On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, as well as 2021, that “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” published profiles of U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, who as a member of the U.S. House, voted against equal pay for women multiple times, insisting that “women don’t want it”. She’s also a co-sponsor of the “Birther Bill”, denies that Mitt Romney ever passed a healthcare program in Massachusetts, and gave an infamous interview where she falsely claimed that the Affordable Care Act (which she also was a part of the “lie of the year” at Polifiact, predicting it would lead to death panels) was a violation of HIPAA, and when asked repeatedly to explain how that’s even possible, she just kept repeating the same falsehood robotically without actually providing any logical answer.
She was also a big proponent of the 2013 Government Shutdown, and on the day it began, went on FOX and Friends to optimistically predict that it would actually teach ordinary Americans about all the “big government” ideas that were being defunded that they can do without (which the opposite actually happened over the 16 day stretch). Our update on Blackburn continued covering her hyper-conservative voting record, as well as the fact that she spoke at the South Carolina Freedom Summit and claimed Christians were a persecuted minority in the United States. When reporters followed up on her remarks and asked her to name an example of such persecution, she failed to be able to cite a single one.
Marsha Blackburn was also particularly awful during the GOP’s witch hunt after the Center for Medical Progress released their deceitful smear of Planned Parenthood, insisting that after all investigations had been concluded that Planned Parenthood had still been caught “selling baby body parts”, and during the paranoia around the affair, attempted to use the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation as a means to demand a complete list of every medical students, residents, or other medical personnel around the country who have ever participated in an abortion, because there’s no way that such a thing would enable domestic terrorists in the radical anti-choice movement to assassinate those people (when they already have done so).
Through 2017, continued to make the rounds on cable news and with the media, where she can do things like insinuate that James Comey is a liar to help provide cover for Donald Trump while he’s investigated for accepting help from the Russians to get elected in exchange for dropping sanctions against them, or when she can be one of the few politicians who actually defended Donald Trump’s spur of the moment decision to ban transgendered soldiers from the military before he ever consulted the Pentagon about what kind of impact that might have. Make no mistake, she’s “all-in” on the Trump administration, and with any luck, she might get swept away with it at some point. Maybe when she was caught in the middle of the NRA/Russia connection, someone should have thrown a flag.
After she started catching some serious hell at her town halls in 2017, where she’s been raucously booed and openly been accused of lying, she responded to that treatment by going on CNN a week later to claim that the people who booed her weren’t actually from her district. The usually passive Wolf Blitzer fact-checked her on, pointing out that people had to show ID to prove they were from her district to get into the building in the first place.
Marsha Blackburn takes advantage of how red of a state Tennessee is, winning election to ther U.S. Senate to replace the retiring Sen. Bob Corker in 2018 with 55% of the vote. She was more than willing to rubber-stamp whatever judicial nominees the Trump administration put in front of her, regardless of how terrible of people they are, or how wildly unqualified they are for the job (which make no mistake, Marsha Blackburn has begun doing that as a Senator)…
We’re also going to note that Marsha Blackburn unilaterally blacked a bill in the Senate that would have required any presidential campaign that receives offers of assistance from an agent of a foreign government to report it to the FBI, opening the door for Russia to assist the 2020 Trump campaign the way they did in 2016. (And at least a dozen GOP Congressional candidates also accepted help from Russian hackers, per the Mueller report). This should come as little surprise, though, because Blackburn knows exactly how deep Trump is in it with Russia… after all, she was on the Trump transition team. She deemed the bill, submitted by Mark Warner, as “over-broad” and that “it should be done in a bipartisan way” even though outside of Blackburn, it had unanimous support. And that Warner offered to allow her to suggest how to amend it to make it not “over-broad” or “more bipartisan”, however the hell she assumes to interpret those words.
In January of 2020, Sen. Blackburn was predictably among the Republican senators who voted against allowing witnesses in the impeachment trial for Donald Trump, thereby making it a “trial”, and then voted to acquit him after said “trial” in spite of the mountain of evidence that he tried to solicit foreign aid in the 2020 elections from Ukraine by threatening to withhold aid from them.
