Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the previous Senate Republican chief who’s largely answerable for serving to destroy American democracy, will announce on Thursday that he’s not operating for reelection, the Related Press reported.
“Seven times, my fellow Kentuckians have sent me to the Senate,” McConnell will say in a speech on the Senate flooring, based on ready remarks obtained by the AP. “Every day in between I’ve been humbled by the trust they’ve placed in me to do their business here. Representing our commonwealth has been the honor of a lifetime. I will not seek this honor an eighth time. My current term in the Senate will be my last.”
It’s laborious to pinpoint the worst issues McConnell has carried out in workplace, as a result of he’s carried out so many horrendous issues. McConnell is answerable for breaking the Senate, weaponizing the filibuster to maintain laws from passing.
He’s additionally answerable for stealing not one however two Supreme Court docket seats from Democratic presidents. In 2016, McConnell gleefully blocked former President Barack Obama from having the ability to fill the seat of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, refusing to provide Obama’s nominee a listening to, not to mention a vote on the Senate flooring as a result of he mentioned it was too near an election. Then in 2020, he conveniently mentioned that rule not utilized when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, confirming Donald Trump’s choose to fill Ginsburg’s seat simply eight days earlier than the 2020 election.
It wasn’t simply the Supreme Court docket that he helped stack. McConnell blocked dozens of Obama’s decrease court docket nominees, holding these seats vacant in order that Trump may fill the seats after he was elected. And he shepherded via Trump’s judicial nominees, together with ones that have been blatantly unqualified.
Much more galling is that when Trump received a second time period in November, McConnell then cried foul when federal judges determined to not retire to maintain Trump from selecting their replacements, accusing them of enjoying politics with the judiciary.
Trump and McConnell
“They rolled the dice that a Democrat could replace them, and now that he won’t, they’re changing their plans to keep a Republican from doing it,” McConnell, the grasp of enjoying politics with the judiciary, mentioned in a speech on the Senate flooring.
McConnell stepped down from GOP Senate management in 2024, saying it was time to move the torch.
“One of life’s most underappreciated talents is to know when it’s time to move on to life’s next chapter,” McConnell mentioned in February 2024. “So I stand before you today … to say that this will be my last term as Republican leader of the Senate.”
Since then, he’s seemingly discovered his backbone, criticizing Trump’s worst impulses and voting towards Trump’s unqualified and harmful Cupboard nominees, together with now-Well being and Human Providers Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and now-Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth.
But McConnell voted for Trump in 2024, despite the fact that he thought Trump was, in his personal phrases, a “stupid … narcissist.”
And Trump wouldn’t even be within the Oval Workplace now if McConnell had carried out the fitting factor in Trump’s 2021 impeachment and voted to convict Trump of inciting the rebellion on the Capitol and bar him from operating for the presidency once more.
McConnell believed Trump was answerable for the assault, saying that the insurrectionists, “were provoked by the president and other powerful people, and they tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government which they did not like.”
However McConnell voted towards convicting Trump, and didn’t work to persuade different Republican senators to vote to ban Trump from looking for federal workplace sooner or later.
Finally, McConnell has been a menace in American politics. He won’t be missed.
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