The former U.S. Senate staffer unpacks the dysfunction on Capitol Hill.
With his latest book, The Betrayal: How Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans Abandoned America, Ira Shapiro completes his critically acclaimed trilogy on the U.S. Senate. In addition to writing, the former Senate staffer and trade ambassador for the Clinton Administration serves as president of Ira Shapiro Global Strategies, LLC, a consulting firm focused on trade policy and international government relations. A new edition of The Betrayal includes an updated foreword that adds the events of 2022-2023 to the story.
The Betrayal first came out in 2022. Why did you feel compelled to publish an updated version so soon, in 2024?
I was delighted that my publisher (Rowman & Littlefield) thought that The Betrayal was an important book that warranted a paperback edition. Jonathan Sisk, R&L’s senior editor, and I quickly agreed that the past two years (2022-23) were part of a continuing story about the Senate’s performance during this period dominated by Donald Trump, necessitating a substantial new foreword to bring the story up to date. I believe the updated edition provides important perspectives on the success of the Biden presidency; the Senate’s role in a surprising set of bipartisan accomplishments; Trump’s unexpected resilience and continued dominance of the Republican Party; the rampaging Supreme Court supermajority; and the consequences of the Republican Senate’s catastrophic failure to stop Trump’s assault on our democracy when it had the opportunity and the responsibility to do so. America has watched as the legal system has struggled to make up for the failure of the Senate to perform its constitutional role.
The string of legislative victories that President Joe Biden is touring the country and taking credit for were made possible by a dozen or more Senate Republicans joining Democrats with GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell’s blessings. They are the clearest manifestation of McConnell’s plan to reconfigure himself and his party post-Trump.
McConnell wants to recruit better candidates for 2024, meaning non-Trumpers, in what could be his best and last chance to regain the majority before age overtakes him.
Judging by the legislative wins he allowed last year—coupled with his presence alongside Biden in Kentucky and Ohio last week touting their joint effort on infrastructure—the wily McConnell has concluded his path to victory is not the obstructionism for which he is famous. Rather, he sees a more successful path forward through selective bipartisanship.
“He loves being the adult in the room, which contrasts quite well to the House and MAGA Republicans,” says Ira Shapiro, who spent 12 years working in the Senate and is the author of the 2022 book The Betrayal: How Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans Abandoned America, an unrelenting portrait of a politician whose actions reduced the Senate to a hyperpartisan, gridlocked shadow of its former self.
But now, as improbable as it seems, McConnell, the grim reaper, is adopting a new, more constructive persona. The politics have shifted with Trump’s power declining, voters saying they want normalcy, and House Republicans acting zany. “McConnell sees himself at the center and able to influence outcomes,” says Shapiro. “He doesn’t favor government shutdowns and putting our full faith and credit at risk. It’s reasonable to think he would align himself with the White House as opposed to the MAGA Republicans. No question McConnell is a more constructive player than Trump and the MAGA Republicans, but that’s a low bar. Compared to the great Senate leaders of the past, he’s a terrible failure.”
After Republican extremists tried repeatedly to sabotage the election of a new speaker, McConnell is seen as someone more open to working with the White House than with the House renegades, whose “message” bills on abortion and/or cutting entitlement programs will end up in the Senate graveyard he was once so proud of tending.
McConnell’s goals are to regain the Senate majority, to win back the White House for the Republicans, and to some extent he must be thinking about his legacy. He turned 80 last year, “and while guilt doesn’t often enter into his calculation, he might be motivated by regrets or guilt that he didn’t stop Trump from his assault on our democracy when there was full Republican control,” says Shapiro.
During the second impeachment of Trump, McConnell refused to allow any witnesses and delayed the proceeding until Trump had left office—only to then declare it unconstitutional to impeach an ex-president. Seven Republicans voted to convict Trump, 10 short of the 17 needed. If McConnell had sanctioned conviction, there would have been a different outcome.
