Category: US

Editor’s Note: Scott Jennings, a CNN senior contributor and Republican campaign adviser, was a former special assistant to President George W. Bush and a former campaign adviser to Sen. Mitch McConnell. He is a partner at RunSwitch Public Relations in Louisville, Kentucky. Follow him on Twitter @ScottJenningsKY. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

CNN
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On Tuesday, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky becomes the longest-serving party leader in Senate history, passing the late Mike Mansfield of Montana, who was Democratic leader from 1961 to 1977.

McConnell’s most recent term atop the Senate GOP conference was won on a 37-10 vote, a continued display of political dominance quite unusual these days in Washington.

I’ve known, worked for and most recently observed McConnell as a political analyst for over 25 years. His ability to maintain his leadership position in a party that has undergone such turbulent change is fascinating. Many politicians have come and gone during his tenure, while others have spun like weather vanes in a futile attempt to keep up.

But the stoic and understated McConnell changes little, which serves as a source of frustration for his enemies, not to mention for more than a few of his fellow Republicans and the reporters assigned to cover our democracy.

I’ve often heard McConnell remark that when he took office in January 1985, he would peer over his desk from a dark corner of the Senate and think, “None of these people are ever going to die, quit or get beat.” He wondered often if his tenure would be one of longevity and consequence, or a short-lived trip on the backbench.

Indeed, McConnell has become one of the most consequential political figures in American history. His longevity and deal-making abilities draw comparisons to his idol, Henry Clay, a fellow Kentuckian who served as US senator, House speaker and secretary of state.

Unlike Clay, however, McConnell never pined for the presidency. Rather, he set out to master the greatest deliberative body in the world. From the back row, McConnell moved up, building a reputation as a campaign street fighter and savvy operator. He won two hard-fought reelections in 1990 and 1996 (Kentucky was still a blue state back then) and then worked his way up to become Republican leader in January 2007 following stints as the Senate GOP’s campaign chief and conference whip.

McConnell’s initial and most recent elections as party leader both came during moments of turmoil for the GOP. He ascended the top spot 16 years ago after Republicans took a “thumping” in the 2006 midterms, as then-President George W. Bush put it.

And in 2022, Republicans failed to regain the majority as Senate Democrats rode former President Donald Trump’s bizarro coattails to pick up one seat, relegating avid football fan McConnell to another term as, in the GOP leader’s words, “defensive coordinator.”

McConnell has never had it easy. Of his 16 years as Republican leader, two came under a lame-duck Bush, four under an erratic Trump and the rest under Democratic Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. He never had more than 54 Republicans (and as few as 40) during his tenure, while the previous record-holder Mansfield never had fewer than 54 Democrats and usually had well over 60, the Senate’s magic number to establish complete political power.

What McConnell has accomplished, he’s done so with thin margins and often from a politically weak position. He achieves gains for his party where he can (the most recent omnibus spending bill scored massive increases in defense spending, for instance) but never lets his partisanship or ideology outweigh his governing responsibilities.

His operating protocol is to achieve the most conservative legislative outcome within the given circumstances, a strategy that has smashed headlong into the strident revolutionaries in his party who prefer no outcomes beyond scoring the next cable TV booking.

McConnell elicits hatred from his political opponents because they rarely can get the best of him. Many Kentucky Democrats hated him first, having failed to oust him seven times.

A number of the political press came next. In my experience observing McConnell, his efforts to stop campaign finance reform and his unwillingness to freewheel with journalists in congressional hallways seemed to put off some reporters.

Washington Democrats are not to be outdone. Their resentment of McConnell securing three Supreme Court seats during Trump’s tenure serves as an eternal flame of rage to light their party’s way, not to mention their frustrations at his use of Senate rules to thwart parts of their agenda.

For many Democrats, McConnell’s holding Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat open in 2016 but filling Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat in 2020, despite both Supreme Court vacancies occurring during presidential campaigns, is particularly infuriating. McConnell drew a distinction between whether government was divided at the time (it was in 2016 but not in 2020); Democrats, of course, did not. Either way, these were among the most consequential decisions of McConnell’s career.

Lately, the populist right has come for McConnell, accusing him of not wanting to win the 2022 midterms. McConnell-affiliated groups were on track shortly before the election to raise and spend more than $380 million. Trump, in comparison, spent around $20 million from his personal war chest despite having plenty more in the bank and a large hand in determining the GOP’s general election roster. This criticism must make for a hilarious joke in the Democratic cloakroom.

