Mitch McConnell, longest serving Senate leader, won’t seek reelection in 2026

WASHINGTON (CN) — Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, for decades the Senate’s top Republican, will not seek reelection and will retire from Congress next year, he announced Thursday.

“Representing our commonwealth has been the honor of a lifetime,” the seven-term senator told his colleagues in remarks on the Senate floor. “I will not seek this honor an eighth time.”

McConnell, who has represented the Bluegrass State on Capitol Hill since 1984 and worked alongside eight presidential administrations, will see out the rest of his current term which ends in January 2027. He was the longest-serving Senate party leader in U.S. history, heading up the chamber’s GOP conference from 2007 to 2025.

McConnell’s announcement comes almost exactly a year after he told colleagues that he would step down as the top Senate Republican. He handed the role to South Dakota Senator John Thune after November’s elections.

In his Senate floor address, McConnell pushed back on concerns from some lawmakers that the upper chamber’s longstanding norms and traditions were under threat from partisanship. He said he would leave the Senate with “great hope” of the chamber’s endurance.

“There are many reasons for pessimism, but the strength of the Senate is not one of them,” he said.

McConnell, a self-described “student of history,” reflected on what he said was the Senate’s duty to grapple with the foundational questions of American life.

In particular, he focused on the chamber’s responsibility to appoint members of the federal judiciary and its role as a check on the courts and the judges who serve on them. And he cautioned his colleagues not to abandon their commitment to that charge.

“When members of this body ignore, discount or pervert this fundamental duty, they do so not just at the peril of the Senate — but the whole nation,” McConnell said. He did not cite any specific examples of such conduct.

McConnell, who was a chief architect of the GOP’s effort to appoint conservative justices to the Supreme Court, has long been critical of Democrats to force an ethics reckoning at the high court. He has accused Democrats of “beating up the Supreme Court” for rulings they disagree with.

But the top Senate Republican has also emerged in recent weeks as one of the main opponents of President Donald Trump’s cabinet appointees, voting against Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to the Health and Human Services Department and Tulsi Gabbard’s appointment as director of national intelligence.

Though McConnell worked alongside Trump under his first administration, a rift emerged between the two men following the 2020 election, after which the Kentucky senator refused to support the president’s claims that the contest had been rigged against him. McConnell and Trump were driven even further apart after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, which the Republican leader called “disgraceful.”

McConnell, however, endorsed Trump’s candidacy in 2024.

In the months leading up to Thursday’s announcement, the former GOP leader has suffered several health problems including a pair of falls which confined him to a wheelchair for several days. McConnell has also frozen up on more than one occasion in recent years while answering questions from reporters.

Despite that, McConnell, who said Thursday that serving as the Senate’s Republican leader was a “rare and specific childhood dream,” told his colleagues that he still had some unfinished business to take care of in his remaining months as Kentucky’s senior senator.

“To the disappointment of my critics, I’m still here on the job,” he said.

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