His calculation then was that Trump was too strong to be taken down by his party, and that too is changing. McConnell is speaking out more, condemning Trump for the poor candidate quality that dashed GOP hopes in the midterms, for dining with an antisemite and a white supremacist, and for saying the U.S. Constitution should be terminated. “He detests Trump,” says Shapiro, and now he sees political advantage in aligning himself against the former president.
Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)’s announcement that she will not run for re-election in 2024 adds to an already complicated Senate map for Democrats. Three Democrats are running in red states, Montana, Ohio, and West Virginia, and there are key races in Pennsylvania and Arizona—any one of which could break for the GOP if they get free of Trump and field mainstream candidates.
This is not the first time the Senate has turned on a dime because McConnell changed his approach, says Shapiro. His previous constructive period was in 2015, after the Democrats lost the Senate in the 2014 midterms, and McConnell became majority leader. After six years of scorched-earth opposition to President Barack Obama, McConnell opened the spigot and allowed a series of bipartisan measures to get through.
McConnell seemed to enjoy the experience, calling working cooperatively with the White House to secure Trade Promotion Authority for Obama “something of an out-of-body experience,” and with wry humor observing that the Senate, once a legislative graveyard, now looked “like an Amazon fulfillment center.”
That constructive period ended when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly in February 2016. McConnell corrupted the confirmation process by refusing to consider Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, and allowing the seat to be filled by Neil Gorsuch, who Trump appointed after winning the 2016 election. Then, after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020, McConnell rushed Amy Coney Barrett to confirmation eight days before the 2020 election.
Shapiro chooses his words carefully as he commends the more constructive role that the Senate’s consummate tactician is adopting. It’s smart politics to advance McConnell’s goal of regaining the Senate majority.
When a friend asked him if there is anything McConnell could do to make him forgive him for the obstruction and the gridlock he inflicted, Shapiro replied, “He could denounce the Supreme Court for going too far,” quickly adding, “But that’s not going to happen. We’ve been living in Mitch McConnell’s America for a long time, and that’s going to continue.”
However much McConnell burnishes his record, his legacy remains a Supreme Court stacked with Trump appointees.
In a new book, author Ira Shapiro writes that Sen. McConnell saw the Trump presidency as an opportunity to push his agenda – cut taxes for the rich, attack the ACA, and turn the Supreme Court far to the right. “With the exception of the Affordable Care Act, he accomplished them very well,” Shapiro tells Lawrence O’Donnell. But, he adds, McConnell’s legacy is “far broader and far darker” than just the Trump years.
Panelists discussed the impact of the 2022 midterm elections on the 118th Congress and potential presidential candidates in 2024. The German Marshall Fund hosted this virtual discussion.
Today’s Senate looks very different from the Senate of the 1960s and 1970s, a time when those serving in Congress put “country over party.” Ira Shapiro, a former longtime Senate staffer and author of the new book The Betrayal: How Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans Abandoned America, discusses the many functions of the Senate, how it’s failed to provide leadership and what lies ahead of the 2022 elections and beyond. Shapiro is in conversation with Rabbi Eric Yoffie, President Emeritus of the Union of Reform Judaism, about how we can return to a time when Senators worked across the aisle.
Ira Shapiro’s recent book, The Betrayal: How Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans Abandoned America, chronicles the US Senate during the Trump presidency. As a veteran scholar and former Senate staffer with bipartisan experience, Shapiro determines that the Senate and its Republican members, led by Mitch McConnell (R-KY), ultimately abandoned late Senator John McCain’s (R-AZ) guiding principle ‘Country first’. Can the Senate recover its purpose and help resolve legislation to address America’s fundamental challenges? To discuss these issues, the United States Studies Centre hosted a webinar featuring Ira Shapiro and Bill Kristol, editor-at-large of The Bulwark, Director of Defending Democracy Together, former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle and one of the most incisive Republican intellectuals and commentators, in conversation with USSC CEO Dr Mike Green and Non-Resident Senior Fellow Bruce Wolpe.
