Mitch McConnell is on his way out – first as Senate Republican leader, at the end of this year, then as senior senator from Kentucky, surely at the end of 2026. There are no real signs to the contrary, but the 82-year-old Louisvillian won’t come out and announce his retirement just yet, perhaps because it would diminish his influence. Washington still listens to him, and he still brings home its bacon.
When House Republicans passed a government-funding bill with a purely political provision supposedly banning non-citizens from voting (already illegal), which threatened a government shutdown because it was unacceptable to Senate Democrats and President Biden, McConnell said “It would be politically beyond stupid” to shut down the government, and House Speaker Mike Johnson backed off. Donald Trump wasn’t happy, which probably pleased McConnell.
Unfortunately, a decade of such brinksmanship, episodically ended by last-minute, catch-all spending bills that avoid spending cuts to please majorities in both parties, has worsened the nation’s financial situation to the point that our national debt is now larger than the gross national product – a threshold many economists warned against. That, and the occasional standoffs in Washington over raising the debt limit, threaten to undermine the dollar as the world’s main reserve currency, a status that gives us unique leverage across the world.
There will be a reckoning next year, with expiration of the deficit-ballooning tax cuts passed by a Republican Congress and Trump in 2018. Meanwhile, McConnell has reclaimed his status as Congress’ biggest slicer of “pork,” local projects funded by federal appropriations.
In the appropriations bills passed before the August recess, McConnell had $498.9 million worth of projects, more than any other senator and far ahead of second-place Susan Collins (R-Maine), who had $361 million. Almost all the difference is the leader’s biggest lick, $218 million to finish the long-delayed larger locks at Kentucky Dam, an appropriation also included in the House energy-and-water bill by First District Rep. James Comer.
Other biggies include $138 million for an Army Reserve hangar at Fort Knox, $50 million for a biomedical research building at the University of Kentucky, $22 million for a precision-medicine center at the University of Louisville, and $20 million to fix the Edmonson County Water District’s supply problem, caused by federal removal of an old dam that exacerbated pollution in Mammoth Cave.
Democrats control the Senate, but spending your money is the most bipartisan of legislative processes; the 49 Republicans in the 100-member Senate got 46 percent of the pork. And McConnell is making up for lost time; he helped pass the bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill in 2021 but “sat out the earmarking process in each of the first three years after Democratic leaders brought it back in 2021, after a decade-long absence,” CQ Roll Call reported. At the end of that year, McConnell issued a press release decrying “Democrats’ reckless tax-and-spending spree.”
What changed? McConnell is giving up the leadership of a Senate caucus that is largely opposed to earmarks and more concerned about spending and the debt, and he seems intent on getting as much federal help for our relatively poor state as he can before he leaves office. He could become chairman of the Appropriations Committee, the catbird seat for spending, if Republicans take control of the Senate – which seems more likely than not.
McConnell is probably all the more eager to bring home the bacon from the next Congress because he knows that Kentucky’s other senator, Rand Paul, would need to undergo a deep philosophical conversion to become a pork slicer. Paul is a deficit hawk who makes a priority of reducing spending and the debt. His last “Festivus Report“ claimed $900 billion in wasteful spending. (The current Senate earmarks total $7.74 billion.)
Because Paul is out of the Republican and congressional mainstream, he’s mostly been a talker on spending, not a doer. If and when he becomes our senior senator, it would be folly to expect much help from him when it comes to getting our share of federal outlays. That should be a priority for representatives of a poor state.
It’s good to talk about reducing spending and the debt, but as long as Congress continues its current practices, I am glad we have Mitch McConnell to slice the pork. And Hal Rogers does a good job of it in the House, as his constituents all over his Fifth District will attest.
Perhaps next year’s reckoning on taxes will also bring a reckoning on spending. Let’s hope it does. But in the fight for federal dollars, which will continue no matter what happens, Rand Paul will amount to unilateral disarmament. So let’s wish Mitch McConnell good slicing.
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