EDITOR'S NOTE: Michael A. Cohen Boston Globe columnist.
By MICHAEL A. COHEN
Some ten days ago, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell came to the floor of the United States Senate to unveil a bipartisan deal that would avert another shuttering of the federal government. Two weeks after the longest shutdown in US history, McConnell announced that President Trump would sign a government funding bill that pointedly did not include the billions he had petulantly demanded for his beloved border wall. But there was a wrinkle: Trump would, said McConnell, announce a national emergency, which would allow him to transfer money toward wall construction.
It was an abrupt flip-flop for McConnell, who weeks earlier had spoken out publicly against Trump taking such a step. For a man for whom serving in the Senate—and becoming majority leader—had been, according to Alec MacGillis’s biography of McConnell, “the dream… [he] had had been revering since he was a boy,” it would seem a particularly difficult concession of the congressional prerogative for him to make.
The most basic and powerful function of Congress is the power of the purse. The executive branch can only spend money that Congress authorizes and appropriates. In endorsing Trump’s power grab, McConnell was offering his explicit support for a move that strikes at the heart of Congress’s institutional prerogatives.
But if there is one defining characteristic of McConnell’s more than three decades in national politics, it is the prizing of political expediency over integrity, ideology, and any other impulse that should define public service in a representative democracy. For McConnell, as for the president whom he has repeatedly enabled, winning is the only thing that matters. All other considerations are secondary to that goal.