Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is ending his 17-year reign as GOP leader in the upper chamber of Congress, but his legacy as leader has shaped another branch of the federal government — the Supreme Court.
During his six years as majority leader, the Kentucky Republican is best remembered for how he chose to confirm or deny appointees to the Supreme Court, but McConnell’s defining accomplishment began in 2013 with a warning to then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV): “You’ll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think.”
Reid was moving to dissolve the filibuster for judicial nominations — with a carveout for Supreme Court nominations — after frustrations over Republicans blocking then-President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees. McConnell and the Senate GOP, then in the minority, opposed the move. Nearly a year after Reid blew up the judicial filibuster, Republicans took control of the Senate, and McConnell would later take Reid’s actions to “its logical conclusion” by eliminating the cutout for the Supreme Court.
During McConnell’s first term as majority leader, he would face his first critical decision on the judiciary. When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia suddenly died in February 2016, Obama nominated Merrick Garland to the high court. If Garland was confirmed to the Supreme Court, the majority would have flipped from a 5-4 conservative majority — before Scalia died — to a 5-4 liberal majority. McConnell declined to give Garland a hearing or a vote, citing the election later that year and the divided government — with a Republican Senate and Democratic White House.
Shortly after Donald Trump took office in January 2017, he nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, and McConnell gave Gorsuch hearings, and eventually, the chamber voted him onto the high court. With Gorsuch’s confirmation, the court remained a 5-4 conservative majority.
The other two nominees McConnell would oversee as majority leader under the Trump presidency would also be pivotal. McConnell pushed through Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, despite controversy after multiple women levied sexual misconduct allegations against him — claims Kavanaugh denies. The third vacancy McConnell would lead the Senate in filling would be the most consequential.
When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suddenly died in September 2020, the GOP-led White House and Senate had the chance to replace a liberal justice with a conservative justice, solidifying a 6-3 conservative majority on the high court. After McConnell had opted not to give Garland a hearing or vote in an election year, he pushed forward Trump’s nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, with less than two months before the presidential election. Barrett would be confirmed Oct. 26, 2020, and the GOP would lose the White House and control of the Senate in the succeeding election.
Despite McConnell being the minority leader for the past three years, his impact on the judiciary is still being felt — and has caused some controversy.
In June 2022, the Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overruled Roe v. Wade and sent abortion lawmaking back to the states. The majority decision had five of the nine justices vote to overrule Roe – with three of those justices being the ones McConnell helped get confirmed.
The decision was a major win for conservatives, but it was also partially blamed for GOP underperformance in the 2022 elections — where Republicans failed to win back the Senate.
Another potentially consequential decision could be handed down from the Supreme Court in the coming months, when the high court rules in a case that could take down the Chevron doctrine established in the 1984 decision in Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council. The Chevron deference states that a court should defer to a federal agency’s “reasonable” interpretation of the law that allows them to create a rule when one is legally challenged.
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As the Supreme Court continues to be a thorn at Democrats and President Joe Biden’s side, the firm conservative majority on the high court can be credited to McConnell’s key moves as GOP leader.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), in a statement on Wednesday, put McConnell’s impact on the courts succinctly, declaring that “no Member of Congress has played a greater role in reshaping the federal judiciary than Mitch.”