Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s power-play, extreme partisan style of leading the Senate provides the best justification for minority and majority leader positions to be eliminated from how Congress operates. McConnell’s obstructionist view of leading the Republican party is moving America towards an autocratic system of government. He has been covertly assaulting democracy for years. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, he arrogantly declared he would do everything in his power to make sure Obama was a one-term president. Since President Joe Biden’s election, he has declared,” He will put 100% of his effort into blocking the agenda of the president.” Nowhere in his public discourse does Mc Connell convey an openness to collaborate with Democrats. The power-hungry old man demonizes, opposes, and blames Democrats, showing no behavior that invites bipartisanship.
McConnell’s brand of political corruption has been analyzed for years in political circles. By definition, one does not have to commit an indictable crime to be corrupt. The World Bank defines corruption as, “a form of dishonesty or criminal offense, undertaken by a person or organization entrusted with a position of authority to acquire illicit benefit or abuse power for ones’ private gain… These forms of corruption are common in autocracies, oligarchies, and mafia-states, forms of governments that the former president, supported by Mc Connell was using as the model for governing the US. Thanks to the Judiciary branch, democracy survived Trump and investigations are advancing to reveal the rampant corruption of the prior administration including the McConnell corrupted Senate.
In April of 2020, Republic Report summarized a report by Journalist Jane Mayer about the corrupt McConnell. She called him “a powerful politician who seems to have no moral compass, no strongly held values, just an intense desire to increase his power by aiding the entrenched special interests that fund his political interests.” His failed job performance ( except for his success at obstructionism and political hypocrisy) includes failure at consistently passing significant legislation and Kentucky’s general 45th ranking as a state. He works against passing bills introduced by the Democrats because Biden is president and fails to write legislation that addresses the real problems that affect the health, voting rights, safety, racial justice, and income of the American people.
In an interview in a Vox article in April 2020, Jane Mayers specified examples that show McConnell to be hypocritical, dishonest, inconsistent in his ideologies, and best described as obsessed with the ” cult of winning.” He has bent the rules when it favors Republicans and their platform, and without justification opposes anything regarding Democrats. This behavior qualifies as corrupt because it is not based on honesty or precedent and was an abuse of his power as a majority leader. Mayer gave examples in the article including;
- Immediately after the insurrection, Connell declared Trump was directly responsible for inciting the attack, then subsequently blocked the vote to form a congressional commission to investigate it.
- McConnell staffers taking tens of millions of dollars from undisclosed donors
- Once wrote on a blackboard three things needed in politics are: money, money, money
- Kentucky does not have reliable clean water, but McConnell has financial ties with the companies causing the water problem
- McConnell, currently the top recipient of Senate campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, has denounced efforts to lower drug costs as ‘socialist price controls.“
- He introduced an amendment to the Prevention and Public Health Fund At The Centers For Disease Control and Prevention to eliminate funding for infectious disease control
- In 2017, McConnell’s corrupt wife, Elaine Chau was under investigation for abuse of power as Transportation Secretary, and Mc Connell refused to recuse himself from involvement in the case
- In 2016, he blocked President Obama’s pick for The Supreme Court, Merritt Garland, citing the timing was too close to the next presidential election. Then he hypocritically allowed Trump to nominate Amy Coney- Barrett to the court, several weeks before the 2020 Presidential election.
- McConnell is the top recipient of donor money from the pharmaceutical companies and has voted against lowering drug prices.
Norman Orenstein, a conservative political scientist is quoted as saying, “McConnell will go down in history as one of the most significant people in destroying the fundamentals of our constitutional democracy. There is nobody as corrupt in violating the norms of government.
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