‘A significant loss.’ Kentucky will have less clout in D.C. without its Senate leader

For the last 17 years, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky often was in the room — sometimes the Oval Office in the White House — where the nation’s most important decisions were made and billions of taxpayer dollars were spent.

If McConnell could grab a little something for Kentucky while sitting there, he wasn’t shy about doing so.

He engineered a $10 billion tobacco buyout for Kentucky farmers, helped get hemp legalized as a replacement crop, secured tax breaks for the thoroughbred horse racing industry and spirits distillers, and brought home a staggering fortune for Kentucky’s roads, bridges, water and sewer lines, military bases, universities and other projects.

“All 100 senators may have one vote,” McConnell explained in 2018, “but they’re not all equal. Kentucky benefits from having one of its own setting the agenda for the country.”

That’s coming to an end.

McConnell, 82, will step down as Senate GOP leader in November, he announced Wednesday, although he intends to stay in office as a senator until his seventh term ends in January 2027.

As a result, Kentucky can expect to have far less influence in Washington, a half-dozen political observers predicted.

“It’s a significant loss because he’s been very helpful to this state, and the other senator (Republican Rand Paul) doesn’t have much to show for his service,” said Al Cross, longtime Kentucky political writer and director emeritus of the Institute for Rural Journalism at the University of Kentucky.

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It matters who succeeds McConnell, observers said. The new GOP leader could either consult McConnell as a respected elder and keep him in the loop, or else ignore him.

One candidate, John Cornyn of Texas, is a valued friend of McConnell’s. Another, John Barrasso of Wyoming, is close to former President Donald Trump, who openly despises McConnell.

“At this point, it does not seem like the junior senator from Kentucky (Paul) is in a position to wield any similar power, so if things do not go well for McConnell, Kentucky will really be without clout,” said Don Dugi, a political scientist at Transylvania University in Lexington.

The changes won’t all be immediate.

For the remainder of his Senate term, McConnell is likely to continue as a senior member of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, which decides federal spending.

Although he’s a staunch conservative, McConnell does not necessarily object to spending bills. He was one of 19 Senate Republicans who voted in 2021 for the $1 trillion federal infrastructure bill, describing it as “a godsend” for money that it allocated to repair and replace aging roads and bridges. An angry Trump blasted McConnell for that vote and called him “the Old Crow.”

Kentucky’s aging representatives

Across the Capitol, 86-year-old U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Somerset, is also a senior member of his own chamber’s appropriations committee, pulling a hefty sum of federal money back to his Southeastern Kentucky district.

But McConnell and Rogers are nearing the end of long careers in office, with no Kentuckian poised to replace them on the key spending committees.

And losing McConnell as one of the Big Four congressional leaders — the top Republicans and Democrats in the Senate and House, who set the agendas and advise presidents — is a generational forfeit, observers said.

“It’s not like the needs of Kentucky will have changed once Senator McConnell and Congressman Rogers are gone. But Kentucky’s ability to meet those needs will be severely diminished,” said Steve Ellis, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a watchdog group that sometimes criticized McConnell for Kentucky-related spending that he slipped into the budget.

Having a Senate leader from your state means more than just getting a juicy slab of federal pork, Ellis added.

“It’s hard to put a price tag on it,” Ellis said.

“You have to look at things beyond appropriations,” he said. “Like, McConnell was really, really aggressive on legalizing hemp. That doesn’t seem like the normal thing you would expect to see a Republican leader pushing on, but it was a big deal for the agricultural interests in the state.

“So, there were a lot of things he did like that, not just dollars and cents but more generally about his influence. Where did certain facilities go because of him? What projects went through because of him? It’s hard to put a total on it, but it’s definitely in the hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions over that total time-frame,” Ellis said.

Building a pipeline

A serious if less appreciated loss for the state will be the dismantling of the “McConnell Machine,” the tightly organized political operation that ran the senator’s election campaigns as well as his offices in Washington and Kentucky, said University of Kentucky political scientist Steve Voss.

Many bright young Kentuckians “found their way into government and politics” by going to work for McConnell, Voss said. They now hold a wide variety of important public and private sector posts, including federal judges, Washington lobbyists and top state elected officials in Kentucky.

“McConnell’s ability to fill jobs in D.C., both in his office and indirectly through other offices, is going to be a big hit for ambitious young Kentucky Republicans who are trying to get a foothold,” Voss said.

“McConnell really stands out in terms of the warm feedback I hear from people who’ve worked for him,” Voss said. “For a guy who isn’t seen as warm and mostly is disliked even by people who support his policies, when it comes to the public stage, he gets a surprisingly different reaction from people who have worked in his office.”