Updated February 20, 2025 at 17:20 PM ET
Sen. Mitch McConnell has announced he will not seek reelection next year, ending a 40-year career in Congress that saw the Kentucky Republican serve as the longest-serving Senate party leader in U.S. history.
"Seven times my fellow Kentuckians have sent me to the Senate," McConnell said on the Senate floor Thursday, his 83rd birthday. "Every day in between, I've been humbled by the trust they place in me to do their business right here. Representing our commonwealth has been the honor of a lifetime. I will not seek this honor an eighth time. My current term in the Senate will be my last."
One of the most consequential and controversial legislators who helped redefine the modern Senate, McConnell stepped down from leadership last year after facing questions about his health. Now 83, he abruptly froze and seemed unable to speak during two news conferences in July and August of 2024. In March of 2023 he fell during a dinner event at a D.C. hotel and spent five days in the hospital.
McConnell's most lasting legacy will be his efforts to remake the federal judiciary, shifting the balance of the courts toward conservatives, likely for the next generation. Those actions made him a hero of the conservative movement, despite years of attacks questioning his commitment to the cause and a frayed relationship with President Trump.
First elected to the Senate in 1984, McConnell was soon driven by a singular political ambition to become majority leader. A cunning tactician who understood how to accumulate power at home and inside the Beltway, he carved a strategic path through the Senate by securing a seat on the Appropriations Committee that allowed him to drive federal dollars back to help his state and shore up his influence — and reelection chances — back home.
In Washington, McConnell worked his way up the leadership ladder, serving in elected positions including Senate campaign chair, whip and minority leader before being elected majority leader when Republicans won control of the Senate in the 2014 election, some 30 years after he first entered the chamber.
During the Obama presidency, McConnell worked with determined focus to block any legislative victories while Democrats held the White House and enjoyed super majorities in Congress.
"The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president," he told National Journal just before the 2010 election. In that goal, McConnell failed, but he remained on a collision course with the Obama White House that would come to be his most defining moment in office.
McConnell and the courts
In 2013, then Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., went "nuclear" in the Senate. Tired of Republicans blocking Obama's judicial nominees, he forced through a rules change on a party line vote to make it easier to confirm lower court nominees with a simple majority vote. The rules change did not apply to the Supreme Court.
"You'll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think," McConnell warned Democrats at the time.
It was prescient: Three years later, Justice Antonin Scalia — an icon on the right — died suddenly, 10 months before the 2016 presidential election. It was plenty of time to fill the seat by Senate standards and precedents, but McConnell was under pressure to block a Democratic president from filling the conservative jurist's seat.
McConnell quickly rallied every Senate Republican behind his strategy to hold the seat vacant until after the presidential election. Obama's appointee, Merrick Garland, never even received a Senate hearing. McConnell told The New York Times in 2019 that the Garland decision was "the single most consequential thing I've ever done."
McConnell, like most of Washington, was expecting Hillary Clinton to defeat Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Ironically, McConnell's decision to hold the seat vacant may have played a role in Trump's victory, propelling white evangelicals to show up in higher numbers for him on Election Day to protect what they viewed as a critical Supreme Court seat that Trump had publicly pledged to fill with a conservative.
"It really did have an impact on the election," Trump said, "People knew me very well, but they didn't know, 'Is he liberal? Conservative?'"
Trump's victory paved the way for a Republican president to nominate Neil Gorsuch to fill the Scalia seat. Democrats promptly threatened a filibuster, and McConnell — like Reid before him — went nuclear again, forcing through a rules change on a party line vote that now lowered the threshold to confirm Supreme Court nominees to a simple majority vote. The rules change allowed Trump to put two additional conservatives, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, on the Supreme Court over Democratic objections, reshaping the court to a 6-3 conservative majority.
McConnell did not stop there. During Trump's first-term he eschewed any real legislative agenda in favor of pushing through as many conservative judicial nominations as possible while a Republican was in the White House. While Trump and McConnell had a rocky personal relationship, they shared that goal.
"The nation owes an immense debt of gratitude to a man whose leadership has been instrumental to our success," Trump said of McConnell at a 2019 White House event. Democrats complained vigorously but had little power to block him.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., accused McConnell of turning the so-called "world's greatest deliberative body" to "a very expensive lunch club" that occasionally votes on judges.
All told, McConnell helped guide 234 Trump appointed judicial nominees to the Supreme Court, circuit courts, district courts and the U.S. Court of International Trade in four years.
A strained relationship with Trump
For Trump, McConnell was at times his closest ally or his perceived greatest enemy in advancing the president's agenda. McConnell tried and failed — due to opposition from his old foe, Arizona Sen. John McCain — to force through a 2017 effort to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act.
Throughout his term in office, Trump publicly pressured McConnell to once again invoke the nuclear option to change filibuster rules, but this time on legislation, to make it easier to pass Trump's agenda. McConnell held the line against the president, in part because he did not have the votes he'd need to do it anyway.
The Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol was a breaking point in their relationship. While McConnell did not vote to convict Trump in the impeachment trial that followed, he made his feelings plain in a Senate floor speech.
"There is no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day. No question about it," McConnell said, "The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president. And their having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth."
Despite the harsh words, McConnell endorsed Trump's presidential bid in 2024.
In the first weeks of Trump's second term, McConnell, no longer in a leadership position, voted against three of Trump's Cabinet nominees: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
For McConnell, who battled polio as a child, the vote against Kennedy was a personal one. Kennedy faced sharp questions during his confirmation about his history of promoting conspiracy theories and unfounded fears about vaccines and other public health measures. In a statement explaining his vote, McConnell said that "a record of trafficking in dangerous conspiracy theories and eroding trust in public health institutions does not entitle Mr. Kennedy" to lead the Health and Human Services department. Trump called McConnell "a bitter guy" after his vote against Kennedy.
In his floor speech Thursday, McConnell said that "the weight of our power to advise and consent has never been lost on me."
The Senate is trusted, McConnell said "on behalf of the American people, to participate in the appointment of the federal judiciary, to be the final check on the assembly of power in the courts beyond the reach of representative politics, and to ensure that the men and women who preside over them profess authentic devotion to the rule of law, above all else."
"When members of this body ignore, discount or pervert this fundamental duty," he continued, "they do so not just at the peril of the Senate but of the whole nation."
The fight for Ukraine
McConnell and Trump have also been at odds on Ukraine since Russia's invasion in 2022, with McConnell one of the loudest Republican defenders in Congress of U.S. military aid. While he did not address Ukraine by name in his remarks Thursday, he stressed the importance of national defense and he told his colleagues that his work was not over.
"Thanks to Ronald Reagan's determination, the work of strengthening America's hard power was well underway when I arrived in the Senate, but since then, we've allowed that power to atrophy," McConnell said. "And today, a dangerous world threatens to outpace the work of rebuilding it. So lest any of our colleagues still doubt my intentions for the remainder of my term, I have some unfinished business to attend to."
Minutes after McConnell's speech, Kentucky's Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron announced he would run for the Senate seat. Republican Rep. Andy Barr also said he is considering a run.
One name not expected to appear on the ballot: Kentucky's Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear. In a post on social media, one of Beshear's top strategists said the governor "is not running for Senate."
Whoever wins the Republican primary will become the overwhelming favorite in a state that Trump carried by 30 points in November.
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