McConnell’s profound cynicism

NBCNews.com No one, including Donald Trump, has done more “to destroy democratic norms than Mitch McConnell,” said Robert Schlesinger. When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died 11 months before the end of President Barack Obama’s term, McConnell, as the Senate majority leader, refused to even hold a hearing on Obama’s nomination of federal appeals court chief judge Merrick Garland. To justify this unprecedented act of partisan obstruction, McConnell pompously argued that in an election year, “the American people should have a voice” in selecting the next justice. Last week, McConnell was asked what the Senate would do if a Supreme Court vacancy opened in Trump’s last year in office. Smirking, he replied, “Oh, we’d fill it.” That’s all you need to know about McConnell’s deeply cynical philosophy of governance, in which principles and norms are irrelevant and power is the only thing that matters. Consider McConnell’s reaction when Obama asked him in September 2016 to join Democrats in a bipartisan statement publicizing and denouncing Russia’s ongoing interference in the presidential election. McConnell refused. A foreign adversary was assaulting our democracy, but McConnell was unperturbed “because they were helping his side.” He is the embodiment “of everything that is wrong with our politics.”