Twenty-two hours ago McConnell posted an op-ed on the Washington Post. If you have not read it and can get into the Washington Post I included a link. If you can not get into the Washington Post; here is a link from the Intelligencer. Formerly of the Washington Monthly, Ed Kilgore takes McConnell to task. Never let it be said that Mitch McConnell can be shamed into silence or introspection. In response to H.R. 1, House Democrats’ new package of campaign finance and voting rights reforms, the saturnine Senate leader issued a Washington Post op-ed that reads a lot like a series of spell-checked Donald Trump tweets, guffawing his way through an extended attack. McConnell, of course, intends to bury H.R. 1 in the Senate without a hearing or a vote. Here are
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Twenty-two hours ago McConnell posted an op-ed on the Washington Post. If you have not read it and can get into the Washington Post I included a link. If you can not get into the Washington Post; here is a link from the Intelligencer. Formerly of the Washington Monthly, Ed Kilgore takes McConnell to task.
Never let it be said that Mitch McConnell can be shamed into silence or introspection. In response to H.R. 1, House Democrats’ new package of campaign finance and voting rights reforms, the saturnine Senate leader issued a Washington Post op-ed that reads a lot like a series of spell-checked Donald Trump tweets, guffawing his way through an extended attack. McConnell, of course, intends to bury H.R. 1 in the Senate without a hearing or a vote. Here are some low-lights:
It should be called the Democrat Politician Protection Act … Why else would the bill scrap the neutrality of the Federal Elections Commission and set it up for a partisan takeover? Since Watergate, the commission has been a six-member body so neither party can use it to punish political opponents.
Perhaps because the Republicans on the six-member FEC have paralyzed its ability to discharge its responsibilities, as a recent chairman of the FEC bitterly observed:
[A] controlling bloc of three Republican commissioners who are ideologically opposed to the F.E.C.’s purpose regularly ignores violations or drastically reduces penalties. The resulting paralysis has allowed over $800 million in “dark money” to infect our elections since Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court decision that allowed corporations and unions to spend unlimited sums to elect or defeat candidates.
McConnell, of course, is one of the most absolutist of opponents to any kind of campaign finance regulation, even of the sort the conservative majority on the Supreme Court has allowed. So it’s not surprising that he goes on to treat Democratic proposals for reviving campaign finance regulation and providing voluntary public financing — or even donor transparency — as somehow illegitimate:
Under this bill, you’d keep your right to free association as long as your private associations were broadcast to everyone [that’s disclosure of “dark money” sources]. You’d keep your right to speak freely so long as you notified a distant bureaucracy likely run by the same people you criticized [that’s reporting political spending by tax-subsidized non-profits]. The bill goes so far as to suggest that the Constitution needs an amendment to override First Amendment protections [that means overturning Citizens United, which did not precede enactment of the First Amendment].
(my $.02) I really do not want to post all of Ed’s comments on AB as I think it is worth the read at his site. McConnell has certainly dished out a number of lies in a similar proportion as what you may find in a Trump diatribe. For example, the harvesting of ballots in California is not legal as McConnell claims, it still is a crime and earn you three years in the jail or prison the same as one may occur in North Carolina in a clear example of “ballot harvesting” by Republican operatives. I stand in awe of a person who can lie about and construe the facts and not blink an eye while doing so. This is not the same as Trump. McConnell (not worth being called a Senator) knows full well what he is saying.