Forget Lindsey Graham. I can see why Democrats salivate when the polls show a close race, but Graham is comparatively hapless. He's nobody without someone bigger to attach himself to. The main target now should be Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. Yes, win the presidency is the first priority, but it's almost useless unless Democrats win the Senate. And after that, the priority is to cut the head off the evil that the GOP has become, and that's Mitch McConnell.
Apart from Trump, there is no single individual in the government as dangerous to the future. Mitch McConnell is the embodiment of political evil. And he has been more effectively evil for longer than the regime in the White House.
In 2009, at the height of the Great Recession, with the economy teetering, millions unemployed, families losing homes, industries facing ruin, a leader of the opposition party might put aside partisan politics to work with the new President for the common good in a national--an international--emergency. Not Mitch McConnell. He did the opposite.
In an infamous meeting of Republican leaders on Inaugural weekend, McConnell organized a policy of total and complete opposition to everything President Obama and the Democrats in Congress proposed. Even when--as was frequently the case--the proposals included previous Republican demands and policies, and sometimes consisted of ideas previously advocated by Republicans.
Because Mitch McConnell doesn't care about anything but his political power. H has shown no evidence of a human conscience whatsoever.
In 2016 he used his power to deny President Obama consideration of his Constitutionally mandated Supreme Court choice, with the bogus excuse that it was too close to the election, then almost a year away. Now McConnell is about to ram through another nominee far right of the country, while people are already voting in this election, with not even a blush at his own hypocrisy. His cynicism is as close as he has to a soul.
McConnell engineered the appointment of Trump's divisive Court nominees by one of his first acts as Senate Majority Leader after the current administration took office: he got rid of the standard that a Supreme Court nominee needed 3/5 of the Senate, and instead, for the first time in United States history, mandated that a Justice could be given a lifetime appointment by means of a simple partisan majority. The 3/5 majority was intended to prevent such naked partisan power polluting the Court. So it was for all of American history until 2017. But McConnell changed all that.
Also in 2016, when the Obama administration conferred with leaders of both parties because of intelligence showing that Russia was attempting to interfere in the election, instead of joining together to fight off this outside danger, McConnell threatened to publicly denounce any efforts to reign Russia in as politically motivated. The mistake the Obama administration then made was to give into this political blackmail, probably because it seemed most likely that both situations (Russia and the Court) would be quickly remedied when Clinton became President.
Now it's pretty clear that McConnell is going to try to do in 2021 what he did in 2009. In the throes of a pandemic, in the midst of another Great Recession, in a time of tension over racial justice, and in the last hours in which it might be possible to save the future from runaway climate catastrophes, McConnell will lead total opposition to anything a Biden administration proposes.
He's already starting by opposing any new stimulus package worth the name, so that a Democratic administration will face a deeper, more intractable recession and a larger, still uncontrolled pandemic. It does not matter to Mitch McConnell how many people suffer, or what their daily suffering is. What matters is winning seats in Congress in the next election.
Republicans are into evil pretty deeply. Mitch McConnell makes their evil effective. But Democrats aren't talking about the Kentucky Senate race, not after the September polls that showed their candidate Amy McGrath behind by double digits. But McConnell is deeply unpopular in Kentucky. McGrath has more money to spend on her campaign, although the challenger needs more, and she could always use even more. And things have changed elsewhere since September. Democrats can afford to try harder to defeat McConnell, and give themselves a chance to govern.
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