While the nation officially hits the mark of 100,000 COVID-19 deaths, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is back home in Kentucky for the week, taking a victory lap on the legislation that was passed because of the work of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. While he was trying to force Democrats into passing a corporate bailout bill back in March, Pelosi and Schumer were negotiating with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on what became the CARES Act. And now McConnell is taking credit.
He's touting the $11 billion he says he got for Kentucky on this recess visit back home. That's after he declared that there wouldn't be any more aid to states because he was going to refuse a "blue state bailout." The enormous backlash he got for that statement has made him back off and adapt a new red line: a liability shield for the health care industry and private businesses to protect them from being sued because of their actions in the pandemic. Like opening too soon and bringing back their employees too soon and killing them. McConnell's completely on board with Trump's premature reopening plan, and completely on board with getting people killed and making sure that his corporate pals can't be held to account for those deaths.
We can save the nation. We can boot McConnell and his majority, with your $3.
"The way to get back to normal is to get back to normal, for the economy to begin breathing again, for people to begin to engage again," Sen. McConnell told WKYT Monday. "Ultimately, that will be done in the best way once we have a vaccine, but we know we can begin to reengage. We're doing it now, doing things like this, restaurants are beginning to open up." And if workers or customers at those restaurants get sick and die, it's no skin off McConnell's nose.
Nope, here's McConnell bravely standing up for the Chamber of Commerce, as if it didn't already have at least half the governors, the White House, the Senate, and a majority on the Supreme Court to protect it. McConnell insists that he has to have these protections or nothing in the next response bill, including state and local aid. When that bill eventually passes, and it will because it has to, and the $1 trillion the House has included in state and local aid is finally provided, McConnell will be back home again, touting his great success.
But that's not happening soon, because McConnell has the Senate out for the week, and when they come back next week, he's got more judiciary and executive branch nominations on the calendar. Because that's what matters to him—creating a federal judiciary that will be 100% in the pocket of the Chamber of Commerce.