Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took to the floor of the Senate Thursday morning to deliver a speech that would be howlingly funny in its historic levels of hypocrisy had McConnell’s dishonesty and ruthless partisanship not so profoundly damaged the United States. The man who ran the Senate with the specific intent of making Barack Obama a one-term president, the man who held a Supreme Court seat open for nearly a year, stood there and complained that “the House’s conduct risks deeply damaging the institutions of American government” and that the House “let its partisan rage at this particular president create a toxic new precedent that will echo well into the future.”
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This is the guy who practically invented the concepts of deeply damaging the institutions of American government and letting partisan rage at a particular president create a toxic new precedent that will echo well into the future.
McConnell went on to detail talk of impeachment from some quarters before this impeachment inquiry and vote as if that talk showed that all Democrats were determined to impeach for any reason. Instead, reality shows us that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was deeply reluctant to impeach and held off repeated efforts by the left of her caucus—until such time as the evidence of Trump’s malfeasance fell into her lap. McConnell went on to claim that the House had impeached a president without even alleging a crime—except that the House Judiciary Committee’s report did extensively make the case that Trump committed crimes in his dealings with Ukraine. So that was a lie, and a lie on which McConnell based a large chunk of his remarks about the supposed illegitimacy of this impeachment.
But the big way McConnell tried to make news was by reframing Democrats’ efforts to press for a real, honest trial in the Senate as evidence of weakness of the case for impeachment and removal. As Pelosi considers whether to transmit the articles of impeachment to the Senate before the Senate has set its rules for a trial, and may withhold them if McConnell doesn’t commit to a reasonable process, McConnell tried to bait her by suggesting that she might be “too afraid” to forward a “shoddy work product.”
The man who promised “total coordination” with the White House is now suggesting that the only reason someone might not give him total control over a Senate trial is fear of their own shoddy work. He then moved on to the threats, suggesting at great length that Trump’s impeachment for trying to extort another country into helping him win a domestic election might just ramp up partisanship to where every future president would be impeached, regardless of their actions. Again, this is a man who would have gleefully pushed impeachment had President Obama not been such a model of ethical governance. This threat was already out there—from Republicans—and impeaching Donald Trump for massive misconduct is not making it any worse.
In other words, McConnell was McConnell: dishonest from start to finish. Projecting his own actions onto Democrats. Presenting himself as a defender of the Constitution and the political institutions he has spent years trying to shred. All with a smirk on his face, even as he posed as a sober, statesmanlike defender of Constitution and democracy.