Mitch McConnell, the longest-serving party leader in Senate history, will not seek reelection next year, the Kentucky Republican announced on the chamber floor Thursday.
“I figured my birthday would be as good a day as any to share with our colleagues the decision I made last year,” McConnell said on the day he turned 83. “Representing our commonwealth has been the honor of a lifetime. I will not seek this honor an eighth time.”
McConnell, who was first elected to the Senate in 1984, announced his plans to step down from Republican leadership nearly a year ago. Throughout his decades in the chamber, McConnell played a key role in steering the Supreme Court to its current conservative tilt and has maintained a traditional Republican view of foreign relations as others in the party shifted toward a more populist view in the Donald Trump era.
McConnell has publicly battled health issues in recent years, including a fall outside the Senate chamber earlier this month, which a spokesperson attributed to the “lingering effects of polio,” which he overcame as a child.
McConnell has had a tense relationship with Trump since the end of the president’s first term. In recent weeks, he voted against some of the president’s Cabinet nominees. He was the sole Republican to vote against Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary and Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence.
Republican jockeying to succeed McConnell has already begun in Kentucky in the anticipation that he would not run for an eighth term. Rep. Andy Barr is considered a likely candidate, while Daniel Cameron, the state attorney general, has also expressed interest.
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
