Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was dead, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell mourned the loss of a giant.

Yet always looking ahead, the Kentucky Republican's public sorrow immediately pivoted to power.

In the same February 2016 press release McConnell conveyed heartfelt condolences about the conservative jurist, he finished with a bold proclamation: "This vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”

An unpredictable presidential election year later — and after blowing up a long-held Senate vote tradition — he delivered, Justice Neil Gorsuch was on the bench.

It was a big gamble that could have backfired if Hillary Clinton had taken the White House, but that pales to the bet that paid off Saturday when Judge Brett Kavanaugh's bitter and raucous 90-day confirmation culminated in a 50-48 vote to seat him on the high court.

The Gorsuch hearings were a picnic next to Kavanaugh’s mosh pit that involved a serious allegation of sexual assault and spilled over into protests on American streets and inside the U.S. Capitol. But McConnell stood firm, ignoring the throng of protesters and cajoling colleagues who might be wavering after being accosted at airports, restaurants and elevators.

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McConnell had even, if only momentarily, muzzled President Donald Trump’s trenchant Twitter account.

Kavanaugh’s vote will be pivotal in cases likely in the Supreme Court pipeline — issues ranging from whether the Civil Rights Act of 1964 covers sexual orientation and religious exemptions to public accommodation laws and the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential race.

The move cements McConnell’s legacy as the man most responsible for reshaping the federal judiciary and ensuring high court’s conservative tilt for generations to come. It also could very well mean McConnell is the senator able to take the most credit if the court topples Roe v. Wade.

Evangelicals like Hershael York say this nomination is the “brass ring” that captures a coveted swing vote once occupied by Justice Anthony Kennedy.

"This is really, in essence, the pay-off for social conservatives and evangelicals who were very uncomfortable with Donald Trump as a candidate but were willing to vote for him in the hopes that he would put conservative judges on the court," he said.

Kavanaugh's appointment to the high court presents social conservatives with their best chance at ending abortion, said York, who is dean of theology at the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville.

“The overturning of Roe v. Wade is something that we pray for on a daily basis,” York said. “There is no two ways about it, we see abortion as murder. It is the extermination of a human being."

Activist Shaunna Thomas, who was arrested in Washington, D.C., on the first day of Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings, agrees overturning the 1973 decision enshrining women’s reproductive rights will be a goal for the new justice.

"That is the reality we are starting to prepare for," said Thomas, executive director of UltraViolet, a national women’s advocacy group.

McConnell more than anyone is responsible for dragging the U.S. courts into a rightward direction that will undo previous decisions, she said.

"Let's be clear, McConnell is not trying to make the court more conservative — he's trying to make the court more radical," Thomas said.

“There is such a thing as a conservative court that isn’t interested in rolling back rights for women, LGBTQ folks and people of color. It is saying, the progress we’ve made as a country is anathema to my ideology, and I’m going to use my power to undo progress that millions of people have been able to celebrate.”

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McConnell has wielded a razor-thin 51-49 majority over Democrats that in Trump’s first two years has ushered in two Supreme Court justices; 26 appeals court judges; and 41 district court judges, according to the majority leader's office.

That breathtaking pace compares to the roughly 22 nominees confirmed in President Obama's last two years. And it is rooted in an escalation of political gamesmanship that McConnell helped start.

In the middle of Obama's second term, Senate Democrats sought to end McConnell's stranglehold as minority leader.

Democrats used the so-called “nuclear option” to end 60-vote filibusters on all judicial nominees except for the Supreme Court. McConnell had warned his counterpart, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, of Nevada, that he could one day be in charge.

In 2017, McConnell, a majority leader with a Republican president, threw out the rule requiring 60 votes for the high court. Gorsuch, like Kavanaugh, got through under that threshold by a 54-45 vote.

'We won’t be intimidated'

Supreme Court nominations were etched in McConnell's political mind when he was a 20-something staffer for U.S. Sen. Marlow Cook of Kentucky, who 50 years ago played a role in torpedoing two of President Richard Nixon’s nominees.

Republican strategist Scott Jennings, a former McConnell adviser, said his old boss has always understood lasting change comes from the judicial branch.

"Things that presidents do and Congress does can be wiped away by the next president or the next Congress," Jennings said. "But when you put somebody on the court for a lifetime appointment or in the case of Trump and McConnell, when you put a record number of appellate court nominees, you can change America for the next 30 years.”

Democratic Congressman John Yarmuth of Kentucky worked alongside McConnell as an aide in Cook’s office in the late 1960s. He said his former friend will be remembered mostly for his shrewd refusal to give Judge Merrick Garland, Obama's pick to replace Scalia, a hearing.

Yarmuth said that irreversibly damaged the nomination process.

"Mitch has set a new bar for tactics, and he has made them baldly partisan," Yarmuth said. "You can make the case Harry Reid really screwed it up for eliminating the filibuster, but clearly Mitch has stretched and mis-characterized what all prior tacticians had done.”

