Mitch McConnell

One of the two most thorn-in-Democrats’-side senators rather brazenly planted her flag on the filibuster today — and she did it at a … Mitch McConnell event of all places.

Calling Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) the “most effective first-term senator” he’s seen in his decades in the upper chamber, McConnell introduced Sinema ahead of her speech and Q&A at the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville.

“She is, today, what we have too few of in the Democratic Party: a genuine moderate and a deal-maker,” he said.

It’s political canon that the president’s party does poorly in the Midterms — especially if it’s said president’s first term. But the Senate minority leader is tossing bits of that conventional wisdom out the window as we get closer to the general election. And it’s not even the first time Mitch McConnell has preemptively winked in the direction of things not going super well for Republicans this fall — at least when it comes to control of the Senate.

During an event in Kentucky on Thursday McConnell suggested that it was far more likely that Republicans are able to flip the House than take back the Senate. That’s because the Senate is “different.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told reporters today that he has no plans to weigh in on the bill to codify same-sex marriage into federal law until the measure is brought to the Senate floor.

“I’m not going to make an observation about that until the issue is actually brought up in the Senate,” he said.  

It’s a standard delay tactic that other Republicans have used in recent days as Democrats push to pass crucial privacy-related protections into law after the Supreme Court overturned Roe — and to get their Republican colleagues on the record about their stances on important and long-established American rights, like same-sex marriage and access to contraceptive care.

It’s standard protocol for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to say a little bit in order to say a lot, and without actually having to say the thing you know he’s actually saying. But this little remark from this afternoon is worth noting, even though he is typically evasive.