Mitch McConnell swings and misses
Earlier in the week, when Mitch McConnell rebuked corporations that took a stand against voter suppression, he was roundly mocked by everyone. It didn’t exactly help him when he went on further to clarify that the company’s political contributions are always nice. Some people wondered if there was some evil plan at work here – that maybe Mitch was trying to rebrand himself as a man of the people in all of this, but the latest steps we’ve seen suggest that a plan is the furthest thing from his mind.
In just about the same clumsy fashion, McConnell came out swinging – or swinging and missing – against President Biden’s newly minted committee looking into the issue of what to do with the Supreme Court. Despite his confidence just five years ago when he refused to let President Obama fill a vacant seat, McConnell is now accusing President Biden of politicizing the courts, even though putting together a nonpartisan commission is the exact opposite of this. Of course, this is the absolute limit that McConnell can do – there’s always the very real possibility that a commission could recommend expanding SCOTUS without a single Republican vote on the matter.
While you’ve been used to hearing about McConnell as some sort of supervillain for the last few years, and while it is true that he’s a skilled manipulator, you’re actually seeing the actions of someone desperate and defeated. This is exactly why McConnell and his colleagues are so desperate to change the conversation to whatever Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are doing or how they might vote. McConnell’s hoping you won’t notice how weak his own team looks – because if they look helpless and weak, they won’t even be able to get their own base to turn out in 2022.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making