Meet the new boss: quietly, Senate Republicans have already chosen Mitch McConnell as their next leader--because Congress just isn't partisan enough.

• Author: Roth, Zachary

One of the Senate's quirkier traditions was inaugurated in the late 1990s by then-Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.). On certain summer Thursdays, Lott decreed, members should leave their customary dark blue and gray suits at home and, as a tribute to southern fashion, instead conduct the people's business in pale blue seersucker. Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), a fellow southerner and Lott's successor as leader, has kept the ritual alive. Lawmakers no doubt welcome the chance to don a cooler fabric in the sweltering Washington heat, but the style doesn't always produce the best optics: On a Thursday in mid-June, many of the Republicans who gathered to discuss the situation in Iraq--where the American death toll had that day hit 2,500--looked less like U.S. senators gravely weighing issues of war and peace, and more like Pat Boone.

But in their suggestion of a party dangerously out of touch with popular sentiment, the outfits were, perhaps, appropriate. Over the previous few weeks, positions on Iraq had begun to harden in a way that left the GOP politically vulnerable. Thanks to pressure from the White House and a short-lived uptick in support for the war in the wake of the killing of the Jihadist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, House Republicans were rapidly lining up behind a resolution affirming support for President Bush's "stay-the-course" approach. Meanwhile, Senate Democrats were unifying behind a resolution of their own, backed by leadership, calling for troop withdrawals to begin this year. With the public already favoring a pullout and growing only more frustrated with the war effort every day, the coming clash between these two positions looked likely to favor Democrats.

The party was not in total agreement, however. Earlier that week, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) had filed a sweeping amendment to a defense bill requiring all U.S. troops to be pulled out of Iraq by July 2007. Knowing his measure would attract little support as written, and hoping to maintain a unified Democratic message, Kerry had informed Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), who was managing the defense bill, that he was not yet ready to offer it for a vote. Warner agreed to give Kerry more time, then left the Capitol building to attend a memorial service at the Pentagon for victims of 9/11.

Soon afterwards, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the Senate number two, rose to speak, his light blue tie elegantly setting off the pinstripes. A pale, graying, and somewhat slight man of 64, McConnell looks more like a financial planner than a politician. He has an unblinking, vaguely android-like stare and gives the impression, even when speaking, of wanting to avoid being noticed. But today, he could not keep a hint of a smile from flickering across his normally impassive features. "Colleagues on the other side have said they were going to offer an amendment to advocate withdrawal by the end of the year," he reminded the chamber. "Let's have that debate." With that, McConnell took Kerry's measure, scratched out the Democrat's name, replaced it with his own, and offered it for a vote.

The move seemed to take even McConnell's Republican colleagues by surprise. Frist, who had just arrived on the floor--white spats complementing the seersucker--referred to the "Kerry amendment," and appeared momentarily confused when told that the pending measure was now, in fact, the McConnell amendment. Even C-SPAN was fooled, informing viewers in an on-screen graphic that the Senate was considering the Kerry amendment. Whatever its name, the measure was rejected by a vote of 93-6. Democrats denounced what Kerry called a "fictitious vote," and even Warner tried to distance himself from McConnell's maneuver, informing his colleagues that it had been carried out in his absence.

McConnell, though, was unashamed. He stood, grinning, on the Senate floor for a long time, his hands clasped placidly in front of him as if at church, as colleagues came up to chat--one gave him a congratulatory pat on the back as he passed. Then he took a victory lap around the press gallery, telling reporters "it has been interesting to watch the Democrats have this debate within their caucus," while Kerry and Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) struggled to respond. As McConnell anticipated, the storyline that emerged in news reports over the next few days was that the Senate had overwhelmingly rejected a quick Iraq pullout and that the Iraq issue was uniting Republicans and dividing Democrats.

The maneuver was typical of McConnell, the Senate Majority Whip, who over a 22-year Senate career has earned a reputation as a shrewd parliamentary tactician and a ruthless partisan warrior. Those qualities are a major reason why, while the outcome of the November midterms remains up in the air, one election has already been all but decided. In January 2007, Frist will step down, and for the last two years, almost below the radar, McConnell has had the race to replace him as Senate Republican leader--and if Republicans maintain control, Senate Majority Leader--virtually locked up.

That someone with McConnell's political style stands to assume what is arguably the third-most-powerful elected post in the federal government speaks volumes about the state of the contemporary Republican Party--and about Washington in general. McConnell is a staunch conservative and a master of procedure, but no piece of landmark legislation bears his name. Almost the only issue on which he has a national profile is campaign-finance reform, and on that, he's known as the man who fought it at every turn. Republican strategist Grover Norquist--who once compared bipartisanship to date-rape and played a key role in creating the system that uses corporate money to maintain Republican control--told us that if he could pick the president, McConnell would be among his top three choices. (Jeb Bush would be another, and Norquist was uncharacteristically coy about the third.)

Indeed, McConnell's political persona--with its focus on bare-knuckled partisanship and support for a money-driven legislative system--embodies the very qualities that have helped reverse Republican political fortunes so dramatically over the last year and a half, and have led directly to a series of government scandals and slipups. In uniting around Mitch McConnell, Republicans are, in effect, doubling down on the governing style that got them, and us, into this mess in the first place.

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