While Mitch McConnell has long been a major force on Capitol Hill, Townhall columnist Kurt Schlichter recently suggested that McConnell's leadership has become a crisis for the GOP.

"For years, I have found Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell to be a frustrating and imperious charter member of the GOP establishment while simultaneously being the best parliamentary leader we have had in living memory," Schlichter acknowledged in an article published late last week.

No longer a "savvy and savage killer"

As an example of McConnell's prowess, the author pointed to his having prevented then President Barack Obama from appointing Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court in 2016.

Schlichter then asked, "Who else could keep a caucus that ranged from maple syrup-moderate Susan Collins, to based Show-Me State conservative Josh Hawley mostly together?"

However, the columnist then complained that McConnell is no longer "the savvy and savage killer of yesteryear" but has instead become "hapless and hated, weak and tone deaf."

According to Schlichter, McConnell is now "barely competition for the second-rate hack who is Chuck Schumer" and "perhaps the most unpopular major politician in America."

Yet rather than pursuing retirement, the Senate minority leader "is raging at the GOP base for daring to object to his increasingly opaque and bumbling schemes."

For although McConnell "was responsible for the great judicial renewal under Trump, including appointing three Supreme Court justices," the old Senate titan "always hated Trump" and that animosity extends to Trump's Capitol Hill allies.

McConnell went from blocking Obama to enabling Biden

Thus we see "a return to the old-time transactional Senate of yesterday," with McConnell helping to confirm Merrick Garland as attorney general.

Schlichter also pointed to McConnell's support for the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending package, something which contained an additional $45 billion in support for Ukraine.

McConnell insisted during a press conference last month that "[p]roviding assistance for Ukrainians to defeat the Russians is the number one priority for the United States right now, according to most Republicans."

As Schlichter pointed out, "Younger Mitch would never have been so insane as to announce that giving money to Ukraine to secure its border when ours is wide open is the Republican Party’s Number One priority."

Then there was last year's midterms, during which McConnell "spent a ton of cash on keeping leftist Lisa Murkowski in power over an actual Republican in Alaska."

As Schlichter drew to a close, he concluded by insisting that "Mitch is too old, too unpopular, too angry, and increasingly too ineffective to be the senior Republican elected official."