This is despicable, even for Mitch McConnell
Last year, many people campaigned hard to remove former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell from the reins of power – whether it was by supporting his opponent who was very unlikely to win due to Kentucky’s voter demographics, or by campaigning for Democratic senate candidates across the country to confine McConnell to the mostly powerless position of minority leader. The second goal was a bit more realistic, but pushing McConnell to retire might still be a prospect that’s just an election cycle away.
It made news headlines a few weeks ago, when McConnell was looking into a state law that would force Kentucky’s Democratic governor Andy Beshear to replace McConnell with a Republican if he were to retire before his term expired. Now, McConnell is doing something else that reeks of desperation.
“The economy’s coming back. People are getting vaccines. We’re on the way out of this. We’re about to have a boom,” McConnell said to reporters on Wednesday. This sounds like pretty good news – and you’d think he’d be happy if it weren’t for the context. Immediately afterward, McConnell said this: “And if we do have a boom, it will have absolutely nothing to do with this $1.9 trillion.”
That’s pretty despicable, but it’s just about what you’d expect from McConnell. First of all, he said the quiet part aloud, that he’s not too thrilled about life getting better for the average American – the main reason he killed nearly every piece of legislation that hit his desk as majority leader, but what’s pathetically embarrassing about this quote, is that McConnell is out of excuses for why his party tried to kill the American Rescue Plan, and he’s not even trying. Let’s campaign like hell to make sure he’s never trusted with the position of majority leader again – in 2023 or any other year.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making