The transactional politics that destroyed a country and its legal system. [ed.]
McConnell, the partisan architect of the partisan supreme court majority, could, if he wished to boast, rightly claim credit for those justices staging the timely rescue of his nemesis. Putting in place justice after justice, breaking precedent after precedent, he is the father of this court’s majority. He considers it his greatest accomplishment.
McConnell made plain the purely transactional basis of the relationship when he endorsed Trump after Super Tuesday, citing how “we worked together to accomplish great things for the American people … a generational change of our federal judiciary – most importantly, the supreme court”. (...)
McConnell had many reasons for declaring he has reached the twilight of his career, even though the Republicans may gain control of the Senate after the election and he would be leader again. His health, after all, is fragile. He froze speechless twice in press conferences. He has suffered a terrible personal tragedy, the accidental drowning of his wife’s sister. But approaching the promised land once more, which might be his culmination, he restrained himself from entering. He announced he would relinquish the enormous power he has accumulated over a lifetime because he could see it ebbing away to his worst enemy. That very worst enemy is not Joe Biden, who he likes and would destroy out of cold partisanship, but Trump, who he hates with a white-hot passion, but whom he has safeguarded and would help become “dictator for a day”.
“Believe me, I know the politics within my party at this particular time,” said McConnell in his Senate speech announcing his retirement. “I have many faults. Misunderstanding politics is not one of them.” Believe him, he can count. (...)
McConnell’s enforcement of the party line made him appear like Senate leaders before him. His acolytes praise him as an “institutionalist”. He basks in presenting himself as a “constitutionalist”. But to build his power McConnell has subverted constitutional norms and standards, corroded and corrupted checks and balances, and drastically weakened the Senate through his explosive abuse of filibusters to transfer power to the federal courts, which he stuffed with Federalist Society cadres. He has been more than a great anti-institutionalist; he has been an anti-constitutionalist.
McConnell’s great crusade was to tear down the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (the so-called McCain-Feingold bill) and open the sluice gates for dark money. The year after its passage he filed his opposition in a case that made its way to the supreme court, McConnell v Federal Election Commission, which he lost in a 5-4 ruling upholding the bill. Still, he persisted.
In 2006, far-right Samuel Alito was nominated to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the court. She was a moderate Republican of the old school, who upheld abortion rights and campaign finance reform. When 25 Democrats attempted a symbolic filibuster against Alito, McConnell took the floor to denounce the effort as unconstitutional: “Mr President, we stand today on the brink of a new and reckless effort by a few to deny the rights of many to exercise our constitutional duty to advise and consent, to give this man the simple up or down vote he deserves. The Senate should repudiate this tactic.”
In 2010, with Alito on the court, it ruled 5-4 in Citizens United v FEC that restrictions on independent campaign funds – dark money – were violated free speech. “So, all Citizens United did was to level the playing field for corporate speech,” said McConnell. It was his emancipation proclamation; he freed the dark money.
In 2014, McConnell filed an amicus brief in McCutcheon, et al v FEC, a case he inspired that was backed by the Republican National Committee, challenging aggregate limits on campaign contributions as “a severe infringement on the rights of speech.” The supreme court ruled for McCutcheon in a 5-4 decision.
With the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, McConnell laid down the Republican line. “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” he ordered. His tactic was the filibuster that he had decried. During the Obama presidency, McConnell held up 517 Senate debates through filibusters. The Senate Republicans successfully filibustered 79 Obama federal judicial nominees during his first five years, compared to 68 in entire previous history. After the Republicans gained control of the Senate in 2015, they blocked 50 of 70 nominations to federal judgeships.
Through dark money and filibusters, servicing corporate interests, McConnell built a new political machine at the expense of paralyzing and diminishing the Senate. He capped his obstructions after the death of conservative justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016. If Obama were to succeed in seating his appointment on the supreme court the majority would tilt 5-4 against the conservatives.
McConnell refused to allow even a single committee hearing for Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, a highly regarded judge of the most moderate temperament on the DC district court. McConnell asserted a novel doctrine that a nomination to the supreme court could not be considered in a president’s last year and that the vacancy must be filled by the next president. He dubbed his gambit “a constitutional right”. “One of my proudest moments,” he said after killing the Garland nomination, “was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr President, you will not fill the supreme court vacancy.’” When Sean Hannity later asked McConnell wondered why Obama left so many vacancies on the federal courts, McConnell replied: “I’ll tell you why. I was in charge of what we did the last two years of the Obama administration.”
In the 2016 campaign, McConnell backed Senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, an acolyte, in the primaries. After Trump bulldozed his way to the nomination, McConnell expected him to be a dead weight on Republican Senate candidates. He suggested that they could separate themselves by running negatives ads against him. “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” he said.
McConnell remained complacent that he was the enduring Republican standard and Trump the blip. “My view is that Trump will not change the Republican party,” he said. “If he brings in new followers, that’s great, and well worth the effort, but he will not change the Republican party … I think he’d be fine.” He added as an additional note of reassurance that the constitution “constrains all of us, members of Congress and the president as well”.
Watching Trump’s win on election night, McConnell said: “The first thing that came to my mind was the supreme court.” He was soon in touch with Leonard Leo, chairman of the Federalist Society, who described McConnell as his “vigilant and irrepressible” partner in gaining control of the federal courts. Leo was an octopus of dark money operations, his tentacles reaching far and wide. After Citizens United, he sat atop hundreds of millions and then billions of dollars to promote his causes and McConnell’s candidates.
A week after the election, Leo carried a list of court nominees into a meeting with Trump at Trump Tower. Trump’s first supreme court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, was on the list. His second and third nominees, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, were on Leo’s next list. Leo sent more lists to the White House, rubber-stamped by White House counsel Don McGahn, a Federalist Society stalwart, and McConnell would process them through the Senate. Eighty-five per cent of Trump’s court appointees were Federalist Society members. He was entrenching conservative power in the courts for a generation to come. Trump remarked privately, “Mitch McConnell. Judges. Judges. Judges. The only thing he wants is judges.” McConnell told Trump: “Mr President, when are you going to thank me for that?”
Six weeks before election day, on 18 September 2020, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. As soon as McConnell heard the news he called Trump: “First, I’m going to put out a statement that says we’re going to fill the vacancy. Second, you’ve got to nominate Amy Coney Barrett.” McConnell’s doctrine that a president could not fill a supreme court vacancy in an election year suddenly evaporated. “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.” Barrett was sworn in on 26 October. McConnell’s relationship with Trump got him what he wanted. The conservative majority on the court was now seven to three. (...)
McConnell has a decades-long history in the Senate from intern to dinosaur, from minion to overlord, but his overweening pride in his shrewdness, his inner hackery, has prevented him from learning any larger lessons of history that explain his fall. He cannot dispense with his ingrained belief that he remains the true Republican and that there is an invisible Republican party that belongs to him, not Trump.
by Sidney Blumenthal, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Mariam Zuhaib/AP
[ed. Nice thumbnail sketch of Mitch's greatest hits. A real statesman of the lowest order.]
by Sidney Blumenthal, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Mariam Zuhaib/AP
[ed. Nice thumbnail sketch of Mitch's greatest hits. A real statesman of the lowest order.]
