Mitch McConnell announces his resignation as leader of the Republicans in the Senate | USA Elections

Republican Senator Mitch McConnell announced this Wednesday that he will leave his position as party leader in the US Upper House next November. McConnell led the conservative minority in the Senate and is the politician who has held those reins for the longest time in history, more than a decade, which also coincides with the most turbulent time in the conservative formation, inaugurated with the emergence of Donald Trump, a declared enemy of McConnell, on the Washington political scene.

McConnell, who turned 82 last week and has his seat secured until 2027, made his decision public to his colleagues in the Senate, a scene he has known well since his arrival in 1985, with a speech in which the politician, with his usual gesture Undaunted, he might not hide his emotion.

“One of the most underrated talents in this life is knowing when it is time to move on to the next chapter, which is why I stand before you today, Mr. President and dear colleagues, to tell you that this will be my last term as Republican leader of the Senate,” McConnell said.

He justified the decision by saying that he is going through “a particularly difficult family moment,” referring to the recent death in a car accident in Texas of his sister-in-law, the younger sister of his wife, former Cabinet Secretary Elaine Chao. “We tragically lost Angela just a few weeks ago,” McConnell said. “When you lose a loved one, especially at a young age, there is a certain introspection that accompanies the grieving process,” he added.

The Kentucky senator then warned: “I still have enough gas in my tank to completely disappoint my critics, and I intend to do so with all the enthusiasm to which they have become accustomed.”

Clear way for Trump

It is inevitable to associate McConnell’s announcement with the decision of the president of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, to resign from her position next week, three days following the vote on Super Tuesday, a day in which primaries are organized in 15 States and in which everything indicates that Trump’s designation as a candidate for next November’s elections will be confirmed. The minority leader in the Senate is one of the former president’s favorite targets, whom he usually denigrates with one of his favorite insults: RINO, an acronym in English for “lip service Republicans.”

McConnell is the living image of the most traditional faction of the Republican Party, the one derived from Ronald Reagan’s conservative revolution in the 1980s, and which has had a difficult time navigating once morest the populist current of Trump and his ilk. The loudest disagreement came with the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, when thousands of Trump supporters put the lives of legislators at risk, McConnell among them, following the still president, who refused, and still refused, He refuses to accept his defeat once morest Joe Biden in 2020, haranguing them at the end of a rally in Washington.

Before that, at the end of Trump’s first term in the White House, McConnell made perhaps the most consequential political decision of his career, one that will influence American public life for decades. It was following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, when he stepped on the accelerator to confirm Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in the last gasp of the 2020 election campaign, despite the fact that in the past he had promised that he would not do something like that. In this way, the high court, whose nine justices are elected for life, leaned towards a super-conservative majority of six to three, unprecedented in this country for eight decades.

“Believe me, I know my party’s politics at this particular moment,” McConnell argued in a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday. “I have many flaws, but that is not one of them.”

Last year, the senator showed signs of weakness following suffering a serious fall. Later, he starred in several regrettable episodes during which he momentarily froze in the middle of an argument before the media. And in recent months, he has also earned the dislike of his coreligionists for associating with the Democrats, and especially with their leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, to carry out an aid package for Ukraine in its defense of Russian aggression in a war that turned two years old last week, as well as to reach an agreement on the border that will help unblock the current migration crisis. Trump does not want this problem to be resolved, out of pure electoral calculation, and has managed, in another demonstration of the control that he once once more has over the party, for congressmen to torpedo this Senate initiative.

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