Mitch McConnell is running scared
By Colbert I. King,
Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s threat to derail the Senate if Democrats roll back the filibuster was a given. Count on him to try to bring the chamber down if Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) rounds up the 51 votes needed to change the filibuster rules — which could happen with Vice President Harris casting the tiebreaking vote.
McConnell (Ky.) knows that filibuster reform will usher top Democratic priorities into law, first and foremost sweeping election reforms and prohibitions on voter suppression schemes being cooked up by state Republican officials.
Thus, McConnell’s threat this week: “Everything Democrat Senates did to Presidents Bush and Trump, everything the Republican Senate did to President Obama, would be child’s play compared to the disaster that Democrats would create for their own priorities if they break the Senate.”
McConnell is running scared.
He knows that with a unified Democratic caucus and Harris wielding the gavel, his mouth is writing a check that he lacks votes to cash. McConnell, self-advertised master of intricate Senate rules, at best can make himself a nuisance by gumming up the legislative process.
McConnell is even trying to intimidate Democrats with warnings of what Republicans will do if they regain the Senate — for instance, imposing a nationwide right-to-work law, defunding Planned Parenthood and sanctuary cities, passing sweeping right-to-life legislation, authorizing concealed-carry firearms reciprocity in all 50 states and the District and hardening Southern border security.
Democrats can be forgiven for not clutching their pearls.
They are well aware of the damage McConnell can cause if he controls the Senate. He amply demonstrated that during President Barack Obama’s years in the White House.
McConnell’s vow to create a “scorched-earth Senate” should be believed. But not feared. He can’t do much without 51 votes. He’s stymied, provided Democrats hold firm.
But step back from this Washington drama, which, while entertaining for political junkies, misses the point about what is really at stake today.
As Georgia’s first Black senator, Raphael G. Warnock (D), said in his inaugural speech from the Senate floor Wednesday, the country is witnessing “a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we’ve ever seen since the Jim Crow era.” Warnock called the wave of at least 250 Republican voter-suppression bills being put forward in 43 states “Jim Crow in new clothes.”
McConnell’s GOP is imposing and defending restrictions that serve to reduce and suppress minority voting — just as the segregationists of decades past did.
The difference is that today’s Republican lawmakers use a new race-neutral vocabulary to achieve the same despicable goal.
Earlier generations — and, yes, we’re talking about Democrats in those days — weren’t the least bit bothered by what came out of their mouths.
Hear past voting rights opponents in their own words:
Every “red-blooded Anglo-Saxon man in Mississippi should resort to any means to keep hundreds of Negroes from the polls in the July 2 primary,” Democratic Sen. Theodore G. Bilbo (Miss.) said in 1946. He added, “And if you don’t know what that means, you are just not up on your persuasive measures.”
“I do not believe the two societies should mix,” said Louisiana state legislator William “Willie” Rainach, who in 1958, with leaders of the White Citizens’ Council, mounted a campaign to use literacy tests and other methods to disenfranchise Black voters.
“If we can’t have a White primary, we want as White a one as we can get,” Herman Talmadge (D) told party leaders in 1948 as he campaigned for Georgia governor. He later served as a U.S. senator.
“I have worked Negroes on the plantation for years and never had a bit of trouble with any of them. I know what is best for them,” spoke Sam Englehardt, an Alabama state senator worried about Black voters controlling his 85 percent African American home district of Macon County. “Our sole purpose is to maintain segregation.” Englehardt proposed a bill to redraw the city limits of Tuskegee to exclude nearly all Black residents. He later sought to eliminate the majority-Black Macon County by dividing it among its neighboring counties.
“This bill is tailor-made to Martin Luther King’s demand for Negro control of the political institutions of the South,” said Democratic Sen. Allen Ellender of Louisiana when Southern lawmakers tried to kill the Voting Rights Act in 1965. They called it an unconstitutional assault on a state’s right to decide who was qualified to cast a ballot. “Only through such a nefarious piece of legislation could incompetents gain control of the political processes in the South or in the United States.”
The words have changed, but their collective spirit lives on in the actions of today’s Republican Party. But Senate Democrats have it within their power to defend our democracy.
All they need to do is ignore Mitch “Hot Air” McConnell.
Read more from Colbert King’s archive.
Read more: Jennifer Rubin: Make voting rights suppressors pay Jennifer Rubin: States that pass Jim Crow-style voting laws will feel the backlash Jennifer Rubin: Georgia must hold the line on democracy — again Greg Sargent: Why the GOP’s awful new voter suppression effort is so alarming The Post’s View: Republicans’ war on democracy is ramping up
