[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 97 (Tuesday, June 12, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3754-S3756]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




CONGRATULATING MITCH McCONNELL AS THE LONGEST SERVING SENATE REPUBLICAN 
                                 LEADER

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, the Senate majority leader, Senator 
Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, will become the longest serving Senate 
Republican leader in history, surpassing former Senator Bob Dole of 
Kansas. This is according to the Senate historical office. Today is 
Senator McConnell's 4,179th day as Senate Republican leader--a position 
he assumed on January 3, 2007, after Republicans lost control of both 
Chambers of Congress.
  I would like to take a few minutes to put Senator McConnell's 
leadership in perspective. That perspective begins in the year 1969. I 
was 29 years old and working in the Nixon White House. Senator Howard 
Baker, Jr., of Tennessee, said to me: ``You might want to get to know 
that smart, young legislative assistant for Marlow Cook.'' Marlow Cook 
was Kentucky's newly elected Republican Senator. That smart, young 
legislative assistant was 27-year-old Mitch McConnell.
  If one has known him for a long time, the evolution of Mitch 
McConnell's Senate leadership isn't hard to trace. To begin with, when 
he was 2 years old, the doctor said: ``Mitch has polio.'' It is hard to 
imagine today how terrifying those words were for parents then. 
McConnell remembers:

       It was 1944. There was a serious epidemic that year all 
     over the country. And the disease was very unpredictable. 
     First, you'd think you had the flu, and a couple of weeks 
     later, some people would be completely normal and some of 
     them would be in an iron lung or dead.

  He continued:

       In my case, it affected my left quadriceps, the muscle 
     between the knee and your thigh. And in one of the great good 
     fortunes of my life, my mother was living with her sister in 
     this little crossroads of Five Points, Alabama, where there 
     was not even a stoplight--while my dad was overseas fighting 
     the Germans--and it happened to be 60 miles from Warm 
     Springs, where President Roosevelt had gone [to treat his own 
     polio]. My mother took me to Warm Springs. They taught her a 
     physical therapy regimen, and said to do it four times a day 
     and to keep me off my feet. She watched me every minute and 
     prevented me from really walking.
       My first memory in life is when they told my mother I was 
     going to be okay, that I'd be able to walk without a limp, 
     and we stopped at a shoe store in LaGrange, Georgia, on the 
     way back to Alabama to get a pair of low top shoes, which 
     were a kind of symbol I was going to have a normal childhood.

  If one knows about the determination of Mitch McConnell's mother, it 
is not hard to imagine how her son determined as a college student to 
be a U.S. Senator, and did; determined to be his party's Senate leader, 
and did; and then determined to hold that leadership position longer 
than anyone in U.S. history, and has. This was an arduous, two-decade 
leadership journey: chairman of the National Republican Senatorial 
Committee, counselor to Majority Leader Trent Lott, majority whip, 
minority leader, and finally, majority leader.
  As for his mother's example, this is what Mitch McConnell said: ``It 
sure had to have an effect on me, which was that if you stick to 
something, you keep working at it and giving it your best, the chances 
are you may actually overcome whatever problem you're currently 
confronting.''
  A second leadership quality that Mitch McConnell learned early--in a 
fistfight--was to not be pushed around. According to McConnell, ``I was 
about 7. We lived in Athens, Alabama, and I had a friend across the 
street named Dicky McGrew who was a year older than I was and 
considerably bigger. He was also a bully and he kept kind of pushing me 
around. And my dad called me over and said, `Son, I've been watching 
the way he's been pushing you around and I want you to go over there 
and I want you beat him up.' ''
  So, McConnell says, ``I went across the street and started swinging 
and I beat him up and bent his glasses, and it was an incredible lesson 
in standing up to bullies and I've thought about that throughout my 
life at critical moments when people are trying to push you around.''
  As a junior Senator on the Foreign Relations Committee, Mitch 
McConnell surprised colleagues when he sponsored sanctions against the 
apartheid regime in South Africa, and then

[[Page S3755]]

in 1986, he voted to override President Reagan's veto of those 
sanctions, but these colleagues would not have been surprised had they 
known McConnell 25 years earlier when he was a student at the 
University of Louisville.
  He remembers:

       The civil rights movement was the defining issue of our 
     generation. Working as an intern in Congress during the 
     summer of 1963, I got to see [Martin Luther King, Jr.'s] ``I 
     Have a Dream'' speech. Then, in 1964, I was an intern in 
     [Kentucky Senator] John Sherman Cooper's office. Two 
     important things happened in 1964. Cooper was in the middle 
     of breaking the southern Senators' filibuster on civil rights 
     and we nominated Barry Goldwater, one of the few people who 
     voted against the Civil Rights bill. Honestly, I was mad as 
     hell about it. And I was so irritated about Goldwater voting 
     against the Civil Rights bill and defining the Republican 
     Party in a way that I thought would be unfortunate that I 
     voted for Lyndon Johnson, which in retrospect was a huge 
     mistake. But it was a protest vote.

