If there were a God, Mitch McConnell would have been reduced to a pile of smoldering ash years ago. After this op-ed at, where else, Fox News, God would sweep up those ashes, reshape and reanimate the remains, just for the pleasure of sending another righteous lightning bolt to smote him. Over and over again. Here’s the title of the op-ed: “Will Dems work with us, or simply put partisan politics ahead of the country?”
The decent world, which includes former President Barack Obama and the would-be Supreme Court Justice named Merrick Garland, would probably like a word about now. It would probably not be a polite word. Particularly if they actually read the thing and get to the part where he says “I have good news: reports of the death of bipartisanship in Washington have been wildly exaggerated.”
Which is of course, a lie. It was declared dead in October 2010, and McConnell called it with these words: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” That didn’t work, so he doubled down.
Here’s McConnell in 2016: “One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.'”
And, here’s essentially what McConnell said in 2016 to the Obama administration when it was attempting to get him on board with warning the country that an adversarial foreign power was trying to interfere with the presidential election: “you’re telling us that Russia is trying to help elect Trump. If you try to come forward with this, I’m not going to sign onto any sort of public statement that would condemn Russian interference. But I will condemn you and the Obama administration for trying to mess up this election.”
Here’s McConnell this very morning, meeting with “newly-elected GOP senators,” one of whom is Rick Scott. Who hasn’t been elected yet because Florida is still recounting the votes. Sen. Bill Nelson would probably also like to have a less than polite word with him, too.
If McConnell had any interest in the preservation of the nation, much less bipartisanship, he’d put the legislation to protect the Mueller investigation (already drafted and ready to go) on the Senate calendar. You already know how that’s going to go.
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Cross-posted from Daily Kos.
