Last month, Mitch McConnell ended his record-setting 18-year reign as the Republican Party’s leader in the Senate. McConnell, 82, will continue to serve until his term ends in 2027, but “from a different seat in the chamber,” as he put it. And on Sunday, in a wide-ranging interview with CBS News’s Lesley Stahl, he contemplated perhaps his most significant accomplishment: By shrewdly exercising the Senate’s power over lifetime appointments to the federal bench, McConnell may even keep handing Democrats their asses long after he leaves office.

McConnell was very good at building a federal judiciary by and for conservative white men. His twin priorities were confirming as many Republican judges as possible, and blocking as many Democratic appointees as possible. When McConnell became Senate Majority Leader in January 2015, the federal bench had 43 Article III vacancies, including a dozen “judicial emergencies,” a designation used by the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts to indicate that access to justice is endangered by the amount of vacancies and size of caseloads. Nevertheless, McConnell ground confirmations to the slowest rate in decades. By the time President Donald Trump took office two years later, there were 112 vacancies waiting for him to fill, including 38 judicial emergencies. McConnell’s actions kept millions of Americans from getting their day in court, and denied President Barack Obama the judicial appointments that the Constitution empowered him to make.

Most notoriously, after Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, McConnell used every procedural tool available to keep the seat vacant for over a year until a Republican president could fill it, arguing that the looming election barred Obama from making the appointment. (The Stahl interview showed a flashback of McConnell describing the time he told Obama he would not fill the vacancy as one of his “proudest moments.”) Yet McConnell did not feel so encumbered in September 2020, when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died less than two months before the election. Trump announced the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett eight days later, and under McConnell’s leadership, Senate Republicans confirmed her 30 days after that, when millions of Americans had already cast their ballots. Barrett’s was the first-ever Supreme Court confirmation held during a presidential election, and the first with no support from the minority party.

During Trump’s first term, McConnell’s audacity and shamelessness allowed the president to confirm over 200 lower court judges and three justices, establishing a conservative Supreme Court supermajority that could last for another forty years. On Sunday night, McConnell told Stahl he feels “fine” about this legacy, his critics notwithstanding. His schemes did not “break any rules,” he continued, and there was “nothing unconstitutional about it.” 

McConnell based this conclusion on the text of Article II of the Constitution, which gives the president the power to appoint federal judges “by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.” And according to McConnell, he realized years ago that “advice and consent” means “whatever any individual senator thinks it means.” He told Time magazine something similar in 2018, explaining that advice and consent is “not like a legal standard” and is “essentially a political exercise.” Basically, if you have power, the only constraint on its impact is the will to use it. 

McConnell’s reflections reveal a few truths that Democrats too often fail to appreciate when thinking about the federal judiciary. For example, even when they were in power, Senate Democrats have adhered to norms like blue slips, a custom by which a district court nominee will not receive a hearing unless both home state senators approve, at the expense of vulnerable people living in red states. They’ve backed down in the face of bigoted smear campaigns against Democratic nominees, and have been agonizingly slow to recognize the courts as captured by conservatives. Even now, as Trump prepares for a second term that could end with him having appointed half of all federal judges over eight years in office, some Democrats are signaling their openness to working with him on filling empty seats.

McConnell would never do these things, because he understands that judgeships are political business. A long-term commitment to building the judiciary you want is critical for winning or protecting political victories, too. And that future must be built with all available tools, no matter how inconsistent with “norms” those tools might be.

McConnell was plainspoken during his interview about viewing appointments as a vehicle to make the country more conservative regardless of the will of the voters. “The normal legislative activities we involve in—they take over, taxes go up. We take over, taxes go down. It’s very hard to get any kind of lasting impact,” he said. “I felt that the way to get lasting impact is to put the right kind of men and women on the courts who hopefully will be there for a while.” In other words, elections come and go, but judges are forever. (McConnell also said that his motivation was to “try to help right-of-center America have a voice,” as if that is something America has ever lacked.)

One of McConnell’s other justifications for his approach to judicial confirmations was more surprising to anyone with a passing familiarity with Senate Democrats: “I knew that if the shoe was on the other foot, they would have done the same thing,” he said. Democrats have provided no evidence to support that conclusion. Perhaps they should.