  That willingness as a college student to buck his own political party 
resurfaced 40 years later in his leadership on First Amendment free 
speech issues. In 2006, he cast the deciding vote against the adoption 
of a constitutional amendment to prohibit flag burning when most of his 
Republican colleagues and almost all of his constituents had a 
different point of view. He argued that the First Amendment protects 
even personally offensive messages, and McConnell became the Senate's 
leading voice against restrictions on political speech under the guise 
of ``campaign reform.'' Again, some in his own party disagreed, 
including President George W. Bush and Senator John McCain, but he 
persisted and on multiple occasions, the Supreme Court has agreed with 
McConnell's view of protecting political speech under the First 
Amendment.
  Two of the three U.S. Senate office buildings in Washington, DC, are 
named for Philip A. Hart of Michigan and Richard B. Russell, Jr., of 
Georgia, two Senators who were never elected to formal leadership 
positions by their colleagues. In this book, Senator McConnell 
discusses ``leaders without portfolio'' in some of his writings, 
describing occasions when a Senator assumes a major policy role outside 
of the confines of formal party or committee leadership. His favorite 
was Senator Cooper, whom Mitch has described as ``my role model as a 
young man, a man of great conviction, very smart.'' In his 
autobiography ``The Long Game,'' Senator McConnell tells of when Cooper 
took him to the signing of the Civil Rights Act and, later on, of 
watching Cooper's principled questioning of the Vietnam war.
  Senator Cooper's example must have influenced his young intern's one-
man crusade 20 years later against a repressive junta in faraway Burma. 
According to the New York Times, on September 15, 2016, Senator 
McConnell ``has been a lead sponsor of every major sanctions measure 
against the Burmese government over the last 20 years and has worked 
quietly and tirelessly with several administrations to try to bring 
democracy to the country.''
  ``Unlike South African apartheid, it was a totally unknown cause,'' 
his foreign policy adviser, Robin Cleveland, told the Times. He 
championed the cause of Burma's pro-democracy leader, Daw Aung San Suu 
Kyi, who for years was under house arrest. In 2012, when San Suu Kyi 
came to Washington, DC, as the new head of government, she traveled to 
Kentucky ``to thank [McConnell] for everything he did for us over, 
well, two decades. That's a long time,'' she said.
  Of course, in order to be the Senate leader, one first has to be 
elected to the Senate. In Mitch McConnell's early career, one can find 
multiple clues that point to his fascination with political campaigns 
and the pugnacious style with which he wins them. Of course, an early 
signal was the fistfight with Dicky McGrew. Another: ``I was the only 
14-year-old in America watching political conventions from gavel to 
gavel [and] I began to practice the craft and see if I could get good 
at it.'' When he was elected president of his high school student body, 
he remembers, ``I was hooked.'' At the University of Louisville, he 
campaigned for president of student council both in college and in law 
school, participated in civil rights marches on the State capitol, and 
as president of the College Republicans, persuaded Barry Goldwater to 
come to campus to speak.
  He did learn the craft of the politics, and he did get good at it. He 
is undefeated in his own political campaigns, winning six Senate races 
in Kentucky, more than any other Commonwealth Senator. He has been 
elected Republican leader more than any other U.S. Senator, each time 
unanimously, and he has been proficient in not just his own races.
  In 2010 and 2012, the Senate Conservative Fund helped nominate 
Republican candidates in five States who lost the general election when 
more mainstream conservative nominees might have won. So, in 2014 and 
2016, McConnell organized an effort to defend incumbent Republican 
Senators who were challenged in primaries. He was successful in every 
case, including his own primary. This is what he said:

       We were not going to allow [what happened in 2010 and 2012] 
     to happen anymore. And so we got the most electable people 
     nominated who basically took them on, because if you're 
     dealing with a group of people who think compromise is a 
     dirty word and who always want to make a point but never want 
     to make a difference, the only thing to do if you want to win 
     the election is to beat them.

