WASHINGTON — Key conservatives are panning Mitch McConnell’s decision against offering an alternative agenda to voters if Republicans reclaim control of the U.S. Senate later this year.
While GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy has begun putting forward outlines of legislation he’d pursue in a Republican-led U.S. House, McConnell has demurred at that approach, preferring to stick to a playbook of battering weakened Democrats.
“I think this is another example of McConnell being out of step with the Republican Party. He doesn’t want to run on an agenda, because he wants to control things afterwards. Everybody from McCarthy to Donald Trump, every candidate is going to run on an agenda,” said David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth, the powerful small government advocacy group.
“That’s the old Republican, kind of RINO [Republican In Name Only] approach, that [John] Boehner had in the House and now McConnell has. And it’s the reason that we lost the majority. Because we had candidates in Georgia that didn’t really stand for anything.”
Brent Bozell, founder of the Media Research Center, fretted that the absence of a conservative policy agenda is pure “stupidity” which risks handing a reason for some voters to stick with a Democratic Senate.
“That’s horrifying. The only agenda Mitch McConnell has is power for himself,” said Bozell. “To brazenly declare the Republican Party stands for nothing is mind-boggling. Why isn’t he championing a tax cut? Why isn’t he championing cutting spending? It tells me if he takes the majority they will do nothing.”
With a 50-50 Senate up for grabs in November, McConnell has indicated he sees the 2022 midterm elections as primarily focused on the Democratic Party’s failures to stem inflation, the surge of undocumented immigrants at the southern border and President Joe Biden’s mishandling of foreign policy, including last summer’s abrupt pull-out in Afghanistan and an emboldened Russia now threatening war in Ukraine.
A fresh unknown for McConnell to calculate is the pending fight over a new Supreme Court Justice in the wake of Stephen Breyer’s imminent retirement.
“I think the midterm election almost certainly is going to be a referendum on the party in power,” McConnell told Fox News last week. “This is an entirely Democratic government: Democratic President, House and Senate, they are in charge of governing. And these midterm elections are always a report card on the performance of those who are in charge, those who are governing.”
When a reporter asked him at a separate press conference what a GOP-steered Senate would pursue with power, the Kentucky leader replied, “That is a very good question and I’ll let you know when we take it back.”
Some read that to be the equivalent of when Nancy Pelosi declared in 2010, “We have to pass the bill, so you can find out what is in it,” in pitching former President Obama’s health care law.
In that instance, Republicans howled with outrage that she was hiding her intent. Now many are piping up against their own.
No overarching theme
“The GOP doesn’t have to do much to remind people of how bad the Democrats are. But the second half of that equation is persuading the voters to hire the GOP. If you only do one half of the job …it is entirely possible that a very unpopular Democratic Party retains power,” said Cleta Mitchell, a longtime Republican lawyer and GOP activist.
She added, “If the GOP doesn’t have a policy agenda well in mind to campaign on, they will not know up from down once they win.”
The public appears to agree, but may not mind. A national Monmouth University survey released Wednesday showed that just 27% of Americans think Washington would get more done with Republicans in charge; a plurality of 41% said it would be the same as now.
McConnell has been careful not to overset expectations in what’s shaping up to be a highly favorable political environment for Republicans. He has only placed 50-50 odds on returning to the majority, fully cognizant of the unpredictable primaries that need to be settled in the months to come. This year’s marquee races in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania are the states that produced some of the closest margins in the 2020 presidential race. And the current 50-50 split means just a single wayward candidate could stain what should be a banner Republican year.
Thus far, leading Republican Senate candidates are mostly sticking to general platitudes in their campaign promises, with some exceptions.
Mehmet Oz, the former TV talk show surgeon now running for an open seat in Pennsylvania, has said his three goals are “safety, our children thriving and jobs.” One of his primary opponents, Dave McCormick, released an advertisement vowing to “fight the woke mob hijacking America’s future.”
Georgia’s Herschel Walker, the former NFL star, has relegated his media appearances to largely conservative outlets, like Fox’s Maria Bartiromo, where he said, “I don’t even have to talk about it. You see this inflation, you see how we lost this public safety. Right now we’ve got national security at risk as well. Well, why? It’s because we put the wrong people in office.”
In North Carolina, contenders have been more specific, with Rep. Ted Budd proposing legislation that would allow Americans to sue Big Tech companies for censoring political speech and Pat McCrory advocating to restore funding for former President Donald Trump’s border wall and a balanced budget amendment.
Still, there’s no overarching theme between the candidates, other than thrashing Democratic rule.
Conservative policy minds have noticed and are becoming more vocal in criticizing what they see as McConnell’s status quo positioning.
Rachel Bovard, the director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute who just penned a piece for The Federalist that charges the GOP will “do nothing” with its power, said she’d heard from conservative lawmakers who are itching to lean into a bold policy contrast. But she suspects McConnell isn’t on board with such radical ideas.
“McConnell isn’t afraid of Democrats attacking his agenda. The campaign arm thrives in that environment. He’s afraid of GOP base voters attacking his agenda,” Bovard said.
‘Doesn’t want the pressure’
Opposition to amnesty, breaking up the Big Tech companies, cracking down on military adventurism abroad and ending all types of mandates could be the core of the Republican pitch, according to Bovard. But she suspects McConnell actually doesn’t support all of the planks conservatives want, “so he just stays silent rather than expose that to the base.”
“The vague hand waving to general platform issues like ‘energy independence’ isn’t going to cover it anymore. That’s an expectation for baseline governance, not a compelling vision.
“We actually need an agenda — a list of things we will promise to do to help people’s lives get materially better, and then we need to leave blood on the field trying to do it,” said Bovard. “And that last bit is the rub — my other suspicion for why McConnell doesn’t commit out loud to an agenda is because he doesn’t want the pressure of the follow through.”
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, acknowledged that while he’s disagreed with McConnell on many issues, he trusts his steady strategic hand.
“He’s a pretty sharp strategist when it comes to the U.S. Senate,” said Perkins. “I know he’s been criticized a lot by conservatives… [but] conservatives have looked to him more than once to take care of bad stuff.”
In the last encouraging midterm political environment for Republicans in 2014, the party faced the same quandary.
“If you asked the average voter what’s the Republican plan for 2015, I don’t think they can say it,” Fox News’ Chris Wallace said on his Sunday morning program in October of that year.
McConnell, faced with his own high-profile primary and general elections that year, ignored suggestions by his colleagues to unite around a modern day “Contract with America.” In his final Republican weekly address in 2014, he framed the stakes in simple terms: The Republicans would produce legislation for President Barack Obama to sign or veto.
“A new Republican majority wouldn’t mean we’d be able to get everything you want from Washington,” the Kentucky senator said. “But it would mean we’d be able to bring the current legislative gridlock to a merciful end. It means we’d be able to start sending bills to the president’s desk again, just as the American people expect.”
It didn’t matter that McConnell was speaking in vagaries; his party netted nine seats, largely as a result of widespread discontent with Obama.
Soon after, the calendar soon turned to the 2016 presidential race and the rise of Trump, who remade what it means to be a Republican. McConnell might’ve taken the lesson that the GOP wasn’t punished for being the Seinfeld party. But the ascension of Trump proved that a vacuum of vision will eventually be filled by someone – and most likely by whoever carries the party’s banner into 2024.
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