McConnell is a huge hypocrite
From the Washington Post comes this piece. It’s early, but Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is making a solid bid for Hypocrite of the Year. He rants and raves about how Democrats will “break” the Senate if they so much as touch the filibuster. But McConnell himself has already pulverized the place and trashed its oh-so-hallowed traditions.
McConnell has been pitching a hissy fit over the prospect that Democrats would change the rules to let voting rights legislation be debated and passed by a simple majority. On Tuesday, he threatened to respond to such action by tying the chamber in knots “in ways that are more inconvenient for the majority and the White House than what anybody has seen in living memory.”
If McConnell wants to blame someone for destroying whatever bipartisan, hands-across-the-aisle comity the Senate might once have had, he need only look in the mirror.
He should be sitting on the Supreme Court — and would be if McConnell believed his pious pronouncements about how the Senate is supposed to work. He was an experienced and highly respected appellate jurist, a judge’s judge who would have been on the Supreme Court’s liberal wing but nowhere near its tip.
On the specious grounds that the nomination had come too close to a presidential election — there were eight months left before voters went to the polls — McConnell refused even to grant Garland a hearing, let alone a vote. Indeed, then, McConnell’s too-close-to-an-election rule had to apply when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020, since less than two months remained before a presidential vote. … She was confirmed on Oct. 26 — just eight days before the election that gave Biden the presidency — virtually guaranteeing that the Supreme Court will have a conservative majority for years if not decades.
Perhaps even worse, though, is how McConnell uses the filibuster — not just as a weapon of last resort on matters of policy but as a purely political tool as well. In the past, there are Republican senators who have voted for many of the provisions of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, one of the two election integrity measures Democrats want to enact. … But McConnell will not allow ten caucus members to join Democrats and provide the 60 votes necessary to end a filibuster and debate the bills.
McConnell has always been more interested in power than doing what is suitable for the people in his state. Kentucky ranks at the bottom in healthcare and receives more money in federal aid than they pay in taxes. McConnell has also enriched himself since joining the Senate. He is now worth more than $35 million. He’s not only a hypocrite; he’s a lowlife.
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