Mark Karlin: McConnell is a Hostage Taker, Don't Placate Him on Infrastructure. Kick Him to the Curb, Pelosi.
June 29, 2021
Special to BuzzFlash by Mark Karlin
Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Minority Leader, has essentially hijacked the passage of bills and made as his goal the thwarting of Democratic legislation to improve life for Americans. He makes no concession to good government and should be taken to the woodshed. After all, he is nothing more than the minority leader of a minority representing 40-44 million fewer people in the Senate than the Democrats. (Gage Skidmore)
In my mind Mitch McConnell’s frequent disingenuous and hypocritical complaints that Democrats in DC are out to ruin the “comity” and “traditions” of the Senate is a stinging insight into his bombastic, grandiloquent mendacity.
As Heather Cox Richardson notes of contemporary Republicans — and although McConnell doesn’t “accept” the big lie, he backs the oligarchy and white “mudsill” neo-Confederate narrative of “patriotism” being for the rich and the white — they echo the language frequently heard in both branches of Congress before the Civil War:
In February 1861, even before Republican President Abraham Lincoln took office on March 4, 1861, lawmakers for the Confederate States of America wrote their own constitution. It was remarkably similar to the United States Constitution—copied from it verbatim, in fact—except for three key changes that they believed made the original constitution better: they defended state’s rights, denied that the government could promote internal improvements, and prohibited any law that denied or impaired “the right of property in negro slaves.”
Confederate leaders convinced ordinary white men in the southern states that defending the expansion of human enslavement would be defending the nation against the “radicals” who valued the principles of equality outlined in the Declaration of independence.
It doesn’t take much imagination to convert the animating origins of the Confederacy with McConnell’s opposition to any effort to federally rein in vast voter suppression of Blacks, and the priming of “white grievance” that ignited the Civil War.
As Richardson writes: “The Confederates, too, believed they were defending America.”
Although Richardson was writing of the insurrectionists who see themselves as “patriots” (as did the Confederates), she could have been referring to the “genteel” McConnell version of the same warped worldview. Democrats are, put quite simply, “the enemy” of white minority oligarchal rule that ran the South prior to the Civil War and returned to the region after Reconstruction, existing, in large part, to this day.
McConnell’s tawdry claim that he is the upholder of the Constitution and DC institutional sanctity is as credible as a Jefferson Davis dollar bill.
McConnell daily lives his hypocrisy, as he has for more than two decades in the Senate. While representing as minority leader a minority of Americans, his 50 senators representing 40-44 fewer Americans than the Democratic 50 Senators, he holds the Senate hostage as he did when Obama was President, and he publicly said that his only goal was to prevent Obama receiving a second term. He regularly violates Senate norms by holding up Democratic appointees, particularly judges. His refusal to give Merrick Garland a proper and normative hearing for Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court seat for a year was just short of criminal, clearly disrespectful at the least of Senate traditional procedure.
Now he is threatening to hold up Biden bills so the GOP can have a better chance of retaking Congress in 2022. And he is directly threatening Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer that if they don’t de-link the so-called “Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill” from the reconciliation infrastructure bill, he will filibuster the “bipartisan” bill, which we all know he is going to do anyway because it would burnish Biden’s “bipartisan” image.
He has been an obstacle to accepting that the vast majority of the American people deserve a much larger share of the American pie and government services, but he tries to hide this behind the lofty language of deceit.
McConnell’s home state of Kentucky was a slave-holding state (with split loyalties) in the Civil War. It is not hard to see him as a non-physical but threatening version of Congressman Preston Brooks from South Carolina. What is Brooks remembered for?
On May 22, 1856, Brooks beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner with a cane to within a hair of his life in the Senate chamber (it took three years for Sumner to recover) for remarks Sumner had made about the evils of slavery and Senators who supported chattel slavery.
McConnell may not have thrashed any Democrats to within an inch of their life (he hardly appears to have the strength to accomplish such a despicable feat anyway), but he practices the hypocrisy of the Southern oligarchs who opportunistically created a populism of hate among the poor and middle class white Southerners against blacks. This was necessary in order to achieve political stability in the South because only about 13-15% of the white plutocrats owned slaves.
McConnell isn’t a slave owner, but he is every bit an upholder of the “Southern Strategy” that empowers the Republicans to provide tax cuts for the rich and subsidize corporations through tax breaks.
At his most fundamental core, McConnell represents an upside down America, where all are not created equal, where he roosts in the Senate as a tyrant who the Democrats are usually too timid to take on, as they bring a butter knife to a gun fight.
He doesn’t stand for the principles of the Constitution, and he — like most Republicans — excels at accusing the opposition party of doing what is his modus operandi: swindling the American people through nefarious political games and smarmy discourse.
And those are just some of the reasons Machiavelli Mitch McConnell is the BuzzFlash GOP Hypocrite of the week, in fact the BuzzFlash GOP Hypocrite of this century.
So many Republicans, so little time.
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