McConnell biography to be released before election day

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Louise Thomas

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A new biography about Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will be released just days before the election chronicling the longest-serving leader in the US Senate.

Associated Press deputy Washington Bureau Chief Michael Tackett’s book The Price of Power: How Mitch McConnell Mastered the Senate will be released on 29 October, a week before the 2024 presidential election through Simon & Schuster.

“Drawing on thousands of pages of archival materials, letters, and more than 100 interviews with associates, colleagues, and McConnell himself, Tackett pieces together the story of McConnell’s early life, his formative battle with polio as a young child, and the teenage infatuation with politics that persisted through his four decades in the Senate,” states promotion material.

McConnell, the often mercurial and tight-lipped Republican leader, has led his party in the Senate since 2007, making him the longest-serving party leader in the Senate. In February, the Kentucky Republican announced he would step aside as Republican leader.

As the leader of Republicans, McConnell served as the main obstructionist during Barack Obama’s presidency, most notably blocking his Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, now US attorney general.

He also reshaped the federal judiciary during Donald Trump’s presidency, facilitating the confirmation of three Supreme Court justices who led to the overturning of Roe v Wade.

Despite McConnell’s sharp criticism of Trump’s actions during the January 6 riot, he voted to acquit Trump during his impeachment trial in 2021 and endorsed Trump earlier this year.

Simon & Schuster said Tackett’s book will chronicle this tumultuous final chapter of McConnell’s career.

“A lifelong Republican, McConnell was known as a pragmatic moderate legislator when he joined the Senate in 1985. Tackett details his steady rightward drift, as McConnell’s politics evolved with his masterful ability to consolidate and wield power. But such success comes at a cost,” the promotional material read.

“The Trump years brought with them the rise of an almost unrecognizable Republican party, suffused with a reactive populism that even McConnell himself would struggle to control.”