Mitch McConnell Is Going to Kill the United States Senate
Mitch McConnell Is Going to Kill the United States Senate
And the truth is, he doesn’t care so long as he gets his judges.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/mitch-mcconnell-is-going-to-kill-the-united-states-senate?ref=scroll
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Sitting in the front row at that ceremony, taking it all in, was Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), which was appropriate since all of this—the weird hearing, the subtle dismissal of victims of sexual assault, the secrecy around the nominee’s record—was his doing. He is the maestro of moving judicial nominees through the Senate, and Kavanaugh was a prime testament to McConnell’s ruthless, amoral, pursuit of that singular mission.
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But, and this is very important, that won’t be McConnell’s sole or even his most important legacy. Indeed, when history is written on McConnell's tenure as Republican leader, there will be a more profound and unsettling conclusion: McConnell broke the Senate and hurt the country, and the sad fact is that he could care less.
This so-called institutionalist who expresses such devotion to the Senate's traditions and the working people of Kentucky is, on these fronts, a fraud. That McConnell exists only in the imaginations of the reporters that write glowing profiles about the brilliant means and Machiavellian mindset he employs while giving short shrift to the damaging ends he pursues.
The reality is that for him politics is all about winning. The idea that a leader would work to bridge the differences between the two parties in order to try and improve the country is a foreign concept to him. Everything is a zero sum game. He is a man of no conviction except for a pursuit of power at all costs.
I had a ringside seat for all of this when I was working in Senator Reid’s office for six years The economy was in a free fall and millions of Americans were hurting. So what did McConnell do? He used every tool available to him as Republican leader to block Obama’s efforts to address this suffering and indicated his opposition to the newly elected president’s agenda for good measure. It was one thing for him to declare famously that his whole goal was to make sure that Obama was a one-term president (obviously he failed) but it was another thing to watch him try to round up the votes to filibuster virtually every piece of legislation we brought to the floor.
The same pattern was there regarding judges. McConnell’s entire objective was to simply block what Obama or Democrats put forward, especially during Obama’s second term in office. It’s the reason there were so many judicial vacancies available for Trump to fill.
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