Tag: Mitch McConnell

Democrats set to use McConnell’s legislative graveyard against him

House Democrats are hoping to use Sen. Mitch McConnell‘s “legislative graveyard” as a messaging tool to topple GOP candidates in 2020.

McConnell (R-Ky.), the Senate majority leader, is embracing his role as a roadblock to the Democrats’ legislative agenda, casting himself as the “Grim Reaper” poised to kill the Democrats’ top policy priorities. The barrier has frustrated Democrats as they fight to advance legislation they promised voters in 2018, but they also see it as a political gift heading into next year’s elections.

Just this week, the House passed legislation granting legal protections to so-called Dreamers, immigrants brought to the country illegally as children. Democrats also hope to soon pass an increase to the minimum wage, and measures on climate change, health care and gun safety have already been approved.

View the complete June 7 article by Mike Lillis on The Hill website here.

Phillips, Freshman Dems Call on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to Hold a Vote on Historic Government Reform Bill

The For The People Act, the first bill Rep. Phillips co-sponsored in Congress, reduces the power of special interests and secures our elections from foreign influence

WASHINGTON, DC – Today, Rep. Dean Phillips (MN-03)  joined fellow freshman Democrats who helped lead the charge to prioritize and pass the For The People Act to call on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to allow debate and an up or down on the floor of the Senate.

“Leader McConnell stands in the way of ending the era of bought and sold politicians,”said Rep. Phillips. “Refusing to even hold a vote on the For The People Act keeps our government in the pocket of special interests and keeps our elections open to foreign attacks. It’s wrong, it’s dangerous, and it should concern every single American. It’s time for McConnell to put country over party and bring H.R.1 to the floor.”

You can video of the full press conference HERE. Continue reading “Phillips, Freshman Dems Call on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to Hold a Vote on Historic Government Reform Bill”

Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao Still Owns Shares She Pledged To Divest

“For the head of the DOT to have a financial interest in an asphalt company, that is not sending a message to employees of DOT that she is making ethics a priority.”

Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao still owns shares in a major construction firm despite pledging to divest them, according to a new report by the Wall Street Journal. Chao had served on the board of the company, Vulcan Materials, for about two years before joining the Trump administration as head of the Transportation Department.

In part of her ethics agreement, Chao said she would end her financial interests in the company by taking “a cash payout for all of my vested deferred stock units” by April 2018. But a financial disclosure report released by the Transportation Secretary’s husband, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), revealed Chao had maintained ownership of somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of Vulcan stock.

The Wall Street Journal estimates Chao has netted more than $40,000 from the stock since April 2018, the date she agreed to cash out on her shares. The Transportation Secretary has been one of the most vocal advocates of President Trump’s plan to invest $1 trillion into U.S. infrastructure, and critics are concerned federal funds would be directly allocated to Vulcan, one of the nation’s largest suppliers of construction materials.

View the complete May 30 article by Peter Castagno on the Citizen Truth website here.

Mitch McConnell really doesn’t care if you think he’s a hypocrite

He and his pals in the Federalist Society are laughing all the way to the bank.

For people who have been observing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell very closely, recent remarks in which he casually flip-flopped from blocking Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court to saying that he would gladly confirm one from Trump during an election year came as no surprise.

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Mitch McConnell doesn’t care that you think he’s a hypocrite.

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The smirk on his face when he says that he would fill a vacant seat on the Supreme Court if one opened up in 2020 tells you all you need to know. He is very well aware of the fact that he is a hypocrite and doesn’t give a damn that you know it too.

That is because, unlike a lot of liberals, McConnell has a theory of change—which he explains in the remainder of the video. As we’ve seen with what Trump is attempting to do to Obama’s legacy, both legislation and executive actions can be undone in one election. But judges are given lifetime appointments. So McConnell isn’t interested in passing legislation (except to secure tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations), but has spent the majority of the Senate’s time over the last three years stacking the courts with conservatives, something he calls his most consequential political accomplishment.

View the complete May 30 article by Nancy LeTourneau from The Washington Monthly on the AlterNet website here.

McConnell says he would help Trump fill a Supreme Court vacancy in 2020 — after blocking Obama in 2016

When President Barack Obama nominated Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court in 2016, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) refused to consider him, blocking the nominee until after that year’s presidential election.

He said then that “the American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice.” The tactic cost Garland his spot on the court, and Neil M. Gorsuch was confirmed in April 2017.

With his party now in the White House, McConnell said Tuesday he would try to push through any nomination that President Trump might make to the high court — even if it comes during an election year. Some saw that stance, which McConnell has signaled before, as hypocritical.

View the complete May 29 article by Reis Thebault and Kayla Epstein on The Washington Post website here.

Senate GOP vows to quickly quash any impeachment charges

GOP senators say that if the House passes articles of impeachment against President Trump they will quickly quash them in the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has broad authority to set the parameters of a trial.

While McConnell is required to act on articles of impeachment, which require 67 votes — or a two-thirds majority — to convict the president, he and his Republican colleagues have the power to set the rules and ensure the briefest of trials.

“I think it would be disposed of very quickly,” said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

View the complete May 27 article by Alexander Bolton on The Hill website here.

Frustration boils over with Senate’s ‘legislative graveyard’

Senators are growing increasingly frustrated as legislative activity has slowed to a crawl during the first half of the year.

The Senate voted on two bills Thursday, breaking a nearly two-month drought during which Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has focused instead on judicial nominations, his top priority.

The lack of floor action has left lawmakers publicly complaining, even though the high-profile feuding between President Trump and congressional Democrats makes it highly unlikely that large-scale bipartisan legislation will succeed heading into the 2020 elections.

View the complete May 24 article by Jordain Carney on The Hill website here.

‘Lock her up’ vs. ‘Case closed’: McConnell and the Trump team’s self-serving view of criminal procedure

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declared Tuesday morning that it’s “case closed” when it comes to President Trump and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation.

Calling it a “Groundhog Day spectacle,” McConnell said, “This ought to be good news for everyone, but my Democratic colleagues seem to be publicly working through the five stages of grief.”

This is an argument Trump’s allies have made for weeks. “Case closed,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said nine days ago when asked about whether he would call former White House counsel Donald McGahn to testify. “It’s over, folks,” White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said immediately after the Mueller report was released. The White House even declared “case closed” before we saw the report. “I don’t think it is going to be damaging,” press secretary Sarah Sanders said of the report, after Attorney Gene

View the complete May 7 article by Aaron Blake on The Washington Post website here.

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.