Inside Mitch McConnell’s cynical and shameless power grab

On Monday I wrote about the GOP’s long-term plan to turn the presidency into a (Republican) unitary executive office. You might think that it makes no sense that members of Congress would go along with such a thing, seeing as it directly interferes with their own constitutional prerogatives. That was certainly what the founders assumed would be the case. They assumed that human egos would demand that people jealously guard their own branches of government, thus preserving the checks and balances that would keep any one branch from gathering too much power unto itself. But it turns out that the modern Republicans are loyal to their party above all else, and no one personifies that dedication more than Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

said that McConnell was the man behind the curtain who made it all happen. Depending on who does the writing, he could also go down as one of America’s most notorious senators. No, he’s not like those traitors who abandoned the Senate to join the Confederacy, nor is he a crude segregationist like the 20th century’s Theodore Bilbo or James Eastland of Mississippi. He’s no demagogue like Wisconsin’s Joe McCarthy or Louisiana’s Huey Long either. But there are elements of all of those men in McConnell, who holds a very special place in that pantheon as what historian Christopher R. Downing called “the gravedigger of democracy.”

In a recent article for the New York Review of Books, Downing writes:

[McConnell] stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar [Germany], congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. … McConnell and our dysfunctional and disrespected Congress have now ensured an increasingly dysfunctional and disrespected judiciary, and the constitutional balance of powers among the three branches of government is in peril.

View the complete May 8 article by Heather Digby Parton of Salon on the AlterNet website here.