Mitch McConnell Has Been Exposed as an Empty Suit



Mitch McConnell Has Been Exposed as an Empty Suit

by Charles P. Pierce, esquire.com

August 12, 2020 12:00 PM

Photo by: NICHOLAS KAMMGetty Images

The long view of history is going to conclude that the political genius of Mitch McConnell was strictly limited to his ability to muster a majority to employ every chokepoint in an 18th-century Constitution to make sure that a Black man who was elected to be president was not able to act fully as president. (He also managed to use a docile majority to lard up the federal bench with larval Scalias.) But now, as the Majority Leader of the Senate at a time of multiple national crises, McConnell has been exposed as the emptiest suit since Claude Rains’s pants ran down the street without him.

He has been both unwilling and unable to wrangle his majority behind even the shabbiest facsimile of an economic relief package, and every day he fails to do so attaches him more firmly to a corrupt and impotent presidency*. Judges aren’t going to count for everything ever. And now the Washington Post reports that even the powerful folks back in Kentucky have searched for their last nerve and found Mitch McConnell there, jumping on it.

The labor protest marked only the latest in a series of exasperated complaints from Kentuckians directed at McConnell (R), as some locals find themselves frustrated by the absence of their powerful political representative on Capitol Hill. In more than two dozen interviews, out-of-work residents, struggling restaurant owners and other business leaders, as well as a cadre of annoyed food, housing and labor rights groups, all said they are in dire need of more support from Congress — the likes of which McConnell has not been able to provide.

About five months after Kentucky reported its first loss of life from COVID-19, its economy continues to sputter amid the coronavirus pandemic. Many unemployed workers say their benefit checks aren’t enough to afford their bills, and some here simply have stopped looking for jobs. Businesses say they’re also hemorrhaging cash, and local governments fear they’re on the precipice of financial ruin, too. The economic tumult in Kentucky is vast, and it has added new urgency to the political standoff on Capitol Hill, where the prospect. of a prolonged deadlock could worsen the financial woes in a state that was hurting long before the pandemic arrived.

McConnell’s favorability numbers back home never have been as robust as a Senate Majority Leader’s ought to be and, nationally, the guy is cholera. The anger at him in Kentucky is starting to go national.

In the face of those financial difficulties, many Kentucky residents had counted on enhanced unemployment payments that offered them an additional $600 in weekly support. Congress authorized the aid program as part of the wide-ranging $2 trillion Cares Act that President Trump signed into law in late March. For residents such as Michael Holland, the additional federal aid offered a critical cushion. A contract industrial engineer by trade, the 59-year-old resident of Lexington had been wiring Amazon facilities and Toyota factories for years until the coronavirus crisis forced him off the job in February and into the ranks of the unemployed.

“There are some people, I’m sure, that are bringing home more than they were making before the pandemic,” Holland said. “But there’s also those of us who’s making a lot less. … What about those of us who need a job, and can’t get a job, because the coronavirus is coming back?” Holland, an independent voter, said McConnell in particular had only left him “madder,” adding: “Democrats and Republicans have made this a fricking political issue when it shouldn’t be political, it ought to be what’s best for the country.”

None of which should be taken as completely dispositive as regards McConnell’s re-election race against Democratic candidate Amy McGrath. Polls have danced all over the place for the past month, but McGrath still has a longer, harder road than many of her party’s other upset-minded hopefuls. But Mitch McConnell’s hour of influence on the national stage is passing swiftly. Right now, I’d say he isn’t even a good bet to be Senate Minority Leader next January.

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