This is longtime Cato Daily podcast host, Caleb Brown.

I've moved on to head the Kentucky's Bluegrass Institute,

but I wanted to leave listeners with some favorite episodes over the last nearly 18 years of my hosting tenure.

I tried to pick episodes that are relevant to our current moment.

Thank you for listening.

This is the Cato Daily podcast for Friday, March 1st, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will cease being the Republican Party leader in the Senate.

Cato's John Samples, a fellow Kentuckian, discusses McConnell's massive role in reshaving the landscape of political speech

and later the U.S. Supreme Court.

John, this is an interesting moment, and I'm glad to get to sit and talk with you about it.

We are both Kentuckians, and we're sort of here recording this just a couple of days after

Mitch McConnell, longtime Republican leader in the U.S. Senate, has announced that he's not going to be the Republican leader in the Senate. He'll maintain his seat, but will not be the Republican leader anymore.

You grew up in Kentucky at a different time than I did. Can you describe Mitch McConnell

his profile as a up-and-comer in Kentucky politics? There's actually a biography well before he left

his position by a man named John David Dyke. And he describes the early

history of Mitch McConnell. And Kentucky was an overwhelmingly democratic state that I grew up in,

at least. So this would be the 60s and 70s and had been for a century.

McConnell came up in Louisville, the major city, in another tradition, which was republicanism,

and indeed in the tradition of a famous Kentucky named John Sherman Cooper and a U.S. Senator named Marlow Cook,

they were thought of in those days as moderate Republicans.

So Senator McConnell started out in the moderate wing of the Republican

...