Mitch "Stop intimidating me" McConnell meets with the Intimidator-in-Chief
Writing in Thursday's
Washington Post, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
provides evidence that he says substantiates his assertion that President Barack Obama is responsible for a "culture of intimidation" that "goes well beyond one agency or a few rogue employees."
For example, McConnell says:
The president’s lawyers circulated a draft executive order in 2011 that would have required anyone bidding for a government contract to disclose political donations. The message was clear: If you want a government contract, be careful which causes or candidates you support because the White House will know.
Yep, you read that right. According to Mitch McConnell, requiring firms that do business with the government to publicly disclose how much political cash they've given to the politicians from whom they seek contracts and special treatment is all about intimidating companies into silence. Of course, that was not the idea at all. The
real idea was to let the public know whether companies that made anonymous political contributions were getting special treatment from the government.
Ask yourself which is a bigger threat to democracy: The possibility that a company doing business with the government would withhold a political contribution out of fear of retribution from White House or Congress ... or the possibility that a company would funnel money anonymously into a 501(c)(4) while quietly claiming credit under the table in order to win favorable treatment from regulators, contracting officials, or Congress?
Corruption is obviously a bigger problem—it's not even close. But even though the idea floated by the Obama administration had nothing to do with intimidation, it was spiked shortly after McConnell thundered his opposition to it. If anybody was doing the intimidating, it was Mitch, and if anybody was intimidated, it was the administration.