Trump is put out with McConnell for not going along with the former President’s election denialism, issuing hateful statements about him and launching a racist tirade against his wife, Elaine Chao, who was transportation secretary in Trump’s Cabinet.

McConnell refuses to respond, clearly because he understands the adage about the futility of wrestling pigs in the mud — and perhaps because he takes some pleasure in ignoring such a self-absorbed narcissist.

Depending on whom you ask, McConnell is either too conservative, too liberal, too partisan or not partisan enough. The sands of politics have washed in and out with the tide since McConnell became leader, but only our perspective has changed. McConnell hasn’t moved much at all. He’s not a showman, and he’s not much bothered by media criticism. To some, that makes him ill-suited for politics during this performative age.

But to this observer, it seems that our democracy needs at least a few sturdy trees whose roots run deeper than the latest ideological fad or conspiracy theory.

It was inevitable that an institution and an institutionalist such as McConnell would eventually become the object of scorn for the burn-it-all-down populists who wield increasing influence in American politics. A recent polling analysis published in The Washington Post found that, since 2018, “Republicans lost confidence in every institution that we asked about except one: the local police. …”

But McConnell believes deeply in two things: the role of strong institutions in our society, and that America, civilly and militarily, is a force for good in the world.

While Trump and his offshoots thrive on weak institutions and the utopian promises of isolationism, America, historically, has not. Their view is that the US cannot be strong at home if it pursues policies that make it strong abroad.

“On this mistaken view, courage and compassion are polar opposites,” McConnell said in a December speech to the US Global Leadership Coalition. “They see strength and sympathy as opposite ends of a spectrum. In this perspective, hard power and soft power are rivals, and prioritizing our interests is mutually exclusive with prioritizing our values.

“But here’s the good news: The entirety of American history tells us that is completely and totally wrong.”

This unfolding battle in the Republican Party will perhaps define the final chapter of McConnell’s long career as GOP leader. Will Trump return? Will the GOP succumb to isolationism and a wrongheaded view that America can only walk or chew gum, but certainly not both at the same time?

While this debate rages over the course of an upcoming presidential primary, McConnell will surely have no intention of changing or going anywhere. He’s got four years left on his current Senate term, and he has seemed to me in recent conversations as engaged and determined as ever to press his worldview forward.

His battle with Sen. Rick Scott of Florida over the GOP conference leadership position was invigorating to McConnell, and his recent public statements show an intention to restore a winning attitude to a party that hasn’t won much at all lately.

CNN
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Being “My Kevin” isn’t counting for much yet.

Kevin McCarthy’s failure to lock down the votes to become speaker is casting new scrutiny on his decision to tie his fate to Donald Trump.

That’s because the ex-president’s use of the midterm elections as a stage for his voter fraud falsehoods alienated many voters and landed the Republican House leader with a tiny majority that has made his campaign for the top job such a squeaker.

McCarthy endured scorn and ridicule when he rushed to Mar-a-Lago days after the US Capitol insurrection two years ago to embrace Trump – living up to that “My Kevin” nickname coined by the former president.

The Faustian pact was clear – make up with the insurrectionist former commander in chief in exchange for Trump’s support of the speakership that McCarthy had long craved.

But the California Republican is having trouble collecting on his bet. While most House Republicans overwhelmingly want him as their leader, the holdouts stand between him and power.

In a chaotic, dysfunctional start to the new Congress, McCarthy risks humiliation Tuesday in a House speaker election unless he can convince a handful of extreme conservatives to drop their opposition to his candidacy.

But even Trump has been unable to convince the holdouts, including several of his most bombastic supporters, like Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Andy Biggs of Arizona, to get behind the California lawmaker and push him over the line.

“Even after the McCarthy Machine’s attempts to whip votes and smear my name for several weeks, McCarthy is still well short of the 218 threshold,” Biggs, who is making a longshot bid for speaker, tweeted on Monday evening that it was time for new GOP leadership.

Such is the hostility toward McCarthy from the radicals that even Trump loyalists like Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who back him for speaker, have failed to break the dam.

McCarthy’s struggle comes despite his repeated capitulations to the demands of the hardliners, including on a rule that makes it easier to topple a speaker, that may have already neutered his power even if he does manage to win the job.

McCarthy’s plight is partly his own fault – since he spent years appeasing the kind of Nihilistic right-wingers that may blow up his dreams of the speaker’s gavel.

