The Earl of Chesterfield famously wrote to his inexperienced son, “A strong mind sees things in their true proportions; a weak one views them through a magnifying medium, which, like the microscope, makes an elephant of a flea: magnifies all little objects, but cannot receive great ones.”

The latest biography of Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the longest-serving Senate party leader who stepped down from his role atop the Republican conference this month, shows that McConnell exhibits a weak mind. In “The Price of Power” by Michael Tackett, fleas are commonly magnified into elephants, and elephants routinely go unseen.

Former Majority Leader McConnell idled while constitutional power hemorrhaged from Congress to the White House: the war power, the treaty power, the power of the purse, the oversight power and the power to legislate.

Presidents commence war on their own. They negotiate executive agreements in lieu of treaties on their own. They divert money appropriated for one purpose to a different presidential purpose. They stiff-arm congressional subpoenas or demands for information with spurious claims of state secrets, executive privilege or unwritten tradition. McConnell has shied from invoking the inherent contempt power of Congress to extract information from the White House, a power unanimously affirmed by the Supreme Court in McGrain v. Daugherty. Presidents exercise limitless legislative power delegated by Congress to issue regulations or proclaim national emergencies as routinely as the rising and setting of the sun.

This alarming seismic shift in power from Congress to the White House, the equivalent of an 8.0 on the Richter scale, goes unmentioned. McConnell was first elected to the Senate in 1984, when Congress still had a claim to be first among equals between the three branches of the federal government. Soon to come was the 1986 joint congressional committee on covert arms sales to Iran. It revealed abuses of executive power born of secrecy and hubris leading to the transfer of arms to Iran in exchange for hostages and the diversion of funds to the Nicaraguan opposition to circumvent the Boland Amendment. The committee received testimony in public sessions from Cabinet members and national security advisers. Transparency is the alpha and omega of congressional oversight.

When Senator McConnell retires from the Senate, he will leave the chamber a shadow of what it was when he entered 40 years ago. He mastered the Senate but forgot to see that it was shrinking from an elephant to a flea. During his Senate ascendancy, the United States fought a 20-year war in Afghanistan, costing a staggering $2.3 trillion, according to Brown University’s Cost of War Project, to restore a grislier version of the Taliban with no oversight hearings! During the Vietnam War, in contrast, hearings conducted by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright exposed executive branch lies, fueled the repeal of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and hastened the war’s end.

McConnell took flip-flopping to a new level, easily surpassing Sen. John Kerry’s somersault on the Iraq war (“I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it”). McConnell was for the flag-burning amendment until he was against it. He was against investigating Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.) for sexual harassment until he was for it. He voted to convict President Bill Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice in Monicagate but voted to acquit former President Donald Trump for insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump’s supporters sought to overturn the 2020 election by force and violence including threats on the lives of Vice President Mike Pence and his family.

McConnell had previously declared, “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people.” But when he later voted to acquit, the senator elaborated, “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one.”

Let’s not forget McConnell’s most brazen hypocrisy. First, he summoned into being a rule that Supreme Court vacancies should not be filled during the last year of a presidential term to deny a vote on President Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland.

Then he summoned into being a codicil to the rule declaring it was inoperative if the Senate is controlled by the same party as the president to justify confirming Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett in the waning months of Trump’s first term.

Kentucky’s heralded Senator Henry Clay sermonized, “I had rather be right than president.” McConnell was no Henry Clay. He had rather be wrong and duplicitous than risk losing power. He epitomizes the pathologies of American politics today.

Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is author of “American Empire Before the Fall.” His website is www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com and X feed is @brucefeinesq.