Only by doing everything we can to win Senate seats in Colorado, North Carolina, Arizona, Maine, Iowa, Texas, Georgia, Kansas, and Kentucky can we hope to reverse Mitch McConnell’s radicalization of America
Following the murder of 20 in El Paso, Texas, we can ask where the killer was radicalized.
Was it a Trump rally?
Trump to a rally crowd in Florida in May: “How do you stop these people” from crossing the border?
Rally attendee: “Shoot them!”
Crowd laughs. Trump smirks.
Trump: “That’s only in the panhandle you can get away with that stuff. Only in the panhandle.” pic.twitter.com/2tYIUBPJbv
— Robert Maguire (@RobertMaguire_) August 4, 2019
Was it Donald Trump’s favorite news channel? Or was it the fevered hells of the internet where furious very online white men congregate to celebrate Donald Trump and murder of immigrants? Was it the concentration camps the Trump Administration is filling along the border?
The answer is certainly a mix of “all of the above.”
The answer to where America was radicalized is much clearer: Mitch McConnell’s U.S. Senate.
The record use of the filibuster under Mitch McConnell during Barack Obama’s first two years prevented, among other things, the DREAM Act becoming law and Democrats being able to enact much of the response to the Bush financial crisis that voters — in the most overwhelming landslide in generation — elected them to carry out.
But it was just a warmup for McConnell’s role in electing a racist conman and leaving him a record number of judicial vacancies that will allow the biggest popular vote loser elected in 140 years to appoint more federal judges than any president in American history.
You know the story. In order to help him steal the decisive Supreme Court nomination of our lifetime, Mitch McConnell blocked a bipartisan response to Russia’s attack on our elections. Just as today, he’s blocking anything resembling an appropriate response to those attacks by securing our elections.
And he’s being rewarded with massive payouts to his home state from a Russian oligarch, who just happens to be the same oligarch Paul Manafort owed millions and passed on polling data to in the heat of the 2016 elections.
The integrity of our elections is not all McConnell is blocking, of course.
He’s also blocking a universal background check bill, a minimum wage increase and a historic bill that would radically improve voting rights — a bill McConnell calls “a blatant power grab” because it would return power to voters from big donors.
Every terrible thing Donald Trump does is because Mitch McConnell makes it possible.
We know this is true because if McConnell doesn’t want it, like the nominations of John Ratcliffe or Stephen Moore, it dies a quick death.
The symbiosis between Trump and McConnell is obvious. They both want more power for right-wing billionaires and they’re happy to rely on Russia to make this happen. And Democrats need to tie McConnell, the least popular Senator in America, to Donald Trump, the least popular president in America.
This is why I do not understand the argument that impeaching Trump is not worthwhile because McConnell’s Senate will kill it and Trump will claim exoneration. I don’t get how this is an argument for exonerating him now without ever making the case, knowing he’s going to claim exoneration no matter what. I don’t get why you wouldn’t want McConnell tied up in the crimes he helped abet by being the one person on earth who may have done more to elect Trump than James Comey or Vladimir Putin.
McConnell is very pissy about the “Moscow Mitch” nickname because it calls out his betrayal of America. This pissiness proves that even Democrats can make McConnell’s unwillingness to do anything about universal background checks while doing anything he can to help Russia attack our elections a winning issue.
Taking control of the Senate from McConnell may be as important as beating Donald Trump. In fact, it may be impossible to do one and not the other.
Only if we defeat him can we get serious about getting rid of the filibuster so there can never be a man who can sell out his nation the way McConnell has, again.
[CC McConnell photo credit: Gage Skidmore | Wikimedia Commons]
