The longest serving Senate party leader in U.S. history, Louisville’s 82-year-old Mitch McConnell announced Wednesday that he is stepping down as leader of the Senate Republican Conference — a position he’s held since 2007 — and will finish out his term ending January 2027 “in a different seat.”
Associated Press Washington Deputy Bureau Chief Michael Tackett was first with the news.
A member of the U.S. Senate since 1985, McConnell was majority whip from 2003 until 2007, minority leader from 2007 until 2015, majority leader from 2015 until 2021, and since Joe Biden’s election has once again held the minority leader chair.
In an emotional address to the Senate well, McConnell confirmed a new Republican leader will be elected to serve the party in November before taking office next January.
And he will be along for the journey.
He did not cite health as a key reason for this change, despite recent public scares, and instead noted it was “time to move on to life’s next chapter” and make room for new officials.
McConnell’s well-documented efforts can be defined as deft, deliberate, yet sometimes divisive.
Most recently, he was a critical cog in securing key appropriations and protections for Paducah’s Barkley Regional Airport, as well as the drafting and passing of the Land Between the Lakes Recreation & Heritage Act. In a July 2021 visit to Murray, he spoke on the country’s need to embrace a COVID-19 vaccination — himself a survivor of polio — and in a January 2022 visit to west Kentucky, he made several rounds to survey storm damage and speak with survivors from the December 2021 tornadoes.
In the last 38 years, he has secured billions of federal dollars for the Commonwealth, and for a wide variety of job sectors and infrastructure needs. In December 2019 alone, he toted $1 billion for Kentucky’s regional projects, which included tax breaks for distillers and new military construction at Fort Knox and Fort Campbell.
A mainstay at Graves County’s Fancy Farm Picnic, McConnell has gone from one of Kentucky’s lone Republican voices in the pulpit to its loudest, leading what’s been a swift change in the state’s majority over the last four decades.
By eliminating the 60-vote requirement to end filibusters for Supreme Court nominations, McConnell paved the way for conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to take seats under the Donald Trump administration — effectively bringing the end of abortion rights originally provided in controversial Roe v. Wade. In 2022, he announced his opposition of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination as a replacement for Stephen G. Breyer.
He’s filed support for Trump’s domestic and foreign policies and did vote to acquit him in his second impeachment trial, but he has since deemed him “practically and morally responsible” for the January 6, 2021, insurrection of the U.S. Capitol, and has been overtly critical of Trump’s insistence of a stolen election process.
A graduate of DuPont Manual High School and the University of Louisville, he’d eventually go on to work under President Gerald Ford as Deputy U.S. Assistant Attorney General before his election as Jefferson County Judge-Executive from 1977 until 1984.
