WASHINGTON— Tragically, McConnell’s hypocrisy and maneuvering regarding the courts resulted in the Supreme Court, for the first time in its history, removing a constitutional right, the right to an abortion.
The result is that in 22 states right now abortion rights are either non-existent or strictly curtailed. Women sick with infections have been forced to wait in hospital parking lots until they are almost dead before the medical staff inside the hospital is allowed to perform an abortion.
Forced births are common even though doctors knew the baby would die in minutes or even just seconds after birth because of deformities that should have allowed an abortion.
At least one state is developing a “registry” of every woman who has an abortion while another state seeks to enforce a law that forbids pregnant women from getting a divorce. A horror show? No! It’s all reality thanks to Mitch McConnell.
It’s a normal Senate tradition that when a lawmaker retires, he or she receives long and laudatory speeches from friend and foe alike. Well, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., will step down from that post, after 17 years, at the end of this year, even if he isn’t retiring until 2026. If there are any fond farewells they could only come from people nearly as guilty as he is of trashing the Constitution and the rule of law.
McConnell has used his undoubted legislative talents over the years to destroy the careers of progressive colleagues, reshape the Supreme Court—and lower courts—with a raft of right-wing ideologues in black robes, and hamstring needed legislation to enhance workers’ rights and protect voting rights, all the while piously proclaiming his fealty to the latter cause.
Not to mention his attitude towards Donald Trump. Just call McConnell Senator Hypocrite, and that’s Exhibit A, with consequences that echo even now and could be felt for many years if those consequences help to entirely dismantle democracy.
Here’s the scene: After the Jan. 6, 2021, Trumpite insurrection, invasion, and attempted coup d’état at the U.S. Capitol, McConnell had a problem on his hands. All the evidence from the House Select Committee clearly laid out Trump’s role in detail.
Further, though McConnell had carried Trump’s water, especially on naming justices and judges, for four years, there was no love lost between the two. Trump often successfully beat him into submission by issuing long and loud public tirades against him. Those included racist attacks on McConnell’s Asian-American wife.
McConnell had a choice: He could excoriate Trump before or after the Senate voted on whether to convict the former White House denizen for high crimes and misdemeanors.
Because the trial began and ended after Trump unwillingly left the Oval Office, McConnell chose to vilify him afterwards—and after voting “no” on impeachment despite his speech after Jan. 6 in which he blamed Trump for the insurrection. McConnell used the lame excuse that the Senate could not convict an ex-president and he assured everyone that Trump would face justice from the U.S. criminal defense system.
Now the judges on the Supreme Court and in other courts, appointed because McConnell refused to have the Senate consider Obama appointments for an entire year and later rushed through Trump picks, are considering whether even the criminal justice system has any role. They are considering claims that an ex-president is immune from criminal prosecution for any crimes committed while he was president. Regardless of the outcome, Trump has been let off the hook for accountability for his crimes before the election later this year. The McConnell courts have already let him off the hook.
Perhaps, one of McConnell’s worst crimes, is that his actions are the reason why Trump is even able to run for president today. McConnell had it in his hands to finish Trump off once and for all but instead chose to keep Trumpism, and more important, the MAGA movement alive and well.
Here’s why this is the case:
“Former President Trump’s actions preceding the riot (sic),(it was an insurrection) were a disgraceful dereliction of duty,” McConnell said AFTER the Senate vote in which he voted against conviction: “The House accused the former President of, quote, ‘incitement.’ That is a specific term from the criminal law…There is no question President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day.”
The invaders “believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president,” Trump. Their “belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.” Trump even endorsed “an associate’s remarks of ‘trial by combat.’
“It was also the entire manufactured atmosphere of looming catastrophe” and “the increasingly wild myths about a reverse landslide election…being stolen in some secret coup by our now-president.
“This was an intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories, orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.”
Those were tough words from McConnell, none of which, coming after the vote on conviction rather than before the vote, were in any way sincere. The Senate vote to convict Trump was 57-43, with seven Republicans (McConnell not included) joining all the Democrats and independents in voting to convict him. But you need 67 votes for conviction. Analysts said then that if McConnell had blasted Trump for his role in the rebellion before the vote, McConnell would have taken enough Republicans with him to convict Trump.
The most important thing is that a Senate-convicted Trump couldn’t run for president in 2024. McConnell’s gift to the country is to put the nation closer than ever to the day democracy is destroyed forever. No court, no president, no one can ever forgive him for that. It is inconceivable that anyone but other MAGA criminals could throw him a goodbye party.
Hypocrisy reverberates
That McConnell decision reverberates in another venue. The three Trump-named justices on the Supreme Court just led the way for Trump, the GOP presidential nominee (again), to appear on every state’s ballot. They emasculated the U.S. Constitution’s ban on insurrectionists who once took the oath of office from ever holding office again. The vote was 9-0. Thank you again, Mitch McConnell.
