The Contemptible Legacy Of The "Grim Reaper"

(The title of this post is based on this, by the way.)

So it turns out that Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell won’t seek another term in the U.S. Senate, as noted here. And in response, I offer a quiet prayer of thanks for his departure (some reasons why are here).

I’m not sure it’s possible to find a more odious political creature than Sen. Mr. Elaine Chao, and believe me when I tell you that that’s saying something. McConnell is, to me, the embodiment of Republican deceit, gall and entitlement made manifest in (barely human) form. He became proficient at bending the Senate to his foul will on behalf of his well-to-do benefactors and, in the process, doing his best to grind our democracy into dust (and making it easy for White House cretins like Dubya and our current occupant to enact their horrific agendas while doing his best to scuttle anything of benefit to the majority of this country, especially from President Obama as well as President Biden).

One of the reasons why McConnell’s moral descent is such a mystery to me (though I’ll admit that it’s probably best that I don’t know the particulars) is that he contracted polio when he was young and was treated at Warm Springs, where FDR rehabilitated from his own attack long ago. You would think an experience like that would have enlightened McConnell as to the struggles and sacrifices of everyday Americans. You would think that – but you definitely would be wrong.

There is so much utter detritus in McConnell’s infamous political history that it’s really impossible to cover it all here (maybe someone enterprising will write a book?), but we can focus on a few areas for now. One (as documented here) is the fact that McConnell engineered the theft of not just one, but two seats on the U.S. Supreme Court. The first came when McConnell refused to even consider the nomination from President Obama of Merrick Garland, allowing Trump to eventually fill the seat with Neil Gorsuch (Garland, by the way, was someone Obama floated to Orrin Hatch to find out if Senate Republicans would accept him, and Hatch said yes - shows how reliable the word of a Republican senator is). McConnell’s cheap excuse for not moving on the Garland nomination was because of this imaginary Senate rule that a SCOTUS justice can’t be confirmed in a presidential election year (despite the fact that Anthony Kennedy was confirmed in 1988). However, McConnell quickly jettisoned that BS theory to confirm Amy Coney Barrett in 2020 upon the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Also, you cannot take a serious look at McConnell’s foul legacy without examining his gross abuse of the filibuster, which has always served as a tool for the minority in the Senate to block legislation, requiring the infamous “60 votes for passage” to defeat that stalling tactic. Financial bills can pass through the so-called “reconciliation” process, requiring only a 50-vote majority. Basically, if you want to know why the Senate passes almost no non-financial legislation, McConnell’s legendary obstruction is the reason.

As noted here...

Filibusters used to be exceedingly rare. One common method used to measure the frequency of filibusters is to count the number of “cloture” votes, the process used to break a filibuster, taken every year. And from 1917 until 1970, the Senate held less than one a year.

That number started to rise well before McConnell became his party’s Senate leader. But the rate of cloture votes doubled in 2007, when McConnell first became minority leader. And it has grown rapidly since then. Between 2010 and 2020, the Senate took more than 80 cloture votes every year.

...

This escalation in filibusters, a tactic spearheaded by McConnell, has transformed the role of Congress in society. And it’s similarly transformed what kind of legislation governing parties even attempt to pass.

And as noted here, McConnell's abuse of the filibuster is so egregious that he once even filibustered his own bill.

McConnell has also spent his wretched career attacking the integrity of our elections, as noted here. More simply put, McConnell started engaging in legal gamesmanship in an effort to overturn the so-called McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill (named for Senators John McCain and Russ Feingold, who championed the legislation) as soon as it was signed into law, leading us all the way to the infamous SCOTUS ruling in Citizens United in 2010.

Oh, and please try telling me again how McConnell supposedly supports infrastructure spending; I know the metaphor of Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown at the last minute is overworked, but it really does apply to Sen. Mr. Elaine Chao when he supports such bills before at the last minute - oopsie! - it turns out he was against them all along as noted here.

And as noted in the following clip, all of these antics have truly been detrimental to the constituents he was elected to ostensibly represent (though not so much to McConnell of course)...



...and as far as I'm concerned, McConnell's little laugh at the end here pretty much gives away the game.



I know there have been stories coming out about McConnell forgetting his words when speaking in public, falling down and apparently needing to use a wheelchair. Despite McConnell’s wretched policies and actions against this country, I don’t wish ill on him because that would be wrong. However, he certainly isn’t worthy of any kind of sympathy as far as I’m concerned, to say nothing of a bit of historical revisionism for his public life either.

One day, like the rest of us, McConnell will shed his mortal coil. And I’m sure there will be commemorations of a sort from those in his party in an attempt to mythologize his slavish devotion to his well-heeled benefactors as some demented notion of doing the public good. There will no doubt be mentions of some imagined stand against MAGA (even though McConnell voted to acquit Combover Caligula in the impeachment trial for inciting the 1/6 insurrection, despite what he said in the video above) and what some would view as government overreach, particularly in response to the 2008 financial meltdown and the COVID pandemic (though I hate to imagine where we’d be without those efforts from Presidents Obama and Biden).

And when McConnell passes, I’ll be tempted to opine on the matter too. So what will I say?

To quote one of the clips from The Lincoln Project, not a damn thing.