McConnell Sneaks His Way to the Exit

McConnell is heading out the door with a tarnished legacy-- with no claim whatsoever to actually have passed significant or historic legislation.  He is only known to have blocked progress (Merrick Garland's nomination, e.g.) or cemented GOP power (to no positive end).  In the waning years of his toxic term, McConnell built up and supported a man that he is known to despise and knows is destructive-- because he always saw Trump as a means to an end. 

And yet that coveted "end," as MSNBC's Jen Psaki points out, left McConnell utterly impotent. "And that's the real legacy of Mitch McConnell: a cynic focused on power only to be swallowed by the monster that he enabled to obtain it," she said.

As McConnell hero Ronald Reagan once said, "To sit back hoping that someday, some way, someone will make things right is to go on feeding the crocodile, hoping he will eat you last — but eat you he will." 

Here's a partial list of the lows of McConnell's legacy:

1. He stole a Supreme Court seat from President Barack Obama. When Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016, McConnell insisted that the seat would remain empty because it was an election year and, according to a rule he created, the seat could therefore not be filled.  He even refused to give Merrick Garland a hearing. But three years later, asked what he would do if the same situation arose in 2020 under President Donald Trump? "Oh, we'd fill it," he said. And that’s just what he did.

2. He stole a Supreme Court seat from future President Joe Biden. McConnell did this after changing his “no new Supreme Court justice in the last year of a president’s term” rule—to install the ultra-conservative Amy Coney Barrett on the court eight days before the 2020 election.

3. He packed the federal judiciary for Trump with white men, many of them unqualified. 

4. He vowed to obstruct the efforts of a sitting President. 

5. He vowed to obstruct Biden. “One hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration,” he said in 2021.

6. He made the debt ceiling a permanent hostage starting in 2011. McConnell made sure that shutdown threats were a regular part of American politics while shutting down efforts to fix the problem. "I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting,” McConnell said before a vote in 2011. “Most of us didn't think that. What we did learn is this—it's a hostage that's worth ransoming."  

7. He turned the filibuster into a weapon. McConnell used the filibuster “more than ever in history” during the Obama administration to try to deny Obama any legislative victories. He kept using it long after Obama left office, including to block a 9/11-style Jan. 6 committee. 

8. He voted to acquit Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

9. He built a career, and a big campaign nest egg, fighting gun safety regulations. 

10. He destroyed campaign finance reform and filibustered any effort to get money out of politics. 

11. He blocked votes to save the Voting Rights Act. This, along with his other moves to make it more difficult to vote, earned McConnell the nickname “the gravedigger of American democracy.”

12. He tried to kill Obamacare—and failed.

13. He blew off coal miners with black lung disease from his own state. But he always found time to help mine owners prop up their dying industry.

14. He named himself the “Grim Reaper.”

15. He tried to silence Sen. Elizabeth Warren. It backfired.

During a floor speech against the confirmation of Jeff Sessions as Trump’s attorney general in 2017, the Massachusetts senator  tried to read a damning letter from Coretta Scott King which blasted Sessions for “the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens” while serving as a United States attorney in Alabama.”  McConnell insisted Warren had violated a rule against demeaning a fellow senator. And he cut her off.  “She was warned,” McConnell said. “She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”  The joke’s on McConnell, though, because his criticism of Warren became a meme. And a hashtag. And a tattoo. And a fundraiser. And a rallying cry.