McConnell didn’t want Kavanaugh to be the president’s pick, but was undeterred even as Christine Blasey Ford, a California professor, came forward with claims that Kavanaugh attempted to rape her during a high school party in the summer of 1982.

Coming almost a year after #MeToo movement had brought down powerful men in film, media and politics for similar alleged misconduct, the nomination appeared doomed. Ford's testimony had swayed many conservative critics to say she was credible.

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McConnell avoided attacking Ford directly, however. Instead, he took up leading a backlash movement that invigorated the Republican base behind Kavanaugh.

McConnell said the claims were an 11th hour partisan attack orchestrated by Democrats who knew of Ford’s allegations for weeks. Speaking at the annual Values Voter summit in Washington, D.C., days after Ford’s accusations became public, he was bullish and succinct: “Keep the faith.”

He targeted attention on the protesters, who accosted him and his members in airports, elevators, restaurants and hallways. “How many stories of sexual violence do you need to hear in order to believe women,” an activist asked a stoic McConnell in a D.C. airport in a video released by the Center for Popular Democracy.

The GOP leader was unbothered, and his floor speeches crafted a narrative that evoked “McCarythism” that spoke to critics of the #MeToo movement.

“We will not be intimidated by these people,” McConnell said in a Wednesday floor speech. “There is no chance in the world that they’re going to scare us out of doing our duty. I don’t care how many members they chase, how many people they harass here in the halls.”

McConnell's speeches in the final week cast Kavanaugh as the victim of allegations that lacked corroborating evidence or witnesses. The Senate vote, he said, was as a referendum on basic fairness.

“For goodness sake, this is the United States of America,” McConnell said in a fiery floor speech Thursday. “Nobody is supposed to be guilty until proven innocent in this country. The Senate should not set such a fundamentally un-American precedent here.”

Those remarks were eventually echoed by Susan Collins of Maine, who McConnell had lunch with just before she announced her support for Kavanaugh.

Collins, one of six Republican women senators, said the #MeToo was needed but she defended Kavanaugh on the floor. She said the allegations against the judge, while compelling, were not enough to keep him off the Supreme Court.

“The facts presented do not mean that Professor Ford was not sexually assaulted that night or at some other time, but they do lead more to conclude that the allegations fail to meet the more likely than not standard,” Collins said.

A jubilant McConnell praised his colleague from Maine immediately as a "great statesman" that led to a standing ovation from Senate Republicans.

University of Kentucky political professor Justin Wedeking, said history will remember McConnell most for steering one of the nastier Supreme Court confirmation’s to the finish line. He said the political divide and stakes for the Supreme Court were much wider and higher than in previous court nominations, such as Justice Clarence Thomas' hearings in 1991.

“It certainly generated the most attention and controversy,” Wedeking said. “During the hearings itself you had spectators who were making noise and protesting, you had these events that really gripped the nation for an extended period of time, so in that sense there was a lot more mudslinging.”

But Wedeking said presidents, not Senate majority leaders, are the ones historians credit with shaping the court. He said it is also hard to predict how the long-term legacy tied to Kavanaugh’s appointment will play out.

“Every time someone new joins the court the justices shift a little bit, and very few stay static in their ideological beliefs as they get older,” said Wedeking whose research specializes in Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

Chief Justice John Roberts could become the new swing vote or Gorsuch could join the more liberal justices on libertarian-leaning legal questions, court observers have noted. Abortion rights also might not be wiped away so easily.

Kavanaugh, who professes devout Catholicism, said during his confirmation hearings that Roe v. Wade was, “an important precedent of the Supreme Court that has been reaffirmed many times." He also told senators during the hearings that his personal beliefs on the subject weren’t relevant to how he has decided cases.

Wedeking said any previous decision by the court could be overturned completely when its makeup changes. The court reversed in a short period on the death penalty in the 1970s, he pointed out, while it took half a century or more to rethink its previous decisions on civil rights and racial segregation.

"With Roe v. Wade, it all depends more or less on what people think about in terms of what's at stake," Wedeking said. "Is it the precedent itself? Or is it the more general ruling of a woman's right to choose and protecting that? Conceivably it could be at stake but right now we don't know."

When McConnell addressed evangelicals at the Values Voters summit, he didn’t promise a specific outcome on abortion or any issue before the court. He said the bench needs judges, “who will interpret and apply the law as it is written.”

But the Kentuckian made it clear to social conservatives what the mission has been, and will continue to be if he’s still in charge in 2019.

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“If you want to have a longtime impact on what kind of country,” McConnell said, “we’re going to have for the next generation the single most consequential thing we can do is these lifetime appointment of men and women to the court who believe that the job of a judge is to follow the law.”

Reporter Phillip M. Bailey can be reached at 502-582-4475 or pbailey@courierjournal.com. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: courier-journal.com/philb.