Why McConnell Blocks Scalia Replacement

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says his obstruction of President Obama’s nominee to replace Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is to empower the people, but it’s more about making sure that the Citizens United gusher of special interest money keeps pouring into Republican coffers, writes Michael Winship.

By Michael Winship

Many years ago, I worked on a documentary about the how and why of political TV ads. The primary focus was on two media consultants: the late Bob Squier, a Democrat; and Bob Goodman, Republican. One ad of which Goodman was especially proud was for a fellow in Kentucky running against Todd Hollenbach, Sr., the incumbent judge/executive of Jefferson County. Produced in 1977, the spot featured a farmer complaining about taxes that he claimed Judge Hollenbach had raised and then lied about.

As he mucked out a barn and his faithful horse whinnied, the farmer declared, “Maybe Hollenbach ought to have my job, because in my business, I deal with that kind of stuff every day.” Then he threw a shovel of manure right at the camera. Hollenbach lost to the candidate who approved this message: Mitch McConnell.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky.

McConnell has been shoveling it ever since, but perhaps never as stunningly as on Tuesday, when he spoke from the floor of the U.S. Senate. The now-majority leader of the so-called greatest deliberative body in the world blustered, as he has several times in the last couple of weeks, that Senate Republicans would never, ever consider an appointment by President Obama to replace the still-dead Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

The President, McConnell then said, “has every right to nominate someone, even if doing so will inevitably plunge our nation into another bitter and avoidable struggle.”

Excuse me, Senator, the bitter and undeniably avoidable struggle was created by you on the Saturday that Scalia’s corpse was found. The body was barely cold when you crassly announced that the duly-elected President of the United States should not name the judge’s successor but must leave it to the next president more than 300 days from now.

McConnell continued, “Even if he never expects that nominee to be actually confirmed but rather to wield as an election cudgel, he certainly has the right to do that.” Again, Senator, it’s you who is wielding the blunt object.

And then the Majority Leader had the chutzpah, as they say down home in his Bluegrass State, to add that Barack Obama also “has the right to make a different choice. He can let the people decide and make this an actual legacy-building moment rather than just another campaign roadshow.”

Oh brother, look who’s talking. Of all the pompous, insincere bloviation; ignoring courtesy, tradition let alone the U.S. Constitution in the name of Senator McConnell’s own misbegotten ambitions.

Psychiatrists call this “projection,” the defensive method by which people take their own negative beliefs or feelings and attribute them to someone else otherwise known as shifting blame. In McConnell’s case, add to it a megadose of the cynical manipulation and crass opportunism characteristic of most of his political career.

Not that it was always so. McConnell began his political life as a liberal Republican remember them?, interning for legendary Kentucky senator and statesman John Sherman Cooper. He supported the Equal Rights Amendment and collective bargaining. Friends say he was pro-Planned Parenthood and he even wrote an op-ed piece in the Louisville Courier-Journal favoring campaign finance reform.

Former McConnell press secretary Meme Sweets Runyon told Jason Cherkis and Zach Carter at The Huffington Post, “He was kind of a good-government guy. He thought the government could do good and could be a solution.”

But once Mitch McConnell got to Washington as an elected senator and the mood of the Republican Party shifted right, so did he. Delay and obstruction became stepping stones. At the same time, the man who New York Times columnist Gail Collins famously described as having “the natural charisma of an oyster,” developed a Jekyll-and-Hyde style of self-serving pragmatism bashing government from Capitol Hill but using all of its perks to bolster support among his constituents.

It’s worth quoting at length what Cherkis and Carter wrote in 2013: “Up until the tea party-led ban on earmarks a few years ago, McConnell played out this dichotomy across Kentucky. In Washington, he voted against a health care program for poor children. In Kentucky, he funneled money to provide innovative health services for pregnant women. In Washington, he railed against Obamacare. In Kentucky, he supported free health care and prevention programs paid for by the federal government without the hassle of a private-insurance middleman.

“This policy ping-pong may not suggest a coherent belief system, but it has led to loyalty among the GOP in Washington and something close to fealty in Kentucky. It has advanced McConnell’s highest ideal: his own political survival.

“McConnell’s hold on Kentucky is a grim reminder of the practice of power in America, where political excellence can be wholly divorced from successful governance and even public admiration,” the Huffington Post reporters continued. “The most dominant and influential Kentucky politician since his hero Henry Clay, McConnell has rarely used his indefatigable talents toward broad, substantive reforms. He may be ruling, but he’s ruling over a commonwealth with the lowest median income in the country, where too many counties have infant mortality rates comparable to those of the Third World. His solutions have been piecemeal and temporary, more cynical than merciful.”

And so it goes. “He privileges the scoreboard above all,” The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos wrote in 2014. “Asked about his ideological evolution, he explained simply, ‘I wanted to win.’”

Tailoring his positions to adjust to the shifting seasons, what sets Mitch McConnell apart is that his motives aren’t really ideological but so baldly about holding onto personal power. His opposition to Obama’s naming of a Scalia replacement puts the majority leader in solid with the far-right Republicans he purportedly so dislikes but who have threatened his job security over the last few years, both at home and in DC.

