McConnell’s WaPo Rant on H. R. 1
Twenty-two hours ago McConnell posted an op-ed on the Washington Post. If you have not read it and can get into the Washington Post I included a link. If you can not get into the Washington Post; here is a link from the Intelligencer. Formerly of the Washington Monthly, Ed Kilgore takes McConnell to task.
Never let it be said that Mitch McConnell can be shamed into silence or introspection. In response to H.R. 1, House Democrats’ new package of campaign finance and voting rights reforms, the saturnine Senate leader issued a Washington Post op-ed that reads a lot like a series of spell-checked Donald Trump tweets, guffawing his way through an extended attack. McConnell, of course, intends to bury H.R. 1 in the Senate without a hearing or a vote. Here are some low-lights:
It should be called the Democrat Politician Protection Act … Why else would the bill scrap the neutrality of the Federal Elections Commission and set it up for a partisan takeover? Since Watergate, the commission has been a six-member body so neither party can use it to punish political opponents.
Perhaps because the Republicans on the six-member FEC have paralyzed its ability to discharge its responsibilities, as a recent chairman of the FEC bitterly observed:
[A] controlling bloc of three Republican commissioners who are ideologically opposed to the F.E.C.’s purpose regularly ignores violations or drastically reduces penalties. The resulting paralysis has allowed over $800 million in “dark money” to infect our elections since Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court decision that allowed corporations and unions to spend unlimited sums to elect or defeat candidates.
McConnell, of course, is one of the most absolutist of opponents to any kind of campaign finance regulation, even of the sort the conservative majority on the Supreme Court has allowed. So it’s not surprising that he goes on to treat Democratic proposals for reviving campaign finance regulation and providing voluntary public financing — or even donor transparency — as somehow illegitimate:
Under this bill, you’d keep your right to free association as long as your private associations were broadcast to everyone [that’s disclosure of “dark money” sources]. You’d keep your right to speak freely so long as you notified a distant bureaucracy likely run by the same people you criticized [that’s reporting political spending by tax-subsidized non-profits]. The bill goes so far as to suggest that the Constitution needs an amendment to override First Amendment protections [that means overturning Citizens United, which did not precede enactment of the First Amendment].
(my $.02) I really do not want to post all of Ed’s comments on AB as I think it is worth the read at his site. McConnell has certainly dished out a number of lies in a similar proportion as what you may find in a Trump diatribe. For example, the harvesting of ballots in California is not legal as McConnell claims, it still is a crime and earn you three years in the jail or prison the same as one may occur in North Carolina in a clear example of “ballot harvesting” by Republican operatives. I stand in awe of a person who can lie about and construe the facts and not blink an eye while doing so. This is not the same as Trump. McConnell (not worth being called a Senator) knows full well what he is saying.
I truly hope the good citizens of Kentucky throw him out in 2020. He is an astute partisan but is a truly miserable human being who has absolutely no business being a leader of a country
Calling it a rant was kind. I love this:
“The bill goes so far as to suggest that the Constitution needs an amendment to override First Amendment protections”.
Protecting rich people’s rights to buy key Senators like McConnell.
Kilgore does a pretty good job of taking McConnell to the wood shed. McConnell does not represent us anymore. He always says; “American people expect . . . .” What he means are those who can afford him.
McConnell is right where he has been the last decade(and longer). Simply the worst person in the world.
” There Is No More Loathsome Creature Walking Our Political Landscape Than Mitch McConnell
Yes, that includes the jumped-up real-estate crook in the White House.
As its first act in the new Congress, the equally new Democratic majority passed something called House Resolution 1. It was a massive anti-corruption measure aimed at restoring the credibility of American elections and safeguarding the franchises for those whose right to vote had been assaulted by 30 years of conservative mischief, both in Washington and in the states. It advocated a constitutional amendment to reverse Citizens United. It proposed making federal Election Day a federal holiday, and it forbade both partisan gerrymandering and voter purges. It also mandated that the president and vice president reveal the previous ten years of tax returns. (Can’t imagine what gave them that idea.) All in all, it was a clear declaration of support for the right of all eligible citizens to vote, and for their votes to have meaning.
On the op-ed page of the Washington Post—Jesus, Hiatt. Really?—Mitch McConnell called it “a power grab.”….
McConnell declared himself in opposition to Barack Obama right from the first day in office. There’s even video. Most noxiously, in reference to our present moment, when Obama came to him and asked him to present a united front against the Russian ratfcking that was enabling El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago, McConnell turned him down, flat. Moreover, he told Obama that, if Obama went public, McConnell would use it as a political hammer on Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Obama should have done it anyway, god knows.) McConnell issued a watery denial of these charges, but there’s no good goddamn reason to believe him.
He doesn’t have the essential patriotism god gave a snail. He pledges allegiance to his donors, and they get what they want. He’s selling out his country, and he’s doing it in real-time and out in the open. This is worse than McCarthy or McCarran ever were. Mitch McConnell is the the thief of the nation’s soul.”
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a25956710/mitch-mcconnell-op-ed-voting-bill-democrats/