https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/how-mitch-mcconnell-became-trumps-enabler-in-chief
On Thursday,
March 12th, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, could have
insisted that he and his colleagues work through the weekend to hammer
out an emergency aid package addressing the coronavirus pandemic.
Instead, he recessed the Senate for a long weekend, and returned home to
Louisville, Kentucky. McConnell, a seventy-eight-year-old Republican
who is about to complete his sixth term as a senator, planned to attend a
celebration for a protégé, Justin Walker, a federal judge who was once
his Senate intern. McConnell has helped install nearly two hundred
conservatives as judges; stocking the judiciary has been his legacy
project.
A fascinating read, thank you. Excerpt:Majority Leader [Mitch McConnell] had tried to jam through a bailout package that heavily favored big business. But by then five Republicans were absent in self-quarantine, and the Democrats forced McConnell to accept a $2.1-trillion compromise bill that reduced corporate giveaways and expanded aid to health-care providers and to hard-hit workers. McConnell, who is known as one of the wiliest politicians in Washington, soon reframed the narrative as a personal success story. In Kentucky, where he is running for reëlection, he launched a campaign ad about the bill’s passage, boasting, “One leader brought our divided country together.” At the same time, he attacked the Democrats, telling a radio host that the impeachment of Trump had “diverted the attention of the government” when the epidemic was in its early stages. In fact, several senators--including Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, and Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut--had raised alarms about the virus nearly two months before the Administration acted, whereas Trump had told reporters around the same time that he was “not concerned at all.” And on February 27th, some three weeks after the impeachment trial ended, McConnell had defended the Administration’s response, accusing Democrats of “performative outrage” when they demanded more emergency funding.
ReplyDeleteMcConnell's senatorial refusal to convene on the confirmation of veto Obama's SCOTUS nominee Merrick Garland was an act of treason against this country's Constitution, not to mention a shameless act of political hypocrisy. Propriety demanded that he just ochestrate a strike-down of Garland's nomination instead of mass abdication of duty, sending this country further into partisan warfare.
Another excerpt:[I]n accommodating Trump and his base, McConnell and other Republicans went along as [Republican] Party leaders dismantled the country’s safety net and ignored experts of all kinds, including scientists. “Mitch is kidding himself if he thinks he’ll be remembered for anything other than Trump,” said [Stuart Stevens, a longtime Republican political consultant]. “He will be remembered as the Trump facilitator.”
ReplyDeleteAnd another:[The two sons of McConnell's chief lifetime financial backer, in two letters to him] argued that “the powers of the Senate to constrain an errant President are prodigious, and it is your job to put them to use.”
ReplyDeleteMcConnell had assured them, in response to their first letter, that Trump had “one of the finest national-security teams with whom I have had the honor of working.”
But in the second letter the Joneses replied that half of that team had since gone, leaving the Department of Defense “leaderless for months,” and the office of the director of National Intelligence with only an “ ‘acting’ caretaker.” [They] noted that they had all served the country: [their] father in the Navy, [one] in the Marine Corps, and [another] in the State Department, as a lawyer. Imploring McConnell “to lead,” they questioned the value of “having chosen the judges for a republic while allowing its constitutional structures to fail and its strength and security to crumble.”
Breath-taking. As is the rest of the article, which goes on to describe a dynamic between McConnell and his immediate family that is simply Shakespearean.