Mitch McConnell may have bitten off more than he can chew
Republican Senators are a supremely venal group. Without a shred of irony, the party that once espoused term limits now corruptly prostrates itself before The Former Guy and his despicable base in a desperate collective attempt to remain in office.
They voted (with few exceptions) to block the establishment of a Commission to investigate the January 6 Capitol Insurrection. The fact that an investigation of some sort will nonetheless proceed — and their churlish vote itself may come back to haunt the GOP in the end — doesn’t diminish the corrupt intent of Republican Senators, just as the failure of Trump’s treasonous attempt to steal the election through a seditionist insurrection does not make it any less dangerous.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has made a callous calculation that the impact of Republicans’ stonewalling the Jan. 6 Commission will be long forgotten by the time the 2022 midterm elections come around, and that the vote is less dangerous to their reelection chances than an investigation that continually reminds voters through the election just how complicit various Republicans were in planning, inciting, stoking, and prolonging the insurrection that threatened the lives of Senators and Members of Congress, as well as Vice President Mike Pence.
Democrats must prove McConnell wrong, by delivering his worst nightmare — a thorough investigation by the House into the Insurrection that publicly reveals all of the information McConnell is trying to cover up, along with a parallel campaign to pound home the fact that Republican Senators tried to stymie such an investigation.
For good measure, Democrats should continue to circulate on social media and on TV an endless loop of McConnell’s floor speech right after he voted to acquit Trump in his second impeachment trial, when McConnell declared that:
“January 6th was a disgrace. American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of domestic business they did not like. Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the Speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chatted about murdering the Vice President. They did this because they’d been fed wild, falsehoods by the most powerful man on earth because he was angry. He lost an election. Former President Trump’s actions preceding the riot were a disgraceful dereliction of duty. . . . There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it.”
Using McConnell’s own words to amplify what he now seeks to hide will be delicious, but the icing on the cake is that it will infuriate Trump and set him off against McConnell once again. The two deserve each other, and let’s hope neither survives their political death match.
