Mitch McConnell just signaled he knows the clock is ticking on Donald Trump’s remaining time in office

| 9:36 am EDT July 12, 2017
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Congress is in recess so often that it leads to perennial jokes about how much politicians enjoy not working. Of course those recesses are supposed to be so members can go back home and meet with their districts. Not that the Republicans do that anymore, with most of them afraid to hold town halls, but that’s neither here nor there. Here’s the point: recess is taken very seriously by members of Congress. And Mitch McConnell just violated recess in a big way, because he knows the clock is ticking.

It’s not that the Republican Congress is in danger of running out of time on the calendar. It’ll retain control of both the House and Senate for the rest of this year and next year. That’s plenty of time to ruin health care, ruin the environment, ruin the economy, and all those other things that the modern Republican party likes to do. And yet McConnell just canceled two weeks of Senate recess, in the desperate hope that his party can use that time to crank out a bit more legislation before what he now suspects is inevitable.

No, that doesn’t mean Donald Trump will be magically out of office in a few weeks. As I’ve consistently said from the start, ousting a president – even a corrupt criminal one – is a long process. We’re actually moving at light speed on Trump’s ouster, but it doesn’t feel that way due to the sheer distance that has to be covered. Unless he resigns, this’ll take awhile. But what it does mean is that McConnell and other Republican leaders in Congress are now expecting Trump’s scandals to imminently explode to the point that they become the only thing in politics, and stay that way until he’s gone.

Even if you’re the majority party in Congress, it’s difficult to do something as constructive (in the Republican Party’s case, destructive) as passing major legislation when the President of your own party is afire with raging scandal. Mitch McConnell just signaled that he thinks the remaining window is very short before Donald Trump’s implosion reaches the point that it preempts anything else going in politics. If you’re a regular reader, feel free to support Palmer Report