politics

Here's a write-up I made 4-years-ago, just to give a refresher on what kind of piece of shit McConnell is:

Recently, a Harvard Constitutional Law School professor denounced Mitch McConnell as a, "flagrant dickhead," now, Trump supporters might contend that this Harvard Constitutional Law Professor is a deep-state liberal agent or without any evidence whatsoever (Edit: I'm not far off; observe this right-wing article calling him a, "crazed leftist"....). Nevertheless, the professor is in my view correct.

##Let's review some of Mitch McConnell's hypocrisy, double-standards, and blatant corruption:

Mitch McConnell in 2010:

The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president"

Claims he wants bipartisanship, immediately slaps down any hope of working with Democrats.

Refusal to Cooperate with Obama on Russian Cyber-attack findings

In the run-up to the 2016 election, Mitch McConnell denied aiding and exposing to the public the fact that Russians were committing domestic cyber-attacks and attempting to covertly influence the outcome of the 2016 election for Trump:

FROM PBS FRONTLINE DOCUMENTARY:

NARRATOR: Top intelligence officials traveled to Capitol Hill to tell congressional leaders what they knew.

JEH JOHNSON, Sec. of Homeland Security, 2013-17: They were all there— the speaker, leader Pelosi, leader McConnell, leader Reid, the Foreign Affairs Committees, the Intel Committees. They were all there. And we briefed them on what we knew.

NARRATOR: Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell expressed skepticism about the intelligence and warned that he would not join an effort to publicly challenge Putin.

RYAN LIZZA:They’re told by Mitch McConnell, the majority leader of the Senate, that, “If you do that, we’re going to interpret that as you putting the thumb on the scales for Hillary Clinton.”

NARRATOR: The meetings were top secret, held behind closed doors.

JOHN BRENNAN: In those briefings of Congress, some of the individuals expressed concern that this was motivated by partisan interests on the part of the administration. And I took offense to that and told them that this is an intelligence assessment. This is an intelligence matter.

GREG MILLER: It’s a moment when politics and partisan positioning appears to take precedence over national security. In other words, they’re so worried about each other, the Democrats and Republicans as adversaries, that they can’t get around the idea that there is a bigger adversary.

NARRATOR: In Moscow, President Vladimir Putin denied being at the center of the hacking, but he seemed pleased to be the center of attention.

McConnell's blocking of Executive Appointments & the Supreme Court Nuclear Options:

In 2013 The Republicans were blocking every routine (70+) appeals court appointment by Obama. Reid got pissed at the obstructionist games and bypassed the super-majority approval requirement to keep the executive branch moving:

In 2013, Reid invoked the “nuclear option,” a historic move that changed a long-standing Senate rule, dropping the number of votes needed to overcome a filibuster from 60 to a simple majority for executive appointments and most judicial nominations — a decision he justified because of trouble getting through court confirmations in the latter half of the Obama Administration

... to which McConnell responded:

At the time, then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and many other Republicans warned Reid that he would regret implementing the nuclear option.

“What goes around comes around. And someday they’re going to be in the minority,” Republican Sen. John Thune warned.

The key part? Reid specifically excluded Supreme Court appointments from the nuclear option.

Reality is that McConnell would've done that regardless and if he really cared about the Constitution he would've taken the high road and not lowered the bar. Reid was just a convenient nonsensical excuse. It falls entirely on McConnell, not only for lowering the Supreme Court nomination bar, but causing the unprecedented obstructionism in the first place. McConnell's true colors and lack of standard is shown by his recent actions of having one standard for Dems in, "Not letting an outgoing President appoint a lifetime Supreme Court Justice," to—suddenly—saying "we'd fill a Supreme Court vacancy during a Presidential election year." Pure. Hypocrisy.

By the way: The obstructionism was unprecedented in 2013 by Republicans. In 2005, Democrats were blocking only 10 of 214 judicial nominations. In 2013? Republicans were blocking 59 executive branch nominees and 17 judicial nominees. (And again, in 2005, excluding the Supreme Court wasn't under discussion, either).

Per Politifact:

In 2013, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was much closer to being correct when he said, "In the history of the United States, 168 presidential nominees have been filibustered, 82 blocked under President Obama, 86 blocked under all the other presidents." His figure included non-judicial nominees.

The bottom-line is that McConnell and McConnell alone invoked the Nuclear Option for Supreme Court Appointments, a step Reid did not take and had restraint. Reid could've, but he didn't. If he did, then yes, it would've been the Dems' fault. If the best argument conservative apologists have truly is that "But the Dems did it," then not only are they invoking a Whataboutism, Tu Quoque (aka, two-wrongs-make-a-right) fallacy, they're also invoking a false-equivalence since they never touched Supreme Court appointments.

What makes this all so amusing is that Merrick Garland once had bipartisan support for being appointed to the SCOTUS 6 years prior, but following Scalia's death in 2016 and being an Obama nomination, McConnell was blocking it (sticking to his outright declared commitment to obstructing Obama from the very beginning of his Presidency when he, again, said):

The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president

Those aren't the words of someone willing to compromise and work together. Let me be very clear: Republicans were to blame for the division, the gridlocking, the obstructionism. Let's not forget that McConnell also fell in line when the government was twice shutdown by Republicans when they held peoples' safety & paychecks hostage for political expediency.

During Obama's final term in office, McConnell denies appointing Merrick Garland to the SCOTUS (and who by the way had no sexual assault accusations), and who originally had bipartisan support—only because Obama nominated him:

Senator Orrin Hatch, President pro tempore of the United States Senate and the most senior Republican Senator, predicted that President Obama would "name someone the liberal Democratic base wants" even though he "could easily name Merrick Garland, who is a fine man."[79][80] Five days later, on March 16, Obama formally nominated Garland to the then vacant post of Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.[81][82]

In an unprecedented move, Senate Republicans (under Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell) refused to consider Garland's nomination, holding "no hearings, no votes, no action whatsoever" on the nomination.[

That outright proves Republicans are the issue at coming to agreement on nominations, not Democrats.

On enabling the potential obstruction of the Mueller investigation

Later, after again spouting vacuous words about bipartisanship, denies passing simple "better safe than sorry" legislation to protect the integrity of Robert Mueller's investigation from the likes of Sessions, Whitaker, and then Barr. (literally no reason not to unless you're enabling or hoping for obstruction).