether he’s truly followed in Cooper’s mold.