Dear America,
With the conventions going on, Donald Trump gets mentioned derogatorily, whether explicitly or implicitly, with great regularity, and he certainly deserves it. But in my opinion, Mitch McConnell is just as derision-worthy as Trump is, and perhaps even more so. Trump is what he is and we have all seen it now for three and a half years. He loves being on television, so he volunteers to be several times a week. And it doesn't matter to him whether what people say about him on those occasions is pejorative or complimentary. He just wants to be seen, and in a sense that makes him more idiotic than menacing. But McConnell doesn't appear on television more often than is absolutely necessary. I can only recall seeing him interviewed on a news program once, and frankly, he handled himself quite well. The interview was about the last round of pandemic relief proposed by The House, and he countered direct questions about the house bill with alternatives that he and his contingent in the Republican senate caucus, which didn't really answer any questions of significance. He left the interview "stage" unscathed because he had been interviewed, not made to compare what he proposed with the alternative. I give him credit for being clever with regard to the positions he puts himself in; he never takes a risk. But he is as Machiavellian as they come, and his tactics are subtle enough that no one ever asks him about them.
For example, more than a year ago, when the topic of everyone's mind was immigration, Republican senator Lyndsey Graham, who still had a little integrity, was at the White House with Democratic senator Dick Durbin, who retains all of his, among others and they were there to discuss immigration reform. Trump was just reshaping his promise about "the wall" into something that he would do and we would pay for rather than Mexico doing so, and he was pressing his case despite the opposition he was getting relative to funding in particular. But without mentioning funding for the wall, he said on television news that if Durbin and Graham, thus both parties acting in accord, brought him an immigration reform bill, he would sign it no matter what was in it. The implication was that with or without wall funding...with or without a resolution of the DACA controversy relating to children of undocumented immigrants...if the two parties could agree, he would too. Well, a week or so later, Graham and Durbin were back with a bill on which they agreed, and Trump's response was that he wouldn't sign it because there was no funding for the wall. He could have been forced to if McConnell had agreed to put the bill up for a vote, because Trump would have had to stand alone against amicably arrived at reform of our immigration, but McConnell didn't do that. In other words, he shielded Trump, who was the only obstacle to resolution of a national problem that even George W. Bush wanted to fix, and his opposition was just that a project on which he had hung his political future wasn't funded. McConnell was his enabler and millions of people will suffer on account of it.
Now, there are two relief bills floating around in The Senate. The first one has been there for over three months now, and it has already been passed by The House. The second one was forged by McConnell and his insider clique, but there are about twenty Republican senators who don't like it, not to mention most or all of the Democrats. But McConnell knows that if he puts his bill up for a vote it will fail, and those twenty Republicans will be exposed to condemnation by their constituents, which means voted out of office in a few months. So he is using the same tactic as he uses to defend Trump; he just doesn't allow a vote on either bill, and meanwhile, people are losing their houses, the children are hungry and their unemployment benefits have been reduced to meaninglessness. But McConnell has protected his party's majority in The Senate, and that's all he cares about...that and protecting Trump from losing his constituency due to an unpopular veto.
There are lots of other examples of McConnell personally being the fly in the legislative ointment in service of Trump's needs relative to reelection and that of his fellow senators as well, but the point is made. Donald Trump is a menace, but he's an oaf, and my guess is that even those in his "basket of deplorables" see that now...at least enough so to get him out of the seat of perhaps the greatest power in the world. But if they don't see it, it's because McConnell has protected him from going on the record with his despicable, self-serving nature. I just hope that the people of his home state of Kentucky value true democracy enough to throw him out with Trump this November.
Your friend,
Mike
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