But his difficulties also come with a large helping of irony. He’s only in such a tight spot because the incoming House GOP majority is so small and is thus offering leverage to critics who would be outnumbered in a larger Republican conference. And the main reason why the midterm election red wave didn’t materialize was because voters in many seats McCarthy expected to win balked at the election denialism and extremism represented by Trump.

And now, with Trumpism effectively returning to power in one half of the capital, McCarthy can only afford to lose four votes and still win the speakership election. As of Monday, five Republicans were in a “Never Kevin” group refusing to vote for him. A further nine, including a number of high-profile Trump supporters, had said in a Sunday letter that some of McCarthy’s concessions were insufficient.

McCarthy is threatening he will take the race to multiple ballots – in a spectacle not seen in a century – to grind his critics down. The veteran Californian representative, who has a reputation as a shrewd power player inside the GOP, is also helped by the lack of any viable alternative candidate.

But his plan still may not work.

“I think it’s possible he will not be the next speaker,” former Republican Rep. Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania told CNN on Monday, outlining an extraordinary possible scenario that would not only mean a heartbreak for McCarthy but would show the new GOP majority is hostage to its zealots and augur a riotous two years ahead.

This is especially daunting since the House faces a set of looming crises in the new reality of divided government – including an expected standoff over raising the government’s borrowing authority that could send the United States into default if it is not elevated.

Such a politicized House could also spell new trouble for Republicans’ hopes of clinging to their majority in 2024 since their path to power lay not in deep-red Trump country, but through seats formerly held by Democrats in states like New York and California, where voters could be alienated by a House playing Trump-style circus politics.

Publicly, McCarthy is defiant. He has spent years working toward the speaker’s chair at countless state Republican Party dinners, by selecting and backing candidates and through raising tens of millions of dollars for them and the party. He told CNN’s Manu Raju on Monday: “We are going to have a good day tomorrow.”

But even if he ultimately prevails, his big moment has been tarnished by the kind of political chaos that raged untamed during the Trump administration – and could play into Democratic claims the GOP remains unfit to govern.

Ostensibly, the gang of five GOP hardliners wants to make it easier to oust a sitting speaker. It is calling for more time to scrutinize legislation and hopes to sharpen what are already looking like relentless efforts by the new House to hound the White House and President Joe Biden and his family with investigations. And far-right members also hope to bar leadership from wielding its influence in primaries ahead of the 2024 election in order to clear the way for more purist MAGA candidates.

Critics accuse McCarthy of being a creature of the “swamp” and say they don’t trust him, despite his repeated genuflections toward Trump – including an effort to whitewash the ex-president’s record on the January 6, 2021, insurrection by killing off a plan for an independent commission and his recent misrepresentation of Trump’s comments after he dined with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at his Florida resort.

But more broadly, lawmakers like Gaetz, Biggs and Reps. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Bob Good of Virginia and Matt Rosendale of Montana appear to be on a more emotionally driven mission to fulfill the desires of far-right “Make America Great Again” voters to destroy what they see as the establishment and to make traditional governance impossible – much as Trump was himself in the 2016 campaign.

It’s therefore hard to see whether the concessions demanded of McCarthy will ever end and whether he could ever do anything, ultimately, to satisfy his foes.

While several of Trump’s most loyal backers are standing in McCarthy’s way, the ex-president has supported his speakership bid, telling his foot soldiers in the House to get behind McCarthy.

“I’m friendly with a lot of those people who are against Kevin. I think almost every one of them are very much inclined toward Trump, and me toward them,” Trump told Breitbart in an interview in December. “But I have to tell them, and I have told them, you’re playing a very dangerous game,” he added.

The ex-president appears to believe that if McCarthy is defeated, Republicans could end up with a speaker who is less beholden to him or one who is more moderate – a key consideration as he seeks to revive his so-far lackluster 2024 White House bid and faces the possibility of indictment in several Justice Department criminal probes.

But at the same time, loyalty is often a one-way street for Trump. If he founders, McCarthy would not be the first big-time Washington player to sacrifice his career and reputation by association with the former president.

Perhaps Trump comes out ahead whatever happens.

Any alternative speaker who does make it past Gaetz and the gang of five is still likely to be firmly in the ex-president’s orbit. And if McCarthy is elected speaker, he will have key Trump figures like Greene and Jordan – whom he courted and rewarded with growing power – to thank for it.

