The Senate leader has gone from admiring Henry Clay to packing the courts to guaranteeing the acquittal of a president caught cheating ahead of an election.
WASHINGTON ― Years after professing admiration for the “Great Compromiser” Henry Clay but then engineering a dramatic remake of the federal judiciary, Mitch McConnell is now earning a different legacy: The guy who rigged a Senate trial to protect a president impeached for trying to cheat his way to reelection.
With even members of his own caucus agreeing that Donald Trump behaved badly by leveraging $391 million in taxpayer-funded foreign aid to damage a political rival, the Senate’s majority leader is on the brink of acquitting Trump without hearing from a single witness ― defying the three-quarters of Americans who say they want witnesses.
“Sadly, the constitutional travesty that he orchestrated here will serve as his legacy,” said George Conway, a prominent Republican Trump critic and husband of a top White House aide. “Not the legions of fine judges he has put on the bench, judges of the sort that would have been nominated by a President Pence even if Trump had been removed, as he rightly should have been.” Continue reading.