Mitch McConnell is an American politician and retired attorney who has been serving as Senate Minority Leader since 2021. In this write-up, we will discuss the details of Mitch McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, and Sherrill Redmon.
Who is Mitch McConnell?
Mitch McConnell was born on February 20, 1942, to Julia Odene, his mother, and Addison Mitchell “A.M.” McConnell, his father, in Sheffield, Alabama. He, however, grew up in nearby Athens, Alabama, where his grandfather, Robert Hayes McConnell Sr., and his great uncle, Addison Mitchell McConnell, owned McConnell Funeral Home. He is of Scots-Irish and English descent. His ancestor, James McConnell, fought on the American side in the American Revolutionary War.
In 1956, his family moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where he attended DuPont Manual High School. McConnell was elected student council president at his high school during his junior year. He graduated Omicron Delta Kappa from the University of Louisville with a B.A. in political science in 1964 with honours. He was president of the Student Council of the College of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Phi Kappa Tau Fraternity.
McConnell attended the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave the “I Have a Dream” speech. In 1964, at the age of 22, he attended civil rights rallies, and interned with Senator John Sherman Cooper. He has said his time with Cooper inspired him to run for the Senate later in life. In 1967, McConnell graduated from the University of Kentucky College of Law, where he was president of the Student Bar Association.
Mitch McConnell wife, Is Mitch McConnell still married?
Mitch McConnell has been in two separate marriages. He was married to his first wife, Sherrill Redmon, in a ceremony that took place in 1968. However, their relationship hit the bottom, leading to a divorce in 1980. During their time together, they had three daughters: Porter, Eleanor (Elly), and Claire.
Mitch McConnell went on to pick another relationship, and this time it is with Elaine Chao, which will eventually lead to having a second wife. The pair dated for some time and officially got married in 1993. Elaine Chao is known very well as Secretary of Labor under President George W. Bush and Secretary of Transportation under President Donald Trump.
Mitch McConnell’s Political Career Explored
In his early years as a politician in Kentucky, McConnell was known as a pragmatist and a moderate Republican. Over time, he shifted to the right and became more conservative. According to one of his biographers, McConnell transformed “from a moderate Republican who supported abortion rights and public employee unions to the embodiment of partisan obstructionism and conservative orthodoxy on Capitol Hill.”
Mitch McConnell has widely been described as an obstructionist.
From 1997 to 2001, McConnell was chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the body charged with securing electoral victories for Republicans. On February 12, 1999, he was one of fifty senators to vote to convict and remove Bill Clinton from office. He was first elected as Majority Whip in the 108th Congress. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist did not seek re-election in the 2006 elections. In November, after Republicans lost control of the Senate, they elected McConnell as the minority leader.
After Republicans took control of the Senate following the 2014 Senate elections, McConnell became the Senate Majority Leader. In June 2018, he became the longest-serving Senate Republican leader in the history of the United States. McConnell is the second Kentuckian to serve as a party leader in the Senate (after Alben W. Barkley led the Democrats from 1937 to 1949) and is the longest-serving U.S. senator from Kentucky in history.
