Three months ago, Mitch McConnell ran the Senate GOP. Now he’s going it alone as he wages battles against some of President Donald Trump’s highest-profile nominees.
The Kentucky Republican became the only member of the Senate GOP’s 53-seat conference to oppose more than one Trump pick with his votes this week — first opposing Tulsi Gabbard’s director of national intelligence nomination on Wednesday and then Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Health and Human Services nomination on Thursday.
“He has expressed the fact that he is going to be independent,” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.). “He is not burdened with … leadership, and if he has a disagreement on a particular individual he will express that.”
McConnell was hardly alone among Senate Republicans in raising doubts about Gabbard, Kennedy and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose confirmation he opposed last month. Several colleagues who hail from the same traditionalist wing of the GOP aired similar concerns about those nominees’ fitness for office.
But only the 82-year-old Kentucky Republican ended up voting against all three. That’s a reflection of the fact that he is unlikely to stand for reelection and thus has no need to curry favor with Trump. Their relationship, in fact, went sour years ago. It gives him immunity from the primary threats, arm-wringing and behind-the-scenes lobbying that brought other GOP senators into line.
Asked about his votes, McConnell’s office on Thursday pointed back to his Jan. 16 floor speech where he offered an early outline of what his approach would be. Known as a ruthless operator but committed Senate institutionalist, he said he would support a “large slate of nominees” who have “credentials and records prove them worthy of the highest public trust and whose policy views align with the administration’s goal.”
In comments since then, McConnell has been unflinching in making clear he believed the Senate should exercise its constitutional powers and reject some of Trump’s nominees.
“The Senate’s power of advice and consent is not an option; it is an obligation, and one we cannot pretend to misunderstand,” he said in a blistering statement opposing Gabbard. “When a nominee’s record proves them unworthy of the highest public trust, and when their command of relevant policy falls short of the requirements of their office, the Senate should withhold its consent.”
Still, Republicans don’t expect McConnell to be a larger headache where it will matter — on Trump’s legislative agenda, with the former leader himself predicting that he will support most of what the administration tries to do.
With 53 seats, the Senate GOP can afford to lose his vote at times, freeing him to cast symbolic opposition to some of Trump’s most controversial nominees while supporting the rest. Notably, he voted to advance Hegseth, Gabbard and Kennedy past key procedural hurdles before opposing their final confirmation. He has also voted for the other 13 of the 16 nominees the Senate has confirmed so far.
McConnell is also following the golden rule of the Senate: How you vote is up to you, but don’t surprise your own party leaders.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said McConnell’s votes weren’t unexpected. “Like any senator he is entitled to vote however he chooses to vote,” he said.
McConnell made clear that after stepping down as party leader he would use his perch in the Senate to try to enact and speak up for his priorities — particularly by pushing back on an isolationist worldview that has increasingly dominated his party’s foreign policy posture.
Ahead of Trump’s formal return to office, McConnell said at a national security conference at the Ronald Reagan Library in December that “America will not be made great again by those who are content to manage our decline.”
He also warned in a statement late last year that Trump’s picks should avoid trying to undermine vaccines, saying that “anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming Administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts.”
McConnell, a polio survivor, took an especially dim view of Kennedy’s skepticism about the vaccine that could have spared him from a devastating childhood illness that affected his mobility into adulthood.
Yet those warnings didn’t prevent any of the picks he opposed from ultimately getting confirmed — or from preventing some of his colleagues from criticizing his strategy. It’s a move that would have once been unthinkable given McConnell’s iron grip over his conference, but became increasingly common in the final years of his leadership reign.
“As I said when I ran against him for leader, we ought to have somebody up here who supports the Trump agenda and supports the Trump nominees and he hasn’t now — he hasn’t, he doesn’t,” said Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), whom McConnell easily defeated in a leadership race in 2022.
Lisa Kashinsky contributed to this report.
