For the past ten years, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has been ruthless and relentless in his one-man crusade to entrench conservative power by any means necessary, unwilling to let the Republican Party’s inability to win free and fair elections put any damper on the right-wing’s shamelessly corrupt and cruel agenda or any limit on the outsized power they wield in Washington.
There’s no unwritten rule too sacred to break and no hypocrisy too great for McConnell, as he made infuriatingly clear this afternoon on the Senate floor when he forced a historic vote to shorten debate on district court nominees from thirty to just two hours of floor discussion.
This means that McConnell and the rest of the Republican majority will rewrite the rules of a decidedly undemocratic institution for the express purpose of machine-gunning through the confirmations of right-wing extremist judges, flooding our judiciary with unqualified, extremely biased, and very young people into lifetime positions.
44 more judicial nominees were advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, on top of the 92 judges he’s already gotten confirmed so far.
McConnell just forced a historic vote. He wants to pack the courts to turn our Constitution on its head & lock in government by and for the powerful & privileged, destroying government by and for the people. Very dark day for our Constitution and for the people of America.
— Senator Jeff Merkley (@SenJeffMerkley) April 3, 2019
What McConnell is doing right now is making sure that even if the Democrats do retake power in 2020, even if all the millions of hours of organizing and canvassing and voter outreach and door-knocking from determined, passionate people all over the country pay off in a government supermajority, we’ll still be unable to pass any kind of substantial legislation to address the fundamental dysfunction and appalling inequality of American economy and society without having it buried in lawsuits and slapped down by right-wing psychopaths who believe gays, women, and people of color don’t deserve any rights.
This shamelessly partisan attempt to corrupt the impartiality of our judiciary by the servants of the oligarchs should be front-page news on every paper across the country. McConnell is intent on tearing down the institutions that keep our barely-functioning democracy working as it is, and the next wave of Democrats is going to need every ounce of courage and resilience they can muster in order to navigate the minefield that he’s leaving the American people.
