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Moscow Mitch is possibly the man who did more damage to our country than anyone else. The Trump administration is his victory, just with someone he couldn't control and actually turned his constituency against him.
Trump is an evil SOB and the US is worse for having him as a president... but I'll at least say one good thing about him. If you poke your head in conservative circles, they have as much respect for the turtle as the left. And I love that for Mitch. May his legacy forever be mired in shit.
As someone who's not from the US, can u give me a TLDR of what he did?
Not OP, but I hate Mitch so much I looked up a write up.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/2/28/2226395/news/The-17-worst-things-Mitch-McConnell-did-to-destroy-democracy/
He held up not just the supreme court nomination from Obama (and rushed one through for trump). He held up many nominations to federal judges for Obama. He waited for trump to get in and then packed the federal courts with more heritage foundation approved judges.
Personally, I hate him because one time when the federal gov shutdown over a budget under Obama. They stopped paying the military. The house passed a partial that would have the troops get paid. McConnell decided not to vote on it because Fuck Him.
All that shit he and his fellow repubs say about supporting the troops. Not one of the repubs in the Senate called him out on it. If they supported the troops they would have called him out. We still had to work. I still had to make sure me and my Marines got ready for deployment. The bills we had to pay still were due. Their kids still need to be feed. Fuck Mitch and fuck all the repubs that claim to support troops but just support the military industry complex and the kickback donations.
I couldn't do a better write up myself. And I love that's the "17 worst things" because... there's... so... so much.
The thing is... from the beginning the man was a snake. Look up his early politics in his state, he jumped in to get the unions to support him, gladhanded them, shook their hands, said he supported them. Then the second he took power he immediately stabbed the unions in the back, with an attitude of it's just a cost of doing business.
He's the opposite side of the coin from Trump of as a man with zero scruples, but where Trump's entire desire is to make himself richer and more powerful, McConnell was a True Believer of his world view of the Conservative Christian view, and would do anything no matter how slimy if it pushed his world view forward.
This is a good point. He had no shame being a hypocrite. He walked so trump could run. People doing evil things without shame allowed the other evil people, that normally would respond to shame, to grow more corrupt.
Don’t forget that once you’re out, the first people to screw over veterans, in any country really, are conservatives. They got their worth out of you and if you die in the streets that’s a you problem.
Abused the Senate traditions to advance his party for decades, culminating in a refusal to see dem nominations to the supreme court and then fast tracking repub nominees resulting in the lopsided court that has accelerated the collapse of equal rights in the usa and the speedy rise of corpofascism
I can't write up a better TLDR than one of the other responses, they hit the major base points, there's just so much more.
What I'll explain is the level of power he wielded because frankly, a lot of US citizens don't realize the mechanisms he used so I'm not sure being out of the US would know.
McConnelll was essentially the leader of the Republican Party all throughout Obama's administration, and with such he pushed the Republicans to be pure oppositional on EVERYTHING because he noted that Dems working with Bush on No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D helped Bush get reelected. So McConnell's statements were "the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." and "if [Obama is] willing to meet us halfway on some of the biggest issues, it's not inappropriate for us to do business with him." The man literally said about our debt "it's a hostage that's worth ransoming"
I'd like to note that when Trump became President, suddenly McConnell was all about putting politics aside and working together as unity to help (his view of) the country.
Now when he got Senate Majority Leader, that meant he had a lot of power. With our system, a law has to go through both Congress and Senate before being signed by the President. And when the President picks positions like judges, the Legislative branch also confirms them. The Senate Majority Leader gets to choose what comes to the floor. So Obama wants some judges... nah, we're not going to vote on them and let that expire so we can stack it when a Republican President comes in power. This is why Obama became a big user of Executive Orders (essentially the President creating orders that aren't laws in that the next President can just tear them down, which Trump did, but since the Executive Branch enforces them they essentially become laws in their own way. It's more complicated than that but by that point I don't have the law degree to explain better) which the Republicans whined SO MUCH about... and went strangely silent when Trump started using them.
I'd also like to note, McConnell voted to convict and remove Bill Clinton in his impeachment trial, but when Trump's first one came up he actively denied four witnesses from coming to the floor "I'm not an impartial juror [in this impeachment trial]. This is a political process. There's not anything judicial about it." And despite being outspoken about Trump's attempt to overturn the election for Biden (only after Trump's supporters stormed the Capitol) and stating that he supported Trump's impeachment, he refused to call an emergency meeting of the Senate for the trial, calling for delaying it after Biden's inauguration, then voted to acquit Trump by stating it was unconstitutional to convict a President who was no longer in office. He went on a 20 minute tirade about how he thought Trump was guilty "If President Trump were still in office, I would have carefully considered whether the House managers proved their specific charge." and stated that Trump didn't get away with it because he'd still be subject to the US criminal and civil laws.
Of course McConnell would filibuster and vote against an independent commission to investigate the Jan 6 US Capitol attack.
And back throughout Biden's administration, it was back to pure obstructionism, nothing else.
McConnell became a senator a year before I was alive, and has wielded an entire party of our country until it took a demagogue who hated him to turn the party against him. According to his biographers, Alec MacGillis, McConnell went "from a moderate Republican who supported abortion rights and public employee unions to the embodiment of partisan obstructionism and conservative orthodoxy on Capitol Hill."
... well this was supposed to be a short writeup... but that didn't work. And I still feel like a lot got left out.