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 Kentucky, discusses McConnell's massive role in reshaping

the landscape of political speech, and later the US 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, a long-time Republican leader in the US 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. 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 US

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 Party in the 1970s.

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