  Mostly, Mitch McConnell's political skills were born of necessity. In 
July 1984, he was 34 points behind in his challenge to incumbent 
Democrat Senator Dee Huddleston. McConnell discovered that his opponent 
had been making speeches for money--now, that was legal then--but Dee 
Huddleston had been missing Senate votes to make those speeches. So 
McConnell ran an ad featuring a Kentucky hunter with bloodhounds 
looking for Senator Huddleston to get him back to work. In another ad, 
the dog treed the Senator right at the end of what became known as 
``the bloodhound campaign.'' McConnell defeated Huddleston by fourth-
tenths of 1 percent of the vote.

  I have searched in vain for early clues to one more aspect of Mitch 
McConnell's leadership style: his parsimonious use of words. Sometimes 
he reverts to absolute silence. In his autobiography, he admits he only 
speaks to the press when it is to his advantage. He also tells of when 
Microsoft founder Bill Gates visited him and the two of them just sat 
there waiting for one to speak, making others in the room 
uncomfortable. At another time, someone once told President George W. 
Bush that Mitch McConnell was excited over a certain vote, and 
President Bush replied: ``Really, how can you tell?''
  Why so few words? McConnell's answer is, ``I learn a lot more by 
listening. And so frequently I start out by listening and think about 
what I want to say before I say it. You don't get in trouble for what 
you don't say. There's nothing wrong with being cautious about your 
comments. I certainly don't mind talking but I usually like to know 
what I'm talking about before I venture down that path.''
  He is not the first Senate leader to be frugal with words. According 
to columnist Bob Novak, former majority leader Mike Mansfield was the 
most difficult interview on ``Meet the Press'' because ``I would ask 
Mansfield a question and he says `Yep,' and then I would ask him 
another one and he'd say, `Nope' and I'd run out of questions.'' Former 
Vice President Dick Cheney, in his constitutional capacity as President 
of the Senate, would attend weekly luncheons of Republican Senators, 
rarely saying a word. This made certain that, when Cheney did rise to 
speak, Senators listened. And silence, after all, was one of Benjamin 
Franklin's 13 virtues and a tactic Franklin often employed in his 
leadership style.
  In July 2014, when he was minority leader, Senator McConnell spoke on 
the Senate floor about what kind of majority leader he would be if 
Republicans won the majority in the November elections. His model, he 
said, would be Mike Mansfield, the Democrat who was majority leader 45 
years earlier when McConnell and I were Senate aides. ``What I meant by 
that,'' he said, ``was . . . first of all, you have to open the Senate 
up. The last year of the previous [Democrat] majority (2014) there were 
only 15 roll call votes on amendments the entire year. In the first 
year of our majority, in 2015, we had over 200. Open the Senate up, let 
people vote. Number two, we needed regular order, which means the bill 
is actually worked on together in committee, comes out to the floor, 
with bipartisan support, and has a better chance of success. The best 
example I can think of

[[Page S3756]]

