Mitch McConnell will end his Senate career with his most indelible mark on the nation’s federal courts and the chamber’s judicial confirmation process, a priority that changed the chamber’s rules and solidified a conservative Supreme Court for the foreseeable future.
As majority leader during the last two years of President Barack Obama’s presidency, McConnell used his control of the Senate to slow judicial confirmations to all but a trickle. He also led his party to leave open for months a Supreme Court vacancy left by the Feb. 2016 death of Justice Antonin Scalia, when Obama’s pick of Merrick B. Garland would have given a liberal tilt to the high court.
And then Donald Trump won the 2016 election. McConnell made judicial confirmations his top priority and changed the Senate filibuster rules to lower the threshold needed for Supreme Court nominees. That mirrored a rule change on lower-court nominees made in 2013 by the previous majority leader, Harry Reid, D-Nev., which Republicans took advantage of to sweep in Trump’s other judicial picks at a record pace.