So, in a way, for Trump, this is case of “heads I win, tails you lose.”

CNN
 — 

An apparent Ukrainian strike in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine appears to have killed a large number of Russian troops, according to the Ukrainian military, pro-Russian military bloggers and former officials.

The strike took place just after midnight on Sunday, New Year’s Day, on a vocational school housing Russian conscripts in Makiivka, in the Donetsk region, according to both Ukrainian and pro-Russian accounts.

The attack has led to vocal criticism of Moscow’s military from pro-Russian military bloggers, who claimed that the troops lacked protection and were reportedly being quartered next to a large cache of ammunition, which is said to have exploded when Ukrainian HIMARS rockets hit the school.

The Ukrainian military said later on Monday that the number of Russian servicemen killed in Makiivka is “being clarified” after claiming earlier that around 400 Russian soldiers were killed and a further 300 were wounded. It has not directly acknowledged a role in the strike. CNN cannot independently confirm those numbers or the weapons used in the attack.

Some pro-Russian military bloggers have also estimated that the number of dead and wounded could run in the hundreds.

The Russian defense ministry on Monday acknowledged the attack and claimed that 63 Russian servicemen died, which would make it one of the deadliest single episodes of the war for Moscow’s forces.

Russian senator Grigory Karasin said that those responsible for the killing of Russian servicemen in Makiivka must be found, Russian state news agency TASS reported Monday.

Karasin, who is chairman of the International Affairs Committee of the Federation Council, said the deaths should not be forgotten.

Video reportedly from the scene of the attack circulated widely on Telegram, including on an official Ukrainian military channel. It shows a pile of smoking rubble, in which almost no part of the building appears to be standing.

“Greetings and congratulations” to the separatists and conscripts who “were brought to the occupied Makiivka and crammed into the building of vocational school,” the Strategic Communications Directorate of the Chief Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said on Telegram. “Santa packed around 400 corpses of [Russian soldiers] in bags.”

The Russian defense ministry said the Ukrainian attack used US-made HIMARS rockets.

Daniil Bezsonov, a former official in the Russia-backed Donetsk administration, said on Telegram that “apparently, the high command is still unaware of the capabilities of this weapon.”

“I hope that those responsible for the decision to use this facility will be reprimanded,” Bezsonov said. “There are enough abandoned facilities in Donbas with sturdy buildings and basements where personnel can be quartered.”

A Russian propagandist who blogs about the war effort on Telegram, Igor Girkin, claimed that the building was almost completely destroyed by the secondary detonation of ammunition stores.

“Nearly all the military equipment, which stood close to the building without the slightest sign of camouflage, was also destroyed,” Girkin said. “There are still no final figures on the number of casualties, as many people are still missing.”

Girkin has long decried Russian generals whom he claims direct the war effort far from the frontline, calling them “unlearned in principle” and unwilling to listen to warnings about putting equipment and personnel so close together in HIMARS range. Girkin was previously minister of defense of the self-proclaimed, Russian-backed Donetsk People’s Republic, and was found guilty by a Dutch court of mass murder for his involvement in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014.

Sergey Markov, another pro-Russian military blogger, said there was “a great deal of sloppiness” on the part of the Russian command.

Boris Rozhin, who also blogs about the war effort under the nickname Colonelcassad, said that “incompetence and an inability to grasp the experience of war continue to be a serious problem.”

“As you can see, despite several months of war, some conclusions are not made, hence the unnecessary losses, which, if the elementary precautions relating to the dispersal and concealment of personnel were taken, might have not happened.”

Donetsk has been held by pro-Russian separatists since 2014 and it is one of four Ukrainian regions that Moscow sought to annex in October in violation of international law.

The news comes after the Ukrainian military claimed that more than 700 Russian soldiers had been killed Saturday, but did not specify where.

Russian forces “lost 760 people killed just yesterday, (and) continue to attempt offensive actions on Bakhmut,” the military’s general staff said Sunday.

Russian units have been pressing an offensive towards the city of Bakhmut in Donetsk for months but have suffered heavy losses as Ukrainian forces have targeted them in what is largely open rural territory.

Air raid sirens sounded across Ukraine over the weekend as fresh rounds of Russian missile strikes hit several regions. The attacks killed at least six people in the Donetsk, Kharkiv and Chernihiv regions, while a man was injured early Monday.

White, 53, and his wife Anne, were in a nightclub in Mexico on New Year’s Eve when the altercation took place.