Workers vacuum algae from the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, after recent renovations following a directive from U.S. President Donald Trump to paint it blue ahead of the 250th anniversary of U.S. Independence, in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 21, 2026. REUTERS/Aaron Schwartz
Mitch McConnell isn't voting this week. His office isn't saying much about why, just that he's been hospitalized. Curt answers, no timeline, no details.
I worked in PR for more than 30 years, and one thing you learn is that when the news is scant, the situation usually isn't good. The less said, the worse it often is.
Which raises a harder, more uncomfortable question: Is Mitch McConnell on his way to becoming the Senate's next Dianne Feinstein, another colossus of American politics whose final chapter became a prolonged and very public unraveling?
Feinstein's decline was genuinely, achingly sad because her record enabled the tremendous loss that followed her decline. She authored the federal assault weapons ban at a moment when taking on the gun lobby required real political courage.
She forced the CIA torture report into daylight at enormous personal cost, standing up to the intelligence community when almost no one else would. And she was an early and fierce champion of LGBTQ rights at a time when it took guts to step forward.
When Dianne Feinstein faded, there was something worth mourning. A legacy that justified the sorrow.
In McConnell's case, things get complicated, and not in a good way. Because all the complications McConnell caused have complicated our lives in ways as far and wide as a 2,028-foot Reflecting Pool.
While everyone is using the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool as a metaphor for the rot, contamination, and botched job Donald Trump has done to America, they're missing the man who helped create the conditions for the whole mess in the first place: Mitch McConnell.
He metaphorically stripped honor, decency, and restraint from the basin of democracy. He drained rights, norms, and protocols from the democratic process. And into that void he poured a dark conservative Supreme Court and helped create the conditions for the algae bloom of corruption and autocracy that followed with Donald Trump.
Long before Trump arrived, McConnell spent decades quietly and methodically dismantling the democratic infrastructure, the proverbial pipes that kept everything flowing. With sinister shrewdness, he bided his time, peeling away one layer at a time.
He knew how to play the game, and he played it dirty. He understood that the rules could be bent until they broke and that few would stop him if he moved slowly enough.
When Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, McConnell did something with no modern precedent. He simply refused to hold hearings for President Barack Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland, for nearly a year. No vote. No process.
It was a raw act of procedural thievery. He invented constitutional cockamamie and called it principle. He held the seat open until a Republican president could fill it, then helped install two more conservative justices, creating a 6-3 supermajority that has dismantled the constitutional right to abortion, weakened the regulatory power of federal agencies, and handed corporations and dark-money interests one victory after another.
The Court McConnell built will shape this country for generations.
When a Court ruling comes down that is gobsmacking, presidential immunity being only one example, people like to yell at Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch.
They should be yelling at Mitch McConnell.
And then there is the money.
McConnell spent the better part of his career as the most dedicated and effective opponent of campaign finance reform in modern American history. He fought McCain-Feingold tooth and nail. He pursed his razor-thin, snake-like lips and hissed that unlimited political spending was a constitutional right.
He helped cultivate the legal and political environment that made Citizens United possible, a ruling that blew the doors off campaign finance law and left American elections awash in unaccountable dark money.
The corrupting flood now pours through every campaign, every election cycle, every race from county commissioner to president of the United States. McConnell didn't just benefit from that system. He helped build the plumbing.
Don’t scream at the Court about Citizens United. Scream at Mitch McConnell.
Finally, there is Jan. 6.
After the Capitol was attacked and five people had died, McConnell voted against convicting Donald Trump in his impeachment trial. Then, in an act of astonishing cowardice, he stood on the Senate floor and declared that Trump was "practically and morally responsible" for the assault anyway.
And the little runt of a hypocritical, sanctimonious man did nothing.
Actually, that's not true. He did something catastrophic. He gave Trump a permission structure to come roaring back for a second term.
When people scream at Trump for the grift, the excesses, the assaults on democratic norms, and the tawdry messes that seem to multiply by the day, they should remember the man who made it all possible.
Mitch McConnell.
Shrewd. Ruthless. Patient. Pathetic.
And now the rot he engineered over four decades is bubbling to the surface in ways we cannot fully count. It extends to the courts, the flood of money in politics, the growing flirtation with authoritarianism, and the weakening of institutions that once seemed durable.
And I need to make this point. There is no celebration in watching an elderly man become ill. None. I watched it happen to my grandfather, and it's crushing.
That is not what I'm writing about. An old man's body failing him deserves sorrow, whatever he has done.
But if we're being honest, Mitch McConnell bears enormous responsibility for the decay of American democracy as we approach our 250th anniversary, with its future hanging in the balance.
It hangs there because McConnell spent four decades stripping away guardrails, norms, and good faith. He treated democratic governance as a game to be manipulated rather than a system to be preserved, waiting patiently like the snake that he is, until power was within reach like hanging fruit, and then striking, doing away with all that is good and decent.
So when people look at that murky, corroded Reflecting Pool and ask who poisoned the water, they're looking at the wrong man.
Donald Trump may be the algae floating on the surface. Mitch McConnell is the cracked pipe underneath.
And long after the pool is drained, scrubbed, and refilled, we'll still be repairing the damage that leaked from McConnell’s vandalism.