Why is this man smiling? Well, the project is almost complete
Does it matter that Mitch McConnell, a Republican senator and the longest-serving Senate leader in US history, has offered his support for Donald Trump’s bid to return to the White House?
Mr McConnell is 82, visibly frail, markedly unwell from a fall and will step down as Republican senate leader at the end of this year. Is there any point then in even noting the fact that he has endorsed Mr Trump for president?
Might his endorsement be magnanimousness despite years of acrimony that include the former president abusing Mr McConnell as a “ piece of shit “ and attacking his Asian American wife Elaine Chao in racist terms?
Or is it a worrying sign of the fear inspired by Mr Trump, who is promising America that he if gets to rule again it will be by vengeance, fiat and the Insurrection Act?
Perhaps Mr McConnell’s endorsement of Mr Trump is neither of these things and merely of a piece with a morally bankrupt strand of American politics that he has very nearly come to epitomise.
As Tom Nichols noted in The Atlantic, Mr McConnell “will be remembered as one of the people whose decisions were crucial in bringing American democracy to the edge of destruction”.
Had he retired a decade ago, said the piece, Mr McConnell “would have gone in the books as just another unremarkable party boss who used his talent for cloakroom politics to ensure that laws were written to protect the wealth and interests of his donors”.
Instead, he used his mastery of “legislative maneuvering” to help “create a strange new principle in American politics”. That’s the one “in which presidents can nominate justices to the Supreme Court only if the Senate majority leader feels like entertaining that idea”.
It was Mr McConnell, remember, who refused to allow President Barak Obama to appoint a Supreme Court justice to fill the vacancy created by the February 2016 death of Justice Antonin Scalia because it was, allegedly too near the November general election. Mr Obama had nominated the moderate jurist Merrick Garland but Mr McConnell had already declared any appointment by the sitting president to be null and void. He said the next Supreme Court justice should be chosen by the next president — to be elected later that year.
And it was Mr McConnell who allowed then President Donald Trump to nominate and appoint Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court in September 2020, to fill the vacancy created by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death earlier that month. Justice Barrett’s nomination and confirmation by Mitch McConnell’s senate came just two months before the 2020 general election.
In fact, Mr McConnell has gone on record to say that one of the “proudest moments” of his life “was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy’.” His refusal to authorise any action on a future Supreme Court Justice Garland broke with 150 years of senatorial precedent and practice.
But that’s not all Mr McConnell will be remembered for. He led his party’s senators through two impeachment acquittals of Mr Trump. The second of these came after the January 6 insurrection.
What does it matter that Mr McConnell and Mr Trump have not spoken since the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021? In real terms, he has helped Mr Trump execute ‘the project’ and will now aid his attempt to return to the presidency and finish it.
What project would that be? The one that believes truly and deeply in small government, which is to say that power should be returned from the federal government to private enterprise as well as to individual states. Mr McConnell had long believed that rather than the federal legislature it would be US federal courts — if filled with enough conservative jurists — who could hobble and cut down to size the federal government. Accordingly, during the Trump presidency, he pushed through congressional confirmation of 175 district court appointments and 54 court of appeals appointments.
As The Atlantic said: “McConnell is the one man who, more than anyone else in Washington, made sure that Trump could walk free, run for president again, and then make his appeal for an elective monarchy to a Court whose conservative majority smirks at the idea of accountability”.
His endorsement of another spell of Donald Trump in the White House — one that is freighted with enormous risk for the very idea of America — would be almost as venal as the would-be autocrat he supports. Except that it doesn’t much matter now. The project is nearly complete.
Originally published at https://www.rashmee.com
