Mitch McConnell

Addison Mitchell McConnell Jr. (born February 20, 1942) is an American politician. A member of the Republican Party, he has served since 1985 as a United States senator from Kentucky, and since January 20, 2021, as Senate Minority Leader. He previously served as Senate Majority Leader from 2015 to 2021, and as Minority Leader from 2007 to 2015. He is married to former Secretary of Transportation and former Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao.

McConnell was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1984 and is the second Kentuckian to serve as a party leader in the Senate. During the 1998 and 2000 election cycles, he was chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He was elected Majority Whip in the 108th Congress and re-elected to the post in 2004. In November 2006 he was elected Senate Minority Leader – the post he held until Republicans took control of the Senate in 2015.

McConnell holds conservative political positions, although he was known as a pragmatist and a moderate Republican early in his political career. He led opposition to stricter campaign finance laws, culminating in the Supreme Court ruling Citizens United v. FEC that partially overturned the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (McCain-Feingold) in 2010. McConnell worked to withhold Republican support for major presidential initiatives during the Obama administration, having made frequent use of the filibuster, and blocked many of President Barack Obama's judicial nominees, including Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland. During the Trump administration, Senate Republican Majority under his leadership confirmed a record number of federal appeals court judges during a president's first two years and confirmed Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett as associate justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. While supportive of many of Trump's policies, McConnell has been critical of Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election, and despite voting to acquit on Trump's second impeachment trial on reasons related to the constitutionality of impeaching a former president, deemed him "practically and morally responsible" for the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol.

In 2015 and 2019, Time listed McConnell as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.