For all the effort she put towards doing that, she’s been mostly twiddling her thumbs to do anything to help the country survive the economic impact of the coronavirus since passing the original stimulus bill back in March. She saves all of her energy for lashing out at the media for daring to fact-check her habitually lying ass, like the did after her fib-filled speech at the 2020 RNC.
Her voting record, just since 2020:
- January 31st, 2020: Marsha Blackburn votes against witnesses being allowed in the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump, effectively making it a “trial”.
- February 5th, 2020: Sen. Blackburn votes against the first impeachment of Donald Trump, in spite of the mountain of evidence showing that he solicited foreign assistance in the 2020 elections.
- February 25th, 2020: Blackburn votes for the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, an insane piece of anti-choice legislation that would ask abortion providers to try to admit aborted fetuses to a hospital if they were “alive” after the procedure, which is medically impossible given the age that abortions can be performed at.
- February 13th, 2021: Marsha Blackburn votes to acquit Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial, feeling that he deserves no punishment for inciting an attack on the Capitol and jeopardizing the lives of the legislative branch of our government.
- March 6th, 2021: Sen. Blackburn votes against the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, because he can’t be bothered to care if people need financial assistance during a pandemic.
- June 9th, 2021: Blackburn drafts a nonsensical resolution that is meant to combat “cancel culture” without explaining exactly what that’s even supposed to mean.
- July 10th, 2021: Marsha Blackburn does the important business of a U.S. Senator, specifically taking time out to do an interview with the white nationalist website Breitbart and continue a feud with pop star Taylor Swift over Swift’s relatively mild political stances, chastising her and telling her she would be one of the first “victims of socialism”.
- August 26th, 2021: Sen. Blackburn immediately politicizes the death of 11 members of the armed forces killed in an attack during the evacuation of Afghanistan, calling for President Biden to resign as a result.
- December 14th, 2021: Blackburn votes against raising the debt ceiling, jeopardizing the United States’ credit rating.
- January 12th, 2022: Marsha Blackburn rails against judicial nominee Andre Mathis, over SPEEDING TICKETS, which after the people she rubber-stamped during the Trump administration, certainly wasn’t a ridiculous excuse for trying to stop a person of color from becoming a federal judge.
- February 28th, 2022: Sen. Blackburn votes against the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would have established a right to physicians to perform abortions to save their patients’ lives.
- March 23rd, 2022: Marsha Blackburn gets on Twitter, and defiantly points out that the Constitution doesn’t award Americans the right to an abortion, just the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. People who aren’t idiots or drunk remind her the Constitution doesn’t mention those things, they’re actually in the Declaration of Independence.
- March 30th, 2022: Blackburn votes against putting the extremely qualified nominee, Judge Kentanji Brown-Jackson, onto the Supreme Court.
- April 4th, 2022: Marsha Blackburn trips over herself on Twitter again, claiming that Tennessee wants a border wall on their southern border, and people point out it’s 1,000 miles away from the U.S. Mexico border, and unless they’re trying to keep out people from Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi… she’s a dumbass.
- May 26th, 2022: Sen. Blackburn votes against the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022, because at this point, domestic terror is a policy plank of authoritarian Republicans.
- July 27th, 2022: Marsha Blackburn votes against the PACT Act, blocking additional funding towards veterans exposed to “burn pits” while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a vote conducted out of spite that Democrats passed the Act the prior day. Several Republicans are seen shaking hands and fist bumping to celebrate screwing over the vets, while releasing a series of photos of the Senate GOP Caucus filling USO boxes and claiming they “support the military”.
Marsha Blackburn truly “embraces stupid”, unflinchingly, as she argued in favor of “Neanderthal thinking” as a better approach to tackling the Covid-19 pandemic.
Yeah, that much. And the country will be stuck with Marsha Blackburn in the Senate until 2024. Just… great. Great.