The right-wing and Trump justices’ next move may grant Trump, and future ex-presidents, immunity forever from criminal prosecution. Thank you once more, Mitch McConnell. We’ll find out by early July if that Trump assault on the rule of law succeeds, too.
To top it all off, when Trump clinched the 2024 nomination on Super Tuesday of this week, McConnell endorsed him.
“It is abundantly clear” Trump “earned the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for President of the United States. It should come as no surprise that as nominee, he will have my support,” McConnell said. McConnell knows that it was abundantly clear that Hitler earned the requisite support of Nazi Party voters to be their nominee for Chancellor of Germany. Would he then have said that it comes as no surprise that he would have supported Hitler?
McConnell lauded his work on the Trump-GOP tax cut for the rich and corporations “and a generational change of our federal judiciary–most importantly, the Supreme Court.” It was, even more importantly, an ideological imprint on the courts, inserting radical rightists into black robes.
“I look forward to the opportunity of switching from playing defense against the terrible policies the Biden administration has pursued to a sustained offense geared towards making a real difference in improving the lives of the American people,” McConnell concluded.
Yet another McConnell hypocrisy concerns the High Court’s members. With the Senate hopelessly tied into knots where nothing substantive—except money bills—gets done, Trump and McConnell concentrated on packing the courts.
The hypocrisy was simple and astounding. If a Democratic president—say, Barack Obama—nominated a Supreme Court justice—say, Merrick Garland—within a year of a presidential election, McConnell, then the Majority Leader, would and did piously proclaim that “it’s too close to the election. Let the voters decide” by leaving the vacancy open for the next president.
Which is what he did. Garland was nominated early in 2016. He never even got a committee hearing. And Trump became president. He nominated Neil Gorsuch. Gorsuch went through the Senate lickety-split thanks to McConnell and took his seat on April 10, 2017.
Trump and McConnell spent the next three years packing the lower courts with ideologues in black robes. One such ideologue: U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who’s slow-walking the Trump trial in Florida on his removal of secret papers from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago estate, and the security risk involved.
But back to the Supreme Court, and fast forward three years to late 2020. The election is looming and it’s close, but Trump—as he showed in the first debate—knows he’s trailing. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies. This isn’t eight months before the next election, the time Obama had. It’s fewer than eight weeks.
Is that too close for McConnell and Trump? No way. Trump nominates, and the McConnell-led Senate confirms, Amy Coney Barrett. She takes her court seat one week before the election, on Oct. 27, 2020.
Hypocrisy #2. Filibuster hypocrisy
Wait, there’s yet another hypocrisy: The filibuster. Otherwise known as the sacred Senate right of “extended debate.” McConnell refined it by ensuring a minority ties the chamber in knots if they can get 41 votes to prevent debate on anything.
Filibusters used to be reserved for big issues, such as civil rights bills. Segregationist Southern Democrats filibustered them, along with anti-lynching laws, fair housing laws, and more, for decades. McConnell grew up in that tradition, as a Senate aide to a moderate pro-civil rights Republican, John Sherman Cooper. McConnell saw how the real filibuster worked, complete with endless speeches.
Those days are gone. McConnell not only uses the filibuster to block civil rights and voting rights bills—the John Lewis Act being the latest—but he wouldn’t even allow such filibusters to begin, much less have up or down votes on either the filibuster or the underlying legislation.
Instead, McConnell successfully marshals his Republicans to threaten to filibuster the “motion to proceed” to debate on legislation. McConnell’s threats to filibuster grew so predictable, and so potent, that the Senate majority wouldn’t even bring legislation to the floor thanks to the pending defeat of the “motion to proceed.”
Which is what happened to the pro-labor Protect The Right To Organize (PRO) Act in the last Congress. Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer of New York refused to bring it up unless and until lead sponsor Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., found enough votes to defeat McConnell’s “motion to proceed.” He never did.
No filibusters on judges
Filibusters of nominations, though, are yet another McConnell hypocrisy. The filibuster and its 60-vote requirement to shut off debate and move to a vote used to apply to judges as well as legislation. But to grease the skids for Trump’s judicial nominees, McConnell changed that, too.
“My colleagues and I have refused to kill the Senate for instant gratification,” McConnell proclaimed in 2021, defending the legislative filibuster. “In 2017 and 2018 I was lobbied to do exactly what Democrats want to do now. A sitting president”—Trump—‘leaned on me to do it. I said no.”
“McConnell playing the committed institutionalist is what scholars of political rhetoric refer to as ‘complete horseshit,’” David Litt wrote in a 2021 Democracy Docket article. “The last time the GOP had full control of government, Trump urged McConnell to end the filibuster and allow bills to pass with a simple majority vote. He refused.”
What Litt didn’t say is that McConnell flip-flopped on filibusters against judicial nominees, all to help Trump. Remember that raft of ideologues in black robes, including Cannon in Florida? McConnell changed the filibuster rule for them—including for Trump-named Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—to a simple majority of 51.
Like we said, Senator Hypocrisy. Better yet, Senator Criminal Hypocrite.
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