How things have changed in the Senate

A top aide to onetime Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, Charles Ferris, died recently. Just days later, the man who surpassed Mansfield’s record leadership tenure, current Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, announced he was stepping down.

The two seemingly unconnected events provide a reminder of the contrasting tenures of the Senate’s two longest serving leaders.

Mansfield, the scholarly Montanan who was majority leader from 1961 to 1977, presided over a golden age for the Senate as it surmounted the earlier domination of Southern troglodytes to pass landmark domestic legislation and raise serious questions about U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

The New York-born former professor of Far Eastern history cultivated a statesmanlike image, while his aides, led by Ferris, a clever Bostonian pol, helped craft the majorities that passed the era’s epic civil rights acts and the Great Society’s many landmark measures.

McConnell, the ultra-political Kentuckian who evolved from a pro-civil rights moderate to the crafty architect of a partisan Supreme Court more conservative than prevailing public opinion, epitomizes the Senate’s subsequent decline.

His legacy is not totally negative. His current effort to ensure continued U.S. support for Ukraine’s courageous fight against Vladimir Putin is not unique. He helped craft bipartisan solutions that kept the government functioning.

And to his credit, despite the resulting political problems it caused him, McConnell privately made it quite clear he was contemptuous of Donald Trump and publicly blamed him for the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection that invaded the Capitol.

But when it came time for him to hold Trump accountable, he blinked, voting to acquit a man he knew to be guilty in the mistaken belief he would just fade away, like other defeated candidates.

If that was a mistake in judgment, McConnell’s other failures were intentional. When conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, McConnell used his power to ensure that President Barack Obama’s chosen successor, Merrick Garland, got neither hearing nor vote in an election year.

For a body where precedent looms large, that directly reversed the way a Democratic majority confirmed Republican President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Justice Anthony Kennedy in 1988.

When new President Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch for the Scalia seat in 2017, McConnell changed the rules to prevent a Democratic filibuster and enable the GOP’s slim 52-48 majority to confirm him. And when liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg died two months before the 2020 election, McConnell pushed through her conservative successor, Amy Coney Barrett, in record time, laying the basis for the court’s subsequent decision overturning its 1973 ruling legalizing abortions.

McConnell also played a crucial role in challenging campaign finance reforms and championed the high court ruling opening the floodgates to unregulated corporate election spending.

His rightward swerve, reflecting his party’s, drew criticism from the former Kentucky Republican senator he served as a legislative aide to early in his career, Marlow Cook.

In 2014, Cook condemned McConnell’s opposition to Obama’s health plan, telling Mother Jones magazine, “I am absolutely amazed he became a conservative.” But he added, “If there is one thing Mitch is, he’s a remarkable politician.”

To be sure, McConnell shares blame for the Senate’s slide into partisanship with at least two predecessors. Republican Bill Frist, while GOP leader, broke an unwritten rule in 2004 by going to South Dakota to campaign against his Democratic counterpart, Tom Daschle.

And Democrat Harry Reid used his majority in 2013 to bar filibusters against district and appeals judges, facilitating several Obama nominations but setting a precedent for McConnell to extend the change to Supreme Court nominees.

Reid and McConnell were a far cry from Mansfield, who was majority leader when I covered the Senate for the Associated Press. His Senate was a more decorous body where bipartisanship often reigned -- as in its civil rights battles – but where bitterly partisan debates over the Vietnam war occasionally flared.

Its makeup was very different – in 1971, 20 states had one senator from each party, an institutional spur to the compromises so hard to reach today. Currently, as Axios recently noted, only five do.

Relations between the parties – and their leaders -- were far better, reflected in Mansfield’s 1972 trip to China with Republican Leader Hugh Scott, or President Lyndon Johnson’s ties with Scott’s iconic predecessor, Sen. Everett Dirksen.

Things began to change in Mansfield’s later years after the arrival of ultra-conservative rules mavens, like North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms and Alabama Democrat James Allen.

Until then, the Senate only had to invoke rules curbing the filibusters used to talk legislation to death on major measures, like the 1957 and 1964 Civil Rights Acts. But Helms and Allen began to force such votes on more routine motions.

And though the rules were liberalized in 1975 to lower to 60 the number needed to break a filibuster, the fact that the Senate became more closely divided politically made it easier for the minority party to muster the 41 votes to block action.

More recently, as Trump’s influence on the GOP grew, even a carefully crafted bipartisan bill like the recent immigration measure was easily killed. Even a wily operator like McConnell had difficulty getting things done, though, ironically, he had better relations with Democratic President Joe Biden than with Trump.

Unfortunately, he leaves leadership with a legacy of helping make the Senate a far different place from the body he joined four decades ago.

Mike Mansfield wouldn’t recognize it at all.