Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, is the most effective
politician of his generation. He may also be the least liked. Exit polls
taken during last week’s special election in Alabama, a state as
conservative as they come, found that only sixteen per cent of voters
viewed McConnell, the most powerful conservative in the Senate,
favorably. He unites an otherwise polarized country, in that both the
left and the right see him the same way: as an enabler of Washington’s
special interests, a legislative plumber with little evident feeling for
the generalized public. When Steve Bannon is lurching through a speech,
he knows that he can revive a crowd with a sneer at McConnell’s expense.
To liberal comedians, the Senate Majority Leader has become a figure of
sustaining anthropological wonder. “Look at how his right eye blinks
entirely independently of the other one,” the comedian Desus pointed out earlier this year, looping a
clip of the Kentuckian speaking on CNN, and marvelling. McConnell was on
the Senate floor on Wednesday morning just after midnight when
Vice-President Mike Pence, holding the gavel, declared that the mammoth Republican tax bill had passed. Some Republicans in the room cheered
vigorously—the bill accomplishes a number of longtime Republican goals
to cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy, and represents the
Party’s lone major legislative accomplishment this year—but McConnell,
standing with some colleagues at the front of the chamber to Pence’s
left, just gave a small, patting clap.

American politics in 2017, from most points of view, was chaotic,
destabilizing, dehumanizing, and very occasionally sublime. But from
McConnell’s preferred perspective—that of the legislative calendar—the
year went pretty much as planned. Last November, on the day after Donald
Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton, when other Republicans
were giddy and talking up the possibilities of the coming Trump era,
McConnell gave a press conference to explain his interpretation of the
election results and his thoughts on the year ahead. The Republicans, he
said, had been given only “a temporary lease on power”; he warned
against overreaching. The Majority Leader said that he expected a
Supreme Court nominee to be sent to the Senate soon. When he was asked
about his legislative priorities, he mentioned only tax reform. When
pressed about Trump’s call for a border wall, he was tepid; when asked
about whether relations with Russia would change, he made what, for him,
was a stirring speech affirming America’s commitment to NATO. The view
of 2017 from the Senate Majority Leader’s office is bracingly
straightforward. The conservative ideas that McConnell made a priority
became real. Others didn’t.

There has been a temptation to view both McConnell’s efficacy and his
unpopularity as functions of his character. And yet as the tax-overhaul bill gathered momentum this month—as passage came to seem inevitable—it
clarified that McConnell’s political difficulties are a function of his
program. His party, having been given a unified government, was able to
pass a very unpopular bill that cuts taxes on the middle class by a
little bit, for a little while, and cuts taxes on the very wealthy by a
lot, forever. In January, when Congress returns from its winter break,
the new Democratic senator from Alabama, Doug Jones, will be seated,
reducing McConnell’s slim partisan majority to fifty-one votes. Going
into a midterm-election year, Democrats are viewed more favorably than
they have been in years, and Republicans, generally less so. For
McConnell, Tuesday night may have been the peak.

There had been some disruptions early in the day, when the House was
voting on the tax measure. Capitol police massed outside the Chamber,
holding wrist ties in case demonstrators grew rowdy, and a few did; one
woman took off her top in protest. But by the time the vote reached the
Senate, in the evening, its progress was assured. Around dinnertime on
the East Coast, Bret Baier, of Fox News, arrived in McConnell’s office
for a summative interview. “We’ve had eight years of stagnant growth—the
country’s significantly underperforming,” McConnell said. He said that
Democrats, who were united in their opposition to the bill, were
evidently “satisfied with where we are.” McConnell spoke to a reporter
again in the early morning hours, after the bill’s passage. “By any
objective standard, it’s been a heck of a year for us,” he said.

For half a decade, McConnell’s counterpart in Washington has been Paul
Ryan, the House Speaker, a more vivid and ideological figure. On Wednesday
morning, the public victory lap for the tax bill was his: Ryan’s entire
career could be plausibly described as a twenty-year effort to engineer
a law like this. “A giddy Mr. Ryan smiled broadly and banged the gavel
with force,” the Times reported,
describing the moment on Tuesday when the House passed the bill. Ryan
was eager to offer sound bites. “We are giving Americans back their
money,” he said, without delineating which Americans would be getting
most of the money. In recent weeks, as the tax bill was nearing the
finish line, there have been reports that Ryan, who is just forty-eight,
might retire from the Speaker position at the end of the term and return
to Wisconsin. When asked about
this possibility on Wednesday morning, he said only that “on questions
way down the line, I’ll address those way down the line.”

It is next to impossible to imagine McConnell going anywhere. His
closest analogue, the former Democratic leader Harry Reid, who retired
at seventy-seven and has lately been in the news musing
about the existence of U.F.O.s; McConnell is seventy-five, and it’s
impossible to imagine him ever going in for the extraterrestrial.
McConnell always seems to pivot to the next piece of business, the
conflict to come. One subplot on Tuesday involved Senator Susan Collins,
the Republican from Maine, who had been instrumental in thwarting her party’s
effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act earlier this year, and had decided to vote
for the tax bill only in exchange for McConnell’s promise to extend the
Obamacare subsidies that help Americans buy health insurance. House
Republicans had bristled at this, insisting that they would not be held
hostage to McConnell’s deals, and on Tuesday reporters tracked Collins
down to ask her about the episode. What she addressed was the running
implication that she had been duped. The coverage, she said, had been
“incredibly sexist.” Then she left. McConnell’s great ally, Senator
John Cornyn, of Texas, said later in the evening that a way would be
found to make good on this deal. “Senator McConnell has made a
commitment to Senator Collins,” Cornyn said. “He feels obligated to
follow through.”

It is a decent thing to stand by a promise to a colleague, and it is a
more decent thing to use the power of the government to help people who
cannot afford health insurance to buy it. By comparison, the ideological
grumbling from the House seemed mean. But McConnell’s hold on power is
weaker than it was a year ago. His strength came from being seen as a
manager of consensus. But by trying to rush through two profoundly
flawed bills—first Obamacare repeal, then this tax bill—without any
substantive hearings or efforts to involve Democrats, that image has
evaporated. When Senator Luther Strange, McConnell’s man, was
floundering in the Republican primaries in Alabama against the insurgent
extremist Roy Moore, McConnell could articulate no system of shared
belief that voters in the state found compelling, only the promise of
allegiance. Though he had begun the year by warning the Republicans
against overreaching, McConnell could not much delay the rush toward a
vote on Tuesday, and so the tax bill on its way to being signed by
President Trump is crueller than it might have been, and more confused
and less popular. McConnell’s institutionalism is not built around a
politics so much as around his reputation. The word from his allies
Wednesday morning might have been that he was planning to fight for
Collins’s subsidies because Americans needed them. Instead, it was that
he had made a promise to a friend.