Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made it clear these past few days that he will be doing his best to block both Congress and the public from seeing special counsel Robert Mueller’s report into Russian hacking efforts of the 2016 presidential election, and the subsequent investigations of the Trump campaign and administration's related actions. He is also singlehandedly blocking deliberation of HR1, the House bill aimed at expanding voting rights and other civic reforms.
But the Green New Deal, a nonbinding House resolution expressing a will to urgently combat climate change, will be getting a vote in the Senate—because Mitch McConnell thinks it will hurt Democrats. The World's Greatest Deliberative Body has been quickly whittled down to a tool for Mitch McConnell to troll the rest of America in whatever manner he pleases. The Senate is now Fox & Friends with fewer commercial breaks.
“I could not be more glad that the American people will have the opportunity to learn precisely where each one of their senators stand on this radical, top-down, socialist makeover of the entire U.S. economy,” McConnell said Monday, ahead of a planned vote that could come as soon as Tuesday.
Buddy, it's a nonbinding resolution. It's less "radical" than some of the post office renamings you people come up with. (That Mitch has been leading his party into a series of top-down makeovers of the entire U.S. economy, via tax cuts and acts of bizarre sabotage, is of course considered Good.)
Because our discourse has become aggressively stupid, however, Republicans have been doing their best to portray the measure expressing support for maybe please dodging the very worst catastrophic effects of carbon-induced climate change as an act of "radical" cow-hating extremists who want to ban airplanes and steaks, forcing Americans into such socialist monstrosities as faster trains and less industrial pollution. Again, it is the Fox Newsification of the Republican Party, a merging of every online conspiracy theory with the trappings of the Senate, House, presidency, and new judicial appointment. Mitch wants Democrats to be "forced" into a vote on the resolution solely because Fox News needs footage of Democrats doing so in order to spin their latest lies about cow-banning. He has already ensured it will not have the votes to pass (because Republicans); it is just for the show of the thing.
The Democratic senators’ plan, at this point, appears to be a rough approximation of Who Cares. There is a push for each Democrat to vote "present" as a way to stiff-arm McConnell's rank cynicism, but it is likely that individual senators either angling for the presidency or clinging to conservative-leaning seats will break ranks to vote for or against. Since McConnell has already ensured it will be a meaningless vote, Democrats are free to vote however they like.
But that doesn't mean the dumbest members of the Senate aren't using the debate to make aggressive pitches to be named dumbest in the land. At the moment Utah Sen. Mike Lee, a semi-conspiratorial nut in the best of times, is using the threat of somebody taking climate change seriously to engage in one of the more remarkable acts of interpretive ranting the Senate has seen. It contains many, many inexplicable props.
Mmm-hmm.
What we can glean from this is that the Republican-controlled Senate will not be finding its bearings anytime soon. McConnell has been devoted to using the Senate solely as a vehicle for railroading through hard-right nominees while blocking substantive action on any and every other of the nation's issues; he has also cemented a reputation for bold lying well above the amateur nature of his president's gibbering, and for announcing that the Constitution itself means whatever he wants it to mean one day, and the opposite the next. The entirety of the Republican Party has collapsed into conspiracies, Dear Leader worship, and outright trolling. None of them seem to be embarrassed enough to stop, and those who’ve expressed a modicum of concern have been booted by voters wanting the party to go further, still.