was the bill to rewrite `No Child Left Behind.' The law had proved to 
be unworkable and unpopular. And by the time it came out of committee, 
you had the Democrats and the Republicans lined up, it went to the 
floor, it was relatively open for amendments, not that absolutely 
everybody got everything they wanted, and in the end, it passed with a 
very large majority. President Obama called it a `Christmas Miracle' 
and the Wall Street Journal said it was `the largest devolution of 
federal control to the states in a quarter-century.'''
  McConnell is quick to list a series of bipartisan accomplishments 
during his time as majority leader which he regards as ``concrete 
legislative results for the American people.'' In addition to the first 
significant education reform since 2002, these accomplishments include 
the first significant reforms to Social Security since 1983, the first 
trade promotion authority bill since 2002, the first long-term highway 
bill since 2005, and the first major legislation to confront the 
Nation's opioid crisis. And don't forget, he says, measures to protect 
victims of human trafficking, to address Puerto Rico's fiscal crisis, 
to sanction North Korea, to strengthen the Nation's cybersecurity 
defenses, to reform Medicaid and to provide permanent tax relief for 
families and small businesses. These are serious accomplishments for a 
legislative body many had written off as irredeemably broken.
  ``Now, what do all these things that we have done time after time 
under our majority have in common?'' he asks. ``In a time of divided 
government, we're focusing on the things that we can agree on, and do 
those. Because when people elect divided government, I think what 
they're saying is, I know you have big differences, but why don't you 
look for the things you agree on and do those. And that's how this 
majority is totally different from the previous one.''
  To gather other clues for what kind of majority leader McConnell 
would be, one only had to look to previous Congresses when he was 
minority leader and was at the center of four major, bipartisan 
legislative efforts that helped to keep the American economy from being 
seriously damaged. At the end of 2010, the country was facing a tax 
``cliff.'' Republicans controlled neither the White House nor Congress. 
With an economy still reeling from the Great Recession, the expiration 
of tax relief threatened to further imperil the economy; yet Senator 
McConnell led a bipartisan effort to ensure that taxes were not raised 
on any Americans.
  The next year, the United States was on the verge of defaulting on 
its debt payments for the first time in history. With the clock ticking 
on the full faith and credit of the United States and calamitous 
economic consequences staring policymakers in the face, Senator 
McConnell negotiated an eleventh hour deal with Vice President Joe 
Biden. This measure avoided the devastating economic consequences of 
default and resulted in the most significant spending reductions in 
recent memory.
  In late 2012, the United States risked prolonging the Great Recession 
and increasing unemployment due to a series of expiring tax policies 
and indiscriminate spending cuts scheduled to take effect on January 1, 
2013. Once again, Senator McConnell crafted a bipartisan compromise 
with Vice President Biden to avert this fiscal crisis by preventing a 
tax increase on a majority of Americans and making the spending cuts in 
a more prudent manner.
  Finally, in 2013, a standoff involving Federal spending and the debt 
limit led to the second longest Federal shutdown since 1980, 
threatening thousands of public and private sector jobs, and putting 
the economic health of the country in jeopardy. Despite these 
challenges, Senator McConnell orchestrated an agreement with then-
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that reopened the government and 
raised the debt ceiling, allowing the United States to continue making 
payments on its debt.
  The humorist Roy Blount, Jr., who grew up in Georgia has written, 
``You start getting in trouble when you stop sounding like where you 
grew up.'' The political corollary is you start getting in trouble when 
you stop coming home. This is advice McConnell has not forgotten. He 
and his wife, Elaine, go home to Kentucky almost every weekend. He has 
kept his eye on Kentucky matters, both large and small, including 
disposal of chemical weapons that have long been stored in the middle 
of Kentucky, enacting a tobacco buyout to help local farmers, support 
for the State's public universities, and his advocacy for workers at 
the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant. Kentucky anglers and tourists 
appreciate his helping to enact a law to require the Army Corps of 
Engineers to allow fishing below the dams on the Cumberland River. 
Twenty years ago, he created the McConnell Center at the University of 
Louisville, attracting a bipartisan parade of national leaders to visit 
with 10 scholars chosen each year from each undergraduate class.
  Each year, Mitch McConnell buys 12 season tickets to the University 
of Louisville football games. He said:

       I have some regulars. We go to every home game and 
     occasionally an away game. We make a day of it. We go out 
     early. One of my friends has an RV in the parking lot and we 
     will talk about what will happen in the game and then go to 
     the game and then we talk about what did happen after the 
     game and it's a complete, lengthy exercise. And one of the 
     great joys of life.

  Mitch McConnell's University of Louisville honors thesis on Henry 
Clay tempted him to pursue a Ph.D. in American history and a career as 
a professor, but those of us who know him doubt that he would have been 
satisfied interpreting the action rather than being in the middle of 
the action, but his devotion to American history and his understanding 
of the importance of the U.S. Senate as a unique institution in 
American life have contributed a valuable extra dimension to his Senate 
leadership.
  In a 2016 C-SPAN interview, he was asked: ``What would you like for 
high school American history teachers to tell their students about the 
United States Senate?''
  He replied:

       That the Senate has been the indispensable legislative 
     body. Because that's the place where things are sorted out, 
     the place where only rarely does the majority get things 
     exactly their own way, the place where stability can occur.

  And at a time when many Americans are not optimistic about our 
country's future, he was asked: ``What would you want those teachers to 
tell students about their future in this country?''
  Mitch McConnell replied:

       Because of our woeful ignorance of American history we 
     always think the current period we're in is tougher than 
     others. We've had nothing like the Civil War period. We 
     haven't had a single incident where a Congressman from South 
     Carolina came over and almost beat to death a Senator from 
     Massachusetts. America's had plenty of tough challenges. 
     World Wars. Depressions. This is a great country. We're going 
     to deal with whatever our current problems are, and move on 
     to another level. And I'm just as optimistic as I ever was 
     that this generation is going to leave behind a better 
     America than our parents left behind for us.

  I thank the Presiding Officer.
  I yield the floor.

                          ____________________