Why is this Man Smiling?

Mitch McConnell is the slimiest, most slippery character ever to walk the halls of the United States Senate.  This is a man who has spent his career learning how to ‘game’ the Congressional mechanism to accumulate power and serve the greed of those who want to buy influence.  The cardinal rule of McConnell is he will do anything to acquire more power, or to achieve an outcome he thinks achieves his political interest.

This is the man who told us in 2010 that his only reason for coming to work every day was to make Barak Obama a one-term president.  Then he led the Republican minority in the Senate to obstruct literally every lawful action that the President attempted.  He broke the traditional filibuster, using it to attempt to block confirmation of nearly 170 judicial appointments being made by the Obama administration. His use of the filibuster in the Senate to obstruct nearly every Democratic initiative was the reason Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in 2013 invoked the so called  ‘nuclear option’ to ram through a Senate rules change to remove the Filibuster as a device for obstruction, except for Supreme Court nominees.

In 2014 McConnell vowed to restore the Senate rules and reinstate the ‘traditional committee process’.  He never got a chance to do that because as soon as he became Majority Leader in 2014, he was faced with the crisis of Antonin Scalia’s death and the prospect of the Supreme Court having the first liberal majority in decades.  So what did he do?  His audacious response was to prevent the Senate from even holding hearings on Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, and then ramming through a rules change to confirm Donald Trump’s nominee, Neil Gorsuch.  How hypocritical!  He declined to even show even a minimum of respect for the sitting President's right to make a Supreme Court appointment.

And then look what he tried to do recently in his effort to repeal and replace Obamacare.  All the analyses showed that millions would lose health care, but did that matter to him and the rest of the Republicans? No.

So now we are listening to him tell us all the wonderful things that are going to result from this newest tax ‘reform’ legislation that he has engineered.  Never mind that all economists and analysts are unanimous in their criticism that this is an economic disaster and an historic re-distribution of wealth from the middle class to the wealthiest 1% of the country.  There are no experts that say there will not be an increase to the nation’s deficit by at least half a trillion dollars and most predict it to be bigger.  There were no hearings on this bill.  A measure that will change the way the entire economy will operate was created in a few weeks by 50 odd people in a locked room with no opportunity for either the opposition party, much less the American people to understand what is in this bill.

So my question to all you fellow citizens is:  Is this the way our democracy is supposed to work?  Is a small coterie of elitist white men and a few women supposed to be able to effect such a ‘sea change’ in our economy and societal structure without the opportunity for all of us to understand what they are doing before they do it? 

And who is the architect of all this? 

It’s our ‘friend’ Mitch McConnell….leading the charge to cash in on his party’s deal with the devil in supporting Donald Trump for President because Trump will sign anything they put in front of him.  This tax ‘reform’ makes all the ‘donor class’ ecstatic.(yeah that’s all the rich people who only want to feed their greed by taking more money from the less fortunate, and who keep financing the campaigns of all those Republicans who are self serving their own avarice for power and that of their ‘donors’).  Our founders are turning in their graves!

I am again reminded that the only real way we root out this ‘rot’ is to vote.  Vote.  It is the only power we really have.  And believe me, there will be endless efforts to minimize that remaining right over the next year.