McConnell joined the wailing chorus of Senate republicans, who had their feelings hurt by Chuck Schumer’s speech on the Senate floor before yesterday’s debt ceiling vote … because he did not speak nicely about them in the speech. He sent a pathetic complaint letter to Biden expressing his hurt feelings, savaging Schumer and the Democratic economic agenda and proclaiming that that he will no longer cooperate with Democrats on anything. Seriously!
Schumer’s speech is just an excuse for McConnell to derail the Democratic plan to help America. Republicans have no plans to cooperate on anything with Democrats. They never have, they never will. They will obstruct and obstruct and try to win brownie points with trump and their petulant crazed base.
The speech from Schumer came after 11 GOP senators joined with all Democrats to end debate on the short-term debt ceiling increase bill. Eventually, the bill was passed on a party-line 50-48 vote, to raise the debt ceiling by $480 billion through December 3.
Schumer pointed out some inconvenient truths about how republicans are sabotaging the economy and holding the country hostage by using the filibuster power to refuse raising the debt ceiling on the debt they created. He bluntly accused them of playing a "dangerous and risky partisan game" and saying Democrats were able to "pull our country back from the cliff's edge that Republicans tried to push us over.”
Now McConnell upped the ante by writing a
letter to President Biden, bitterly complaining about Schumer’s speech.
Seriously, this is the Senate minority letter writing a petulant complaint letter to the President of the United States, full of the usual right-wing talking blather. There is no bottom with McConnell either. Maybe, he wants to be friends again with trump, who has been attacking him all day. Perhaps, he wants to impress the juvenile base of the juvenile republican party. Maybe, he wants to create a distraction away from the Jan 6 investigations. Perhaps, he is getting orders from his big boss.
For anyone complaining about Schumer’s words, read any speech that McConnell has given on the Senate floor or the tweet he tweeted to announce the debt ceiling “concession” or this letter — they are all laced with poisonous words and juvenile insults against Democrats. There is never one word of reconciliation or awareness of their hypocrisy or their dastardly role in creating crisis after crisis for the country. Not one word of respect for members of the Democratic party every slips off that forked-tongue.
The ending paragraph gives the game away —
I am writing to make it clear that in light of Senator Schumer’s hysterics and my grave concerns about the ways that another vast, reckless, partisan spending bill would hurt Americans and help China, I will not be a party to any future effort to mitigate the consequences of Democratic mismanagement.
Yup, this is just posturing and finding excuses for their continued obstruction.
Republicans will continue to play dangerous games and do everything possible to wreck Biden’s agenda. The right-wing noise machine will ramp up their talking-points on the subject. It does not have to make any sense, since their base expects none. They want to create chaos. They think they can win the Senate and the House in 2022 with chaos assisted by voter suppression.
It is not clear how we will make progress on the Democratic agenda given the total intransigence on the part of republicans and given that, so far, a couple of Democratic Senators are pulling for the other side.
What should Democrats do next on the debt ceiling issue? What about the infrastructure bill? And filibuster “reform”? Voting rights? What should our strategy and messaging be?