Mcconnell is a rank hypocrite

It’s early, but Senate Minority Leader Mitch Mcconnell, R-KY., is making a strong bid for Hypocrite of the Year. He rants and raves about how Democrats will “break” the Senate if they so much as touch the filibuster. But Mcconnell himself has already pulverized the place and trashed its oh-so-hallowed traditions.

Mcconnell has been pitching a hissy fit over the prospect that Democrats would change the rules to let voting rights legislation be debated and passed by simple majority. He threatened to respond to such action by tying the chamber in knots “in ways that are more inconvenient for the majority and the White House than what anybody has seen in living memory.” And in an over-the-top floor speech, he attacked President Biden as “profoundly unpresidential” for being willing — finally — to consider filibuster reform.

That’s rich. If Mcconnell wants to blame someone for destroying whatever bipartisan, hands-across-the-aisle comity the Senate might once have had, he need only look in the mirror.

In his years as majority leader, Mcconnell flagrantly broke Senate tradition — and his own word — to achieve the political outcomes he wanted. His threats to make Democrats’ lives miserable if they act boldly on voting rights are probably real. But folks, look at recent history: He’s going to do that anyway.

Most notably, look at the fact that Attorney General Merrick Garland should not be running the Justice Department. He should be sitting on the Supreme Court — and would be, if Mcconnell actually believed his own pious pronouncements about how the Senate is supposed to work.

You will recall that President Barack Obama nominated Garland to the high court in March 2016, following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Garland was not any kind of fiery progressive. He was an experienced and highly respected appellate jurist, a judge’s judge who would have been on the Supreme Court’s liberal wing but nowhere near its tip. Many Republican senators would have found it hard to vote against confirming him.

So Mcconnell denied the Senate the opportunity to vote at all. On the specious grounds that the nomination had come too close to a presidential election — there were eight months left before voters went to the polls — Mcconnell refused even to grant Garland a hearing, let alone a vote. Garland’s nomination languished for 293 days, until the next Congress was sworn in. Then the new president, Donald

Trump, was able to nominate — and Mcconnell gleefully confirmed — conservative Justice Neil M. Gorsuch to fill Scalia’s seat.

Surely, then, Mcconnell’s too-close-toan-election rule had to apply when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020, since less than two months remained before a presidential vote. But Mcconnell, in a fashion that can only be called shameless, pushed through Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett at lightning speed. She was confirmed on Oct. 26 — just eight days before the election that gave Biden the presidency — virtually guaranteeing that the Supreme Court will have a conservative majority for years if not decades.

“Major changes need major buy-in,” Mcconnell piously said on Tuesday, in defense of the filibuster. But it did not trouble him in the least that every single Democratic senator was outraged at how he handled the Garland and Barrett nominations.

Bipartisanship, apparently, is for suckers.

Perhaps even worse, though, is how Mcconnell uses the filibuster — not just as a weapon of last resort on matters of policy but as a purely political tool as well. It was used, for example, to block formation of a proper bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection.

There are Republican senators who in the past have voted for many of the provisions of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, one of the two election integrity measures Democrats want to enact. The other — the Freedom to Vote Act — also contains elements that some Republicans could vote for. But Mcconnell will not allow 10 members of his caucus to join Democrats and provide the 60 votes necessary to end a filibuster and debate the bills.

Again, the issue is whether the bills can be debated. Isn’t debate what Congress is supposed to do? The Founders wanted the Senate to be slow and careful, but they didn’t want it to be paralyzed. And they specifically rejected the idea of requiring supermajorities to approve legislation.

Someday, Republicans will again hold the majority in the Senate. Without the filibuster to constrain them, they may pass all sorts of laws that Democrats abhor. But eliminating the filibuster will actually give more power to the centrists in both parties, because fewer votes will be required to tip the scales. The Senate might actually become what it’s purported to be: a place of deliberation and compromise.

Given what the Senate is now, it’s worth a try.