Opinion: Mitch McConnell’s Ghost Returns to the Senate’s Haunted House

Photo Illustration by Victoria Sunday/The Daily Beast/Getty Images/Reuters The Imagineers over at Disney really knocked themselves with the new Mitch McConnell model they unveiled in Washington , D.C. this week.

People who didn’t know any better might have thought that was the actual Mitch McConnell being wheeled around the Senate instead of a hollowed-out automaton, its face frozen into the smiling rictus of a taxidermied Cheshire cat.

Contrast that with the monstrous Donald Trump installed in the Hall of Presidents just a few years ago and the advances in the technology really become apparent.

Kudos, Disney.

First you didn’t cancel Kimmel and now this—truly a great American company.

Before his return, it had been almost 100 days since our former Senate Majority Leader was last seen in public , a hundred days marked by an enviable lack of Mitch McConnell in our lives.

That blessed interregnum now seems to be at an end, though, as the Senate reconvenes to take up the important business of bending over for the president.

After all, there’s little else to do when House Speaker Mike Johnson just sent the rest of Congress home for… checks notes… six weeks? Whether the Old Crow returns full-time to his part-time job remains to be seen.

Being a senator has never been the most strenuous occupation, but even the attenuated schedule of the world’s greatest deliberative body may require more charge than even Disney’s AAA batteries can provide.

There’s something fitting about a diminished Mitch returning to an institution the more vigorous version of the now-84-year-old McConnell spent the last decade reducing.

The Senate has always been rancorous, of course, but McConnell’s tenure transformed this last bastion of comity into a viper’s nest of partisan division and minority obstruction.

His finest moment, as he himself recalled, was blocking Obama’s Supreme Court pick (remember Merrick Garland?) from even having a hearing.

“In my time as Majority Leader, the single biggest decision I’ve ever made was actually a decision not to do something,” he told Fox News’ Martha McCallum in a 2021 interview.

“And that was to fill a Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Scalia during the 2016 election.” What followed was, well, everything that followed.