This is Mitch McConnell’s most absurd empty threat yet
Mitch McConnell manages to accomplish a lot of evils things in the Senate. He also spends a lot of time making a number of laughably empty threats over things he doesn’t even control, in the hope of scaring his adversaries into being paralyzed with fear. The Resistance would do well to start focusing on which is which, so they know how to fight back against McConnell more effectively, and which of McConnell’s threats to ignore.
For instance, last month Mitch McConnell asserted that he was going to quickly get Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial over with by a certain date. Back in the real world, Nancy Pelosi and the House get to decide when to hand off impeachment to the Senate, meaning McConnell has zero control over when the Senate impeachment trial might start, which means he can’t promise it’ll be over by a certain date. Now McConnell is floating the opposite threat.
Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans are now suddenly pushing the notion that they’re going to drag out Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial all the way through the heart of the 2020 presidential primary season, so that the four Democratic Senators running for president will be too busy with the impeachment trial to be able to run their campaigns. This makes sense, but only if you put literally zero thought into it.
Are we really supposed to believe that Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker and Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar are complete idiots? Are we really expecting their presidential campaigns to fall apart because they have to be in the Senate for Donald Trump’s impeachment trial? It would be a boon for their campaigns, because they’d get to campaign by default from the Senate chamber and the Senate hallways, as the entire nation tunes in to watch the impeachment trial.
We all know that Donald Trump’s impeachment trial will be a far bigger problem for the Republican Senators who have to vote on impeachment and then try to get reelected, when they’ll be hurt whether they cast a “yes” or “no” vote. But sure, let’s spin this into some doomsday fantasy in which Trump’s impeachment is instead going to somehow magically hurt the Senate Democrats.
Republicans like Mitch McConnell love floating laughably absurd nonsensical threats like this because they know the media will eat it up, under the premise that it’ll scare the Resistance into staying glued to their televisions. The more the Resistance tunes out this kind of empty fear mongering, the more inclined the media will be to stop airing it. Mitch McConnell does enough damage with his actual corrupt antics. Let’s not give him even more power by cowering over his laughably nonsensical threats that even he knows aren’t a real thing.
