Je l'accuse!

If there is one single individual I hold primarily responsible for Congressional gridlock and the awful, yawning chasm of partisanship that divides our country today, for the deterioration of political civility and the abandonment of Constitutional duty by elected officials, that person is Mitch McConnell. I know many of my friends would give the current president shame (not honor) of first place in such a contest, but I see things differently. The current president would never have been a candidate had the divide not been already so deep. And even elected to the highest office, he could never single-handedly have achieved the levels of destruction we have seen without a Republican party united behind him, united for the sake of their party rather than the country, led in the U.S. Senate by Mitch McConnell. 

McConnell’s reprehensible and indefensible machinations began long before the current administration was in place. Never in my life (there may have been instances in history but never as long as I have been alive) has there been such disrespect for a sitting president as McConnell showed President Obama. Others in his party and in the Senate fell in line, but McConnell was the ringleader. Anything President Obama proposed, McConnell was against, not because any particular proposal was against his “principles” but simply because Obama proposed it. He made it plain from the very beginning of the Obama administration that he did not intend to let the president have a single “win” on anything, and the shameful culmination of this campaign of partisan Congressional dereliction of duty came when the Senate refused to hold hearings for Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, a moderate admired by Republicans as well as Democrats. Blocking those hearings was an egregious slap in the face to the president, and I call it a dereliction of the Senator’s duty under the Constitution, as well as a mark of disrespect I have yet to manage to forgive.

Now that there is a putative Republican in the Oval Office, McConnell has generally continued his lockstep partisan strategy, putting party ideology over ideals, principle, and even Constitutional duty. To bring civility back into our national discourse, we need to get rid of uncivil, power-hungry partisan ideologues in government and replace them with men and women of decency and dignity who will fulfill the duties of the offices to which they are elected.

Robert Reich has written a piece asking who is worse, Trump or McConnell, something I read it this morning while searching online for other opinions on the Senate Majority Leader. As I see it, the president is the Great Oz, a little man behind the curtain. McConnell is the curtain.