Yep, Mitch McConnell is a steaming pile of an un-American, unprincipled, opportunist, rabid extremist. And the Washington Post decided to let him ooze all over their op-ed page.
On Thursday, Democrats mounted the first successful partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee in U.S. history; in other words, a partisan Democratic minority tried to block the bipartisan majority that supported Gorsuch from even voting on his nomination. It was a direct attack on the traditions of the Senate and yet another extreme escalation in Democrats' decades-long drive to transform judicial confirmations from constructive debates over qualifications into raw ideological struggles.
He writes that without even blinking, as if Merrick Garland and his nomination to the court never existed. As if Garland wasn't such a consensus nominee that Sen. Orrin Hatch, flaming right-winger from Utah, hadn't recommended him. He writes that as if he had not led the filibuster of 79 of President Obama's nominees during Obama's first term. Between 1949 and 2009, there were only 68 filibusters in all. He uses the words "partisan" and "extreme" as if he'd been an innocent bystander to Republicans efforts to destroy every branch of government simply because a black man won over the hearts and minds of a pretty big majority of voters.
This unprecedented attack on the traditions of the Senate, if allowed to succeed, would have resulted in a brazen new standard—that the nominees of Democratic presidents would be allowed to proceed to up-or-down votes, but the nominees of Republican presidents would have to secure supermajority support to do so—an obviously untenable situation.
There he goes again: "unprecedented." He knows very well what he's saying, and he no more believes it than any of us. But he knows his audience is a Republican base so partisan that they will believe white is black when their leaders tell them so, even if they were convinced of the reverse when it was convenient for leadership. McConnell is just the person to exploit the sheep-like mentality of conservatives. He is so unfettered to the truth, so devoid of conscience that he will willingly destroy everything in his path to get a Republican "win." He will do anything. And has.
This man can claim almost sole responsibility for our dysfunctional, broken government. He was the one who shut down the Senate beginning in 2006, the one who made sure the best ideas for public policy died, who made sure that the courts were understaffed, and government agencies were underfunded. All out of pure spite, with a dash of tax cuts for the rich thrown in.
In the face of that, Democrats did the only principled thing they could: resist. They should not for one second regret that choice. (Or engage in wishy-washy speculation about reversing that principled stand should they get back in the majority. Seriously dudes. Stop it.) You can't fight a bully and a cheat like McConnell by playing by his rules.