Senator Evil

I'm going on a news fast and this is my last topical post for awhile.  In light of the latest news concerning the Supreme Court, I wanted to share Jonathan Chiat's observation:

Democrats have won the national vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, which, with the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, will have resulted in the appointment of eight of the Supreme Court’s nine justices. And yet four of those justices will have been appointed by presidents who took office despite having fewer votes than their opponent.

There are lots of reasons for this short-circuiting of democracy on the road to authoritarianism but at this moment I think mostly of someone who is as close to purely evil as anyone I can even imagine: Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.  He is completely without patriotism, statesmanship or any sense of justice.  And he has driven a dagger into the American system of government.

After defying the Constitution's intent for the sitting President to fill a Supreme Court vacancy by denying to even allow hearings for President Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court--a step no other congressional leader has ever dared--on the pretext that the seat fell vacant too close to an election (though it was 8 months before the 2016 election), McConnell will try to ram through the antipresident's nominee a few weeks before the 2018 elections.  He will do so without the slightest shame for his own blatant hypocrisy.

This was not the first nor the last of his shameful acts, his evil acts, utterly at odds with the constitutional government our founders established.  In January 2009 he held a meeting with congressional Republicans to announce a strategy: Republicans would violently oppose every proposal that President Obama made to Congress regardless of its merits, regardless if it was something Republicans had previously supported and even if it was something Republicans had previously proposed.

Then in 2016 McConnell compounded his irresponsible opposition to the President's constitutional function in nominating a Supreme Court Justice by committing treason.  When briefed on the US intelligence community assessment that a foreign adversary, Russia, was attempting to interfere in the 2016 elections, he refused to condemn it in a joint statement with President Obama, and threatened the President, telling him that if he took action or made strong public statements, he would accuse him of partisan political motives.

McConnell doesn't care if we have a chief executive taking orders from the Kremlin.  McConnell doesn't care about anything but winning partisan political battles, pleasing his big bucks overseers and keeping power.

Hell has room for lots of Republicans.  McConnell gets pride of place in the inner circle.