Dear America,
The things that Mitch McConnell goes un-reproached for are mind-boggling. Politics is full of sophistry, but almost always it is marginally plausible at the very least. The Republicans claim that the election in 2020 was rigged, and they adduce incidents that are at least colorable as supportive of the claim, for example, a suitcase full of ballots being video-taped as it is pulled out from under a table where votes were being counted. Of course there was an explanation that had nothing to do with fraud; the on-site supervisor had told the counters that the center was closing, at which time they packed the ballots away--ironically for security purposes--only to be ordered to reopen the case and resume counting in consequence of orders from above. The Republicans ignored the facts under cover of ignorance so they could feign sincerity, but McConnell doesn't even bother to try to cover his lack of integrity with claims wishfully thought. This week, for example, he marshaled his Republican Party's Trump-struck soldiers to vote unanimously against a voting rights bill aimed at preventing the circumscription of voting rights being curtailed in several Republican dominated states by state voting rights bills that don't guaranty the opportunity to vote, but rather restrict it. And what was McConnell's public justification for his enforcement of this party blind loyalty? Did he have any evidence that restrictions on the opportunity to vote would accomplish anything laudable? No.
What he said after pronouncing the party's univocal stand firmly against the federal voting rights guaranty embodied by the bill in question is that it comprised Democratic Party efforts to enhance their vote tallies nationwide rather than its obvious implicit gravamen: that it is necessary to prevent the Republican state legislators and governors from limiting the right to vote in their favor. Think about the logic, or the bald-faced farcicality in McConnell's claim. The Democratic bill would guaranty voters a certain number of days for early voting. It would prevent them from being barred from voting because they didn't register soon enough. It would permit state election officials to send them absentee ballots, all among other things intended to make the polls accessible to more voters, which implicitly renders McConnell's preposterous contrived justification for his political chicanery plainly spurious. If the Republicans don't want more votes cast, it must be because they feel that more votes means more Democratic votes, or more simply, more voters favor Democratic candidates than they do Republicans. In a true democracy, that should translate into political hegemony for the Democrats, which is what we have now...barely. The conclusion that the Republicans, McConnell in particular, want to rise to power by preventing votes from being cast for the opposition Democratic Party's candidates to the extent that they were so cast in 2020 is inescapable. Yet, McConnell has pressed it shamelessly, and no one has called him on it, at least not is such a way as to make the news, all while two Democratic senators refuse to support the bill...and thus pass it...because since all the Republicans voted against it, it isn't bipartisan. As if bipartisanship is possible when the Republicans press their own contrived versions of the facts to justify their blind party loyalty.
While this is all just a little more unsavory manipulation of our system under the regime of Capo McConnell to go along with the Supreme Court nomination stifled by him with an argument that he ignored when his party wanted to put its candidate on the court at the last minute, as well as the votes he prevented so as to protect his partisans from being forced to vote out of party loyalty as opposed to loyalty to their constituents, his duplicity is beginning to have deleterious effects on our nation that will live far into the future. Ironically, it seems that the Justice that he single-handedly manipulated onto the Supreme Court may in fact be more rational fair-minded than conservative and Republican, but that one small saving grace won't get McConnell into heaven.
If for no other reason than to mitigate the threat to our way of life that Mitch McConnell's Tammany Hall style of running his party constitutes, we all have to vote in 2022. If of the 34 senate elections that will occur at that time the Democrats win just one of the 19 Republican seats on the ballot and keep all of the 15 Democratic seats that are in play, McConnell's reign of terror will be over. He will still be the Republicans' Darth Vader, but the force won't be with him. My fingers are already crossed.
Your friend,
Mike
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