When the history of the death of the Republican Party is written, people like Newt Gingrich, Tom Delay, Rush Limbaugh, Rubert Murdoch, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump will take up voluminous space.
So will Enemy of the People-Obstructionist in Chief-Legislative Grim Reaper-Moscow Mitch McConnell.
Since occupying a position in Republican Senate leadership, his three preoccupations have been:
- Confirming reactionary judges to the federal bench.
- Passing tax cuts for the rich.
- Suffocating any legislation that helps 99 percent of the American people.
Because he was more intelligent and skilled in knowing how to work the Senate than Trump, many viewed his reelection race to retain his Senate seat in Kentucky just as important as the Presidential contest.
Unfortunately, the majority of the people in Kentucky voted against their own interests and reelected Moscow Mitch.
Since becoming the Senate Minority Leader again, Mr. McConnell has been using his old back of tricks by:
- Stalling on a power-sharing agreement with Democrats which delayed Biden/Harris cabinet confirmations.
- Forcing Democrats to use the reconciliation route to pass the American Rescue Plan which did not receive one Republican vote.
- Threatening to filibuster measures such as the Democrat’s attempts to secure legislation protecting voting rights and the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act.
The American People should wonder if members of the Republican Party are really working for them if they are against:
- Sending people $1400 cash payments.
- Safely reopening schools.
- Helping people put food on their tables.
- Protecting voting rights.
- Combatting violence against women.
This week, Enemy of the People McConnell had a fit on the Senate floor when he threatened a scorched Earth approach to conducting Upper Chamber business if filibuster reform was passed.
Like the Legislative Grim Reaper has not been engaging in a scorched Earth approach to conducting Senate business for the last 14 years.
The Obstructionist in Chief also threatened to enact fringe legislation like defunding Planned Parenthood if Republicans regained the majority.
Those comments could serve as a political ad to convince (hopefully) all moderate and independent learning communities in the country not to vote for members of the former Party of Lincoln in 2022, 2024, and beyond.
The Democrats need to pass filibuster reform and make it easier to pass measures like infrastructure, protecting voting rights, combatting violence against women, immigration reform, and other social justice measures.
If Republicans like Enemy of the People Mitch McConnell want to obstruct vital legislation that will help the American People and move the country forward, most of them, according to a proposal from Oregon Senator Jeff Merkely, should be made to stay on the Senate floor twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week and speak to the country in trying to justify their obstruction.
They need to feel, as Senator Joe Manchin said, “pain” if they want to pursue this obstructionist course of action.
Much needs to be done to fix the country after years of Republican failed socio-economic policy mishaps and obstruction.
A key to that is reforming the Senate which does preserve the rights of the minority to debate but not choke the chamber to the point where measures that will help the American People do not get voted on.
To those people like Enemy of the People-Obstructionist in Chief-Legislative Grim Reaper-Moscow Mitch McConnell that threaten a continuation of their scorched Earth approach to Senate business: Go to Hell.
It is time for the United States Government to function again for all the people.
Democrats need to reform the filibuster and consign Moscow Mitch and his obstructionist methods to political irrelevancy.
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Greg Sargent has “An intriguing reason that Republicans want to keep the filibuster”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/18/why-republicans-want-to-keep-filibuster/
[A]an interesting argument is bouncing around that explains why McConnell might have reacted this way — and why it’s actually a show of weakness and fear on McConnell’s part.
The idea is that McConnell doesn’t want a simple-majority Senate because many things Republicans want to do can’t get 50 GOP votes anyway, because they’re deeply unpopular. Meanwhile, important GOP priorities that can get 50 GOP votes, such as tax cuts, can be passed via the simple-majority reconciliation process: This is how the 2017 tax cut passed.
As Benjy Sarlin put it in a Twitter thread, there aren’t “many GOP priorities that could get 50 votes.” And Sarlin added a nuance: If the filibuster were done away with, and Republicans did take the majority, there would be tremendous pressure from the conservative grass roots to pass unpopular items, something McConnell might prefer to avoid.
This has created a situation in which McConnell’s threat to pass Republican legislation in a filibuster-free Senate is an empty one. And it isn’t just that those policies might be hard-pressed to command simple majorities.
The threat is empty for another reason: The things Republicans want to pass would be easier to reverse than the things Democrats want to do. In a filibuster-free Senate, if one party does things by simple majority, then power will shift eventually, and the other party can just theoretically undo via simple majority the things that the opposition did while in power. The rub is that this would be harder for Republicans to do than Democrats.
Indeed, there’s still another reason why it might be harder to reverse Democratic policies than Republican ones: The former are likely to be more popular once enacted. It would be politically harder to reverse the legalization of millions of immigrants or an expansion of voting rights than it would be to reverse concealed-carry or the defunding of Planned Parenthood. (There are exceptions — something like national voter ID, if legally doable, could be popular.)
I think all these are good reasons to entertain a filibuster-free world. If we can pass things by simple majority, and they can be repealed by simple majority by the opposition once it takes power — which would be either easier or harder based on how the public is reacting to those things — that might actually expose senators to more direct public accountability.
Republicans probably have more to fear from ending the filibuster because the changes they’d pursue would be more easily reversed, as their core priorities are just less popular.