It is Mitch McConnell, more
than anyone else in Washington, who has turned the notion of comity into
comedy.
It’s kind of trivial, perhaps,
but one of my favorite odd facts about the
1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom — the epic event that
produced Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech — is that not one but
two college kids in the bobbing sea of faces crammed around the Reflecting Pool
listening to King’s immortal words would grow up to become U.S. senators many
years later.
One future senator would —
over the course of his
50-year-long, 1000-1-shot rise to political prominence — remain
remarkable true to the expansive vision of that 1963 march, with an almost
annoyingly loud but consistent, laser-like focus on expanding economic
opportunity and fighting for the working classes.
The other young man in the
shadows of MLK grew
up to become Mitch McConnell.
Unlike the
young Bernie Sanders, McConnell must have been taking a dip in the
Reflecting Pool or even dozing off when King said that “with
this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation
into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.” To the contrary, the Kentucky
Republican has risen to the pinnacle of U.S. power, as Senate majority leader,
by turning up those “jangling discords” to a nearly deafening level — with no
moral or ideological compass other than following
the Big Money that promises political power in our warped 21st
century, with a win-at-all costs mentality that crushes norms of basic
democracy that had survived for a couple of centuries. It is Mitch McConnell,
more than anyone else in Washington, who has turned the notion of comity into
comedy.
The latest episode in
McConnell’s sad odyssey came this week, when senators
from both parties started circulating a bill that would curb the power of the
executive branch— now in the person of one Donald John Trump — to fire a
Justice Department special counsel such as Robert Mueller, who is probing the
events surrounding Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and
the possible role of all the president’s men and women, including perhaps Trump
himself.
The fire alarms for democracy
are clanging all across America. The notion that a president can arbitrarily
fire the prosecutor looking at possible criminality in that president’s
campaign is the power reserved for a dictator, not the leader of a democratic
republic. The public gets that — literally
hundreds of thousands have pledged to hit the streets if Trump makes a move on
Mueller or the deputy attorney general overseeing him, Rod
Rosenstein. (Police
brass in Pittsburgh even told cops to bring their riot gear to work —
an overreaction, but it does speak to the gravity of the potential
constitutional crisis.)
Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell doesn’t take the threat to our democracy as seriously as the Pittsburgh
police. Indeed, the only threat he sees from the tangled politics of Trump and
Mueller is the threat to the only thing that matters to McConnell anymore — his
51-49 hold on the Senate majority. He is dead set on using his considerable
power over the legislative process to make sure that protecting Mueller and
averting this crisis never comes up for a vote, even though it seems that a
majority of lawmakers in his upper chamber currently support it.
“We’ll
not be having this on the floor of the Senate,” McConnell told Fox News on
Tuesday. His logic is that the bill isn’t necessary because he doesn’t believe
that Trump is planning to fire Mueller. As one of my astute Twitter followers
pointed out, the majority leader’s stance is akin to refusing to buy car
insurance because you have no plans to get into an auto accident anytime in the
future. But trying to apply common sense to virtually anything that happens in
Congress these days is a waste of time. I’ve followed politics closely for all
of McConnell’s career in Washington, and I’m hard pressed to think of anything
the Kentuckian stands for — beyond self-preservation.
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