Well, this is something I never thought I’d see. I have written repeatedly how no matter what he tried and failed, McConnell would never face a mutiny simply because he was such a vicious political psycho. I have previously nicknamed him Gollum, after the Lord of the Rings character obsessed with the power of his ring. His Senate power has always been Mitch McConnell’s obsession.
Whether the Majority Leader or the Minority Leader, McConnell ruled his caucus with an iron fist in an iron glove. Want to criticize McConnell? Go right ahead. And you’ll find your committee assignment on the sub-committee for compost compliance management. Oh, and the guy who polishes the floors will have a better parking slot assignment. This is what made McConnell such a valuable asset for Trump in his agenda.
But starting on January 8th of this year, it’s a brave new world, and McConnell has made one fatal miscalculation after another. That shouldn’t matter, since it’s still his caucus. But it turns out that it isn’t his caucus anymore, it’s Trump’s caucus. And McConnell didn’t just weaken himself, he weakened a whole lot of other Senators who have at least as much, if not more at stake than he does.
This afternoon Texas Senator Calgary Teddy Cruz crossed the Rubicon. He took to the floor of the Senate and directly criticized McConnel’s total collapse on the debt ceiling crisis. He came right out and said that McConnell had blinked, and that he honestly wished that the GOP hadn’t blinked. And he wasn’t the only one, several other GOP Senators joined in to publicly slam McConnell on his capitulation. Hours later Chuck Schumer called the procedural vote for cloture to the floor on the debt limit deal, with McConnell’s guarantee that he had 10 Senate votes for cloture. Long after the vote closed, there were only 9 GOP aye votes. McConnell had to scramble around to whip up one more vote.
The problem is that McConnell has burned his bridges with his own caucus. Earlier this year, there were more than enough GOP Senate votes for cloture to form the bipartisan January 6th Commission. McConnell desperately ran around whipping votes against the bill, literally begging GOP Senators to vote the bill down as a personal favor to him. Iron fisted autocrats don’t beg for personal favors, they issue commands.
Here’s the rub. When you get outside of the Trump base, Trump is still largely unpopular, especially among white suburban women, a key GOP demographic. And since Trump’s loss, he has gone out of his way to keep trump at a long arms length. But you have several potentially vulnerable GOP Senators up for reelection in 2022, including Rubio in Florida, Lee in Utah, Hawley in Missouri, and Johnson in Wisconsin, with Grassley in Iowa a question mark. Two of them, Rubio and Hawley, are already testing the waters for 2024 if Trumpenstein ends up being strapped back on the table, and Cruz is aggressively moving that was as well. They need to keep Trump’s base energized, and slapping at a wounded duck like McConnell is a natural.
This is the time for Schumer and the Democrats to drop the hammer. Quit dicking around and ram through the reconciliation human infrastructure bill. And then start pinning the GOP Senators to the wall like a butterfly collection. Call the strongest version of the George Floyd police reform bill that can get 50 Democratic votes to the floor, and force the GOP Senators to own those votes. Do the same thing with the Manchin brokered voting rights act. And an immigration bill, as well as the women’s reproductive rights bill. Force the GOP to record a vote that can be used against them in 2022. And when mid November rolls around, and the GOP has obstructed every one of those, and wants to play chicken with the debt ceiling again, reform the filibuster once and for all, and get it done anyway. In fact, threaten filibuster reform every step of the way. It’s McConnell’s worst nightmare, let’s use it against the ghoul for once. There is literally nothing to lose.
Follow me on Twitter at @RealMurfster35
The above is REALLY bad news for the GQP. McConnell was the last national leader they had left. Trump is, in the words of Bill Palmer, “three-quarters senile and half dead”, which is why you don’t see him in public so much. Romney’s niece is still in charge of the RNC and continuing to make a mess of it (possibly also funneling cash to Trump). And the rest are too busy fighting each other to be a collective threat. Oh and did I mention that COVID is killing their voters PDQ still?
Kill the effing debt limit, or raise it by 8 trillion dollars, and make it clear in every D announcement, every D political ad, every D political speech, that the amount is needed to cover the bills run up by the Rs while the former guy was president, when they had no problems voting for spending and raising that limit.
The only problem with the end of your comment is that the right-wing will just say “fake news” and remind their base of Trump’s massive tax cuts (lying, in the process, that those cuts helped everyone, not just the 1%) and yadda yadda yadda.
Our side is fully aware that the debt ceiling is meaningless when the GOP’s in power and only becomes a “serious issue” when those “tax-and-spend Democrats” take charge. I mean, GOPers and right-wingers are already using the issue of raising the debt ceiling as a way for Biden and the Democrats to just spend more (of the hard-working white people’s) money.
Using their tactic of saying it lots, so people eventually hear it.
Since Sinema is clearly proven to be for sale, why aren’t they rounding up heavy hitting Democratic lobbyists to outbid the people who’ve already bought her? She obviously has no loyalty and will go with the highest bidder. Because she’s the freakin fly in the ointment
He blew it from day one when he supported the big dump as the GOP candidate in 2016. He thought he was more powerful than he is and he was wrong. McConnell sunk his own boat when he was complicit in allowing the mango monster and his tea party cum maga supporters in Congress to rant about voter fraud and stolen elections because he believed they just needed to get it off their chests and they’d get over it.
I can’t wait to see him go down in flames. He’s a raging hypocrite who has done more damage to this country than anyone, even more than trump.
The rise of the Tea Party was the single biggest misplayed tactic of the 2010s GOP. They thought they were getting in-house shock troops to make up the W gap of popularity. What they got instead was a pack of irrational, superstitious loons that they lacked the leadership to keep under control. Once Trump had them, the Republican party’s fate was sealed.
Ah, you may be right; there may be some party affiliates who wish they’d never opened that particular can of worms, but consider the nefarious shit GOP establishment figures got away with while the rest of us were watching, slack-jawed, as the Tea Party morphed into The Deplorables. I’d bet there’s a sizable quotient of Republican grifters and erstwhile “loyalists” who figure the political, monetary, and authoritarian gains they’ve made over the past ten years are more than worth having to cater to what they likely consider a transiently insane base. What’s interesting to me is that while for now the Freedom Caucus is riding the tiger, as everybody has known since the bloody days of Robespierre, Danton and Marat, that tiger’s got to be fed on the regular. What’re Josh Hawley et al gonna do when they’ve become the red meat being fed to the mob?