The Mendacity of Mitch McConnell
BY MOLLY JONG-FAST
September 26, 2020
Democrat Amy McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot, has raised $46,921,518 for her Kentucky Senate race. In August alone she raised $8.7 million, with the average donation said to be $48. Conventional wisdom states this seat is a long shot for Dems and there are many more winnable Senate races around the country, like Arizona and Colorado. But winning is only part of why Democrats are pouring money into this race. They are passionately donating to McGrath not just because of who she is—but because of who she isn’t. You see, McGrath is running against the most hated Republican in the Senate and perhaps even the entire party: 78-year-old Addison Mitchell McConnell Jr.
There are lots of reasons to hate Mitch McConnell. Let’s start with his actions since 2018, when the Democrats took back control of the House. In the past two years, McConnell has defiantly blocked any legislation that has come from the Lower House, refusing to take up 395 House bills that have been sent to the Senate, a fact that he’s embraced by joyously tweeting a picture of a graveyard and calling himself the “grim reaper of socialism,” and telling Fox News, “They’ve been on full left-wing parade over there.” But, of course, Grim Reaper Mitch doesn’t mean socialism; he means a functioning government, which McConnell effectively brought a halt to as soon as Republicans lost the House. And stopping legislation makes sense because fundamentally, as Jeet Heer writes in The Nation, “Both Trump and McConnell are nihilists, eager above all to hold onto power and to serve the wealthy donors of the Republican Party.”
There are other reasons to hate McConnell, among them the fact that he’s packed the courts with hundreds of conservative judges on the federal bench, making it, as Howard Fineman wrote this week in the Washington Post, “younger, whiter, and more male—and far more partisan—in the process.”
And then there’s the hypocrisy. In February 2016, McConnell said, “Of course it’s within the president’s authority to nominate a successor even in this very rare circumstance—remember that the Senate has not filled a vacancy arising in an election year when there was divided government since 1888, almost 130 years ago—but we also know that Article II, Section II of the Constitution grants the Senate the right to withhold its consent, as it deems necessary.” Shortly after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, McConnell stood on the floor of Congress and told the Senate that “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.” Completely the opposite of what he said when there was a Democrat in the White House and 10 months to go in his term.
https://www.vogue.com/article/the-mendacity-of-mitch-mcconnell-senate-majority-leader