What’s more, McConnell is desperate to keep a conservative majority on the Court to preserve the unbridled flow of campaign cash that the Citizens United decision let loose and that he so successfully has tapped for himself and the GOP. Unlike the young man who penned that campaign finance reform op-ed back in Louisville, fundraising has become his favorite thing, and he’s scary good at it.

As his former Republican Senate colleague Alan Simpson said, “When he asked for money, his eyes would shine like diamonds. He obviously loved it.”

And even if a Democrat holds onto the White House next year, chances are McConnell — the man who once said that the most important thing was to make Barack Obama a one-term president — will still play a power broker role in determining which Supreme Court candidate will successively run the 60-vote supermajority gauntlet needed for Senate approval. It’s good to be king.

But if he wants us all to wait for a Republican president to choose the next appointment to the Court, he might want to think twice. Donald Trump bows before no man — just ask him — and he shovels muck even better than that farmer who helped Mitch McConnell win his first public office.

Michael Winship is the Emmy Award-winning senior writer of Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com, and a former senior writing fellow at the policy and advocacy group Demos. Follow him on Twitter at @MichaelWinship. [This story originally appeared at http://billmoyers.com/story/mitch-mcconnell-has-a-horse-in-the-supreme-court-race-himself/]

7 comments for “Why McConnell Blocks Scalia Replacement

  1. Brooklyn Dave
    February 27, 2016 at 16:03

    Mitch the B**** McConnell, there is no end to how low he can go. Lawd, with that stupid smile on his mug he looks like she should put on a gray curly wig and a granny housecoat. Retire ya ole goat.

  2. Brooklyn Dave
    February 27, 2016 at 16:03

    Mitch the B**** McConnell, there is no end to how low he can go. Lawd, with that stupid smile on his mug he looks like she should put on a gray curly wig and a granny housecoat. Retire ya ole goat.

  3. Airbrush2020
    February 27, 2016 at 03:21

    An opposing political party’s attempt to subvert the Constitution is treason. The POTUS has the Constitutional Right to submit a nominee to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Senate Judiciary has an obligation to give a nominee a fair hearing. The Senate is consitutionally obligated to give an up or down vote. It makes me angry when bi-partisan obstruction subverts the functioning of the republic.

  4. Eddie
    February 26, 2016 at 23:25

    Another good article by MW. It stresses something that too often isn’t sufficiently emphasized – – – the sheer ‘opportunism’ of so many of the present-day Republicans. I sometimes get annoyed when I see good liberal/progressive writers berating the supposed ‘beliefs’ of guys like McConnell, Ryan, etc because they’re writing as if guys like that actually BELIEVED the stuff they’re saying. I had heard years ago that a ‘belief’ is two things — thought/words + action. Either one alone really doesn’t qualify as a belief, it takes them together to really fulfill the idea of a belief. The only belief that guys like McConnell have is that ‘I have to get elected by any means necessary’ — everything other than that is secondary and negotiable.

  5. Erik
    February 26, 2016 at 22:40

    Regardless of the Pres, no SJC nominee can be uncorrupted: only the anti-constitutional oligarchy can nominate them, and all of the present SJC judges are anti-constitutional. I say this from lengthy and consistent experience with federal judicial corruption at all levels in three states and the SJC, which is far more extreme than the media dare to report. Those who think of judges as Santa Claus make a very childish error. The fact that we cannot run the country without an uncorrupted judiciary does not mean that we have one.

    Federal courts routinely deny basic constitutional rights on the basis of corrupt influence, posting vacuous excuses as judgments and completely ignoring the law, the constitution, and their own judgments in favor of Rethuglicans. See link to counterpunch.org http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/12/10/why-judicial-corruption-is-invisible/
    and also link to amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/National-Memorial-John-Barth-Jr/dp/1499357591/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8. Federal judges spend their careers inventing all-purpose excuses to use when violating the Constitution for political purposes, and they are nominated solely for this purpose by those who benefit.

  6. Joe Tedesky
    February 26, 2016 at 16:52

    I feel turtles are being unfairly represented, and something should be done about it. Impeach McConnell!

  7. J'hon Doe II
    February 26, 2016 at 16:34

    Is McConnell a loyal confederate? – Scalia a dedicated conservative?
    ::
    James Madison wrote; ‘If there be a principle that ought not to be questioned within the United States, it is that every man has a right to abolish an old gov’t and establish a new one. This principle is not only recorded in every public archive, written in every American heart, and sealed with the blood of a host of American martyrs, but is the only lawful tenure by which the United States hold their existence as a nation’.
    ::
    Madison; ‘It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the Society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the Society against the injustices of the other part.
    If men were angels, no gov’t would be necessary.

  8. Bill Bodden
    February 26, 2016 at 13:35

    … the so-called greatest deliberative body in the world …

    Who ever concocted that piece of meretricious nonsense?

Comments are closed.