Mitch McConnell Is A Mentor With Muscle

Kentucky State Sen. Whitney Westerfield ran for attorney general in 2015. He lost by 0.2 percent. On the one hand, perhaps he should have won--2014-16 were fairly GOP-leaning years in America and particularly in Kentucky. On the other hand, Westerfield lost to Andy Beshear, whose father was still governor back then and has turned out to be a fairly-skilled politician in his own right.

Fast forward to late 2018. Westerfield was gearing up for a second run at AG--and the job was open, since Beshear was running for governor. He lined up endorsements from many of the key Republicans in the state legislature. He seemed like the candidate. Then, a Louisville lawyer and former Mitch McConnell aide on Capitol Hill named Daniel Cameron told the Courier-Journal he was considering getting into the race. Cameron was asked if the powerful senator was behind his candidacy. He didn’t answer directly. But the story included a glowing quote praising Cameron from Terry Carmack, who directs McConnell’s operations within Kentucky. 

Westerfield got the message. He soon announced he was not running for attorney general after all. Cameron entered the race. But so did another state senator, Wil Schroder, who represents a district in Northern Kentucky near Cincinnati. Cameron had no experience as a prosecutor, while Schroder had served a six-year stint in a county prosecutor’s office. Many Republicans in the state legislature endorsed their colleague. 

Schroder probably should have heeded the signals too. Cameron significantly out-raised Schroder, helped by McConnell allies who urged people to contribute to Cameron’s campaign. A D.C.-based group allied with McConnell called the Judiciary Crisis Network aired several hundred thousand dollars in ads, touting Cameron as an ally to President Trump. Despite Schroder’s consistently-conservative record in the state legislature, Cameron’s campaign sent out mailers casting Schroder as a Democrat because he had voted in the Democratic presidential primary back in 2008. 

Cameron defeated Schroder in the Republican primary and then easily won the general election in fairly-red Kentucky. And he is a man who could be going places way beyond Frankfort. Cameron is charismatic, young (34) and it’s worth noting, black in a party often lacking prominent black voices. He has already become a national figure, making Fox News appearances  and meeting at the White House with Trump. He has embraced being one of the GOP’s more high-profile black elected officials, speaking at a “Black Voices for Trump” event in Atlanta in November and recently bashing Joe Biden’s flippant comment that “you ain’t black” if you can’t decide if Biden or Trump is the better candidate. 

And it’s important to acknowledge McConnell’s role here. Cameron, as a college student at the University of Louisville, was part of the McConnell Scholars program, an initiative that the senator and U of L alum is heavily involved in that brings major political figures to campus to speak to students and helps students make connections if they want to get into politics. Cameron later worked in the senator’s office in Washington as a legal adviser from 2015-2017. 

And if McConnell played a key role in helping Cameron get elected, as I have strongly implied, that is not a bad thing. In fact, if either political party is going to have fewer white men and more people of color and women in major roles, it will probably require powerbrokers in each party, like McConnell, to intervene and directly promote these non-traditional candidates. Getting elected is in part about fundraising and building a major network of allies and donors---and often powerful white men in politics have those networks and have to choose to share them with others to help them advance. 

That said, Cameron’s ascent may not be totally altruistic on the senator’s part either. McConnell arguably already has four major legacies: 

1. The chief architect of the Republican Party’s ascent in Kentucky, a state once dominated by Democrats; 

2. The leading figure in the GOP’s oppose-at-all costs approach during the Obama years, which arguably broke democratic norms but also stalled Obama’s political goals and kept open a Supreme Court seat and many lower-court judicial slots that Trump has now filled; 

3. The executor of an initiative by Trump, the president’s legal advisers and McConnell to appoint a ton of young, deeply-conservative judges to the federal bench, who will be deciding the fate of laws long after McConnell and Trump have left the political scene; and

4. Trump’s most important defender on Capitol Hill, mostly notably preventing witnesses from testifying in Trump’s impeachment trial and mobilizing Senate Republicans to vote against the president’s removal from office. 

McConnell, who is 78, seems to be working on a fifth project: political godfather, putting his proteges into key posts. Over the resistance of even one of his Republican colleagues, McConnell this week pushed for and got a successful vote to put Justin Walker on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, 

arguably the second most-powerful court in the land because it makes rulings on a lot of cases involving the president, Congress and federal agencies. 

Walker only served for about eight months in the district court in the Louisville area. But the Louisville native was an intern for McConnell and after serving as a law clerk for Brett Kavanaugh on the D.C. appeals court on which Walker will now sit, Walker was one of the judge’s strongest supporters after Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault during his Supreme Court confirmation process. Likely because of his Louisville roots and strong support of Kavanaugh, McConnell seems deeply invested in Walker’s advancement and has now helped him get one of the most prestigious jobs in America’s judiciary. 

Walker is only 38 years old. So it’s easy to imagine he is considered for and perhaps even gets a seat on the Supreme Court over the next few decades. Cameron is also young and almost certain to be considered for jobs in the cabinet for future Republican presidents, as well as potentially being a governor or senator. 

I’m not the only person thinking this way. 

“It is hard to predict who will end up on the Supreme Court, but he clearly has all the credentials you want in a Supreme Court justice,” McConnell told the New York Times in a recent interview, referring to Walker. 

Thanks for reading.

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