Obviously, the wide range of McConnell's estimated wealth is due to the way the disclosure forms allow a pretty wide range on reports of assets.

His top asset is his holdings in the Vanguard Tax Exempt Money Market, estimated at between $5,001,002 and $25,015,000. His next most valuable asset is his D.C. home (and carriage house rental) which is reported as worth between $1M and $5M.

The rest are investments in a wide variety of stock and bond mutual funds.

Let's look at his Vanguard investments.

Back in 2006, his major Vanguard investment was in its 500 Index Fund, estimated at between $650,003 and $1,350,000.

The next year, McConnell's wealth in that fund jumped to an estimated $1,100,002 to $5,250,000. Then in 2008 (not a good year in the market), McConnell's wealth in that fund dropped a bit (estimated from $500K to $1M), but all of a sudden he had $5,001,002 to $25,015,000 in the Vanguard Tax Exempt Money Market.

The year before, he had a pittance ($1K to $15K) in that fund.

Somehow, some way, McConnell got much richer in 2008, getting at least $5M from somebody.

That somebody was his second wife's father, who made his fortune in shipping Chinese-made goods to the USA.

Elaine Chao married McConnell in 1993, and was George W. Bush's anti- Labor Secretary for the full eight years.

According to Laura Flanders, her father, James Chao:

had the luck not only to attend one of his country's finest universities with Jiang Zemin, the future leader of the People's Republic, but also to fall in with the immensely powerful Shanghai-born family the Tungs, who shifted their operations to Taiwan for a time. The Tung dynasty is powerful in Chinese politics and business to this day. Hong Kong's first chief executive after reunification with mainland China was Tung Chee Hwa, the first child of the magnate Tung Chao Yung, in whose Maritime Trust company James Chao got his start. James Chao married into another powerful family: the Hsus. His wife's family would later operate a shipping empire in Hong Kong.

So Mitch McConnell has moved from the upper-middle class of a lifelong government employee into the real upper class ($20M or so net worth) of someone who married a woman with a rich father.

Who just happened to become rich from his connections with the rulers of communist China.

Villagers would say that this is old news, "free" trade is great for everybody, we like Mitch and Elaine, and want him to return our calls, etc.

So they have not reported on the source of McConnell's mega-wealth (relative to the rest of us), and how that source has presumably, for 20 years or so, affected McConnell's positions on "free" trade and its devastating impact on millions of Americans who used to have decent manufacturing jobs.

McConnell and his wife are cheap-labor Republicans who hate the idea of American factory workers making more than $15 an hour.

Because that's what their benefactors want them to do.