The real "target" for Democrats in Georgia runoffs should be ousting Mitch McConnell

 

The insanity continues. Sammy Davis Jr.  lookalike Ali Alexander is asking people to give money to him personally to fund his “stop the steal” campaign in Arizona. “I am willing to give my life for this fight,” he tweeted. The Arizona Republican Party retweeted it, adding “He is. Are you?” One wonders if “Ali” is a scam artist, because he has seen people give Trump more than $200 million in the past month to help him steal the election from the rightful victor, Joe Biden. What all these gullible people should be asking themselves is what exactly is Trump going to do with all that money? I’m sure his tax lawyers in the Trump Organization can figure out a way to use it to help allay that $500 million in bank loans that are coming due in the next few years.

So while Trump is raking in the hundreds of millions of dollars from desperate fools, how are the rest of us doing, as if Trump cares? Or Mitch McConnell, for that matter? Every day I hear an employee where I work excitedly talking about the next stimulus check, for months now. It ain’t happening, because McConnell won’t let it happen. And in the U.S. Senate runoff elections in Georgia, the two Democratic challengers need to start making the case that it is McConnell—not Perdue, Loeffler or even Trump—who is currently the greatest danger to country in the post-Trump era.

As we saw in the U.S. Supreme Court nomination processes in 2016 and 2020, McConnell is a hypocrite bar none. He is also a conceited, arrogant, hyper-partisan hack behind that hang-dog mug. Nancy Pelosi has agreed to support a bi-partisan $908 billion coronavirus relief package as a temporary measure, well off the $2 trillion that Democrats have previously demanded, and half what the Trump administration suggested before the election. McConnell continues to insist on a “targeted” package of $500 million, much of which is an extension of the “paycheck protection” plan for small businesses, which has been riddled with fraud, corruption and favoritism.  Politico reports that

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s staff told other congressional leaders on Wednesday that the bipartisan coronavirus negotiators will be unlikely to satisfy Senate Republicans, according to a senior Democrat familiar with the conversations. McConnell’s staff informed House and Senate leadership staffers that the group’s attempts to marry $160 billion in state and local aid and a temporary liability shield probably won't fly with most of the GOP, the Democrat said. Those two issues have become the primary focus for a bipartisan group of lawmakers that is trying to hammer out a $908 billion compromise.

McConnell claims to want to stick to less “controversial” subjects, like the PPP and health care assistance, but his real “issue” is that he doesn’t want money going to states—especially those with large “Democratic” constituencies—which have been taking on the pandemic virtually alone without any assistance from the Trump administration, which has only made things worse.  Furthermore, there is not a second stimulus check anywhere in sight. McConnell claims that this is about “fiscal restraint,” but that cow left the barn eons ago, and he also claims that the economy is “improving,” so there is no need for more stimulus money; of course that is easy to say for someone living off of taxpayer money, or has the best health insurance taxpayer money can buy.

But given past history, it is just as likely that McConnell just doesn’t want to do anything to benefit the ordinary voter that Democrats can possibly take credit for. We saw that all through the Obama administration; McConnell and the Republicans would rather see anyone but their wealthy donors living in pain so long as there is somehow partisan political “benefit” for them and not for the other party. Jane Mayer in The New Yorker noted that McConnell has always been a bit of a hypocrite:

In 1977, McConnell ran for the position of Jefferson County judge / executive, the official overseeing the county that encompasses Louisville. A contemporary news account documents that, after announcing his candidacy, he promised to limit his campaign spending. But Mike Ward, who had elicited the pledge as the chair of Common Cause Kentucky, told me, “He snookered me.” Ward says that he thought McConnell meant to limit spending throughout the campaign, but McConnell’s promise applied only to the primary, in which he had no serious opponent. In the general election, he spent a record amount—and won.

Ward, a Democrat who was later elected to Congress, suggests that McConnell’s first campaign was misleading in other ways. Unlike much of Kentucky, Louisville is a Democratic stronghold. “We’re a moderate community, so to get elected he masqueraded as a progressive,” Ward said. To win the endorsement of labor unions, McConnell pledged to support collective bargaining for public employees, an issue he dropped after taking office. Years later, he admitted to Dyche that he’d been “pandering.” Abortion-rights groups believed that McConnell was on their side, but he claims that they were mistaken. Ever since then, he has called himself “pro-life,” and has packed the courts with judges who oppose Roe v. Wade. According to two people who have been close to McConnell, he attends church but isn’t especially religious, nor does he care about abortion; but, as one of the sources put it, he “will never take any position that could lose him an election.”

This hypocrisy has become more obvious during the Trump administration. While the Trump administration fumbled and bumbled in the first year or two, McConnell apparently waffled on whether or not it was “safe” to tie himself too closely to Trump, although remaining “mindful” of the fact that it was on his instigation that Trump employed his wife as transportation secretary. But once the “base” became impossibly enamored with Trump’s autocratic tendencies that mirrored their own prejudices and bigotries,  McConnell was quick to shed his spots. 

In the same New Yorker article,  “traditional” conservative Bill Kristol referred to the “old” McConnell as  “a pretty conventional Republican who just decided to go along and get what he could out of Trump” but went even further; rather than be a “break” on Trump’s worst impulses, McConnell chose to acted as an “accelerant” instead.  “Demagogues like Trump, if they can get elected, can’t really govern unless they have people like McConnell,” by being “largely silent about the President’s lies and inflammatory public remarks, and has propped up the Administration with legislative and judicial victories.”  In other words, the far-right side of McConnell saw in Trump a "useful" puppet.

McConnell has also convinced billionaire money to back Trump. Kristol asserted that “There’s been too much focus on the base, and not enough on business leaders, big donors, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. The Trump base would be there anyway, but the élites might have rebelled if not for McConnell. He could have fundamentally disrupted Trump’s control, but instead McConnell has kept the trains running.”

McConnell continues to play best man to Trump’s continuing outrages against democracy in this country.  As the Senate Majority Leader he is supposed to be the “leader” of the congressional Republicans, and if he is indeed that, we might be just looking at another Jack, a supposed “choir boy” turned leader of a pack of feral boys in The Lord of the Flies.  Bob Moser in Rolling Stone last year said of McConnell “For all the damage he’s inflicted on American democracy, for all the political corpses he’s left in his wake, Mitch McConnell has never betrayed an ounce of shame. To the contrary, like the president he now so faithfully serves, McConnell has always exuded a sense of pride in the lengths to which he’s gone to achieve his ambitions and infuriate his enemies.”

McConnell will do everything in his power to see that the Biden administration fails, just as he tried to do to the Obama administration, whose only legislative victories occurred in the first two years when the Democrats only needed the votes of one or two moderate Republicans in the wake of the Great Recession, which McConnell would have been just fine with being ongoing if the Democrats could be blamed for it. If for no other reason, getting McConnell out of a position in which he can harm the country as “collateral” damage due to his hyper-partisan political games is reason enough to hope for Democratic victories in both Georgia runoff elections.