We
all suffer for Mitch McConnell’s sycophancy
Opinion by
Columnist
Jan. 4, 2021 at 5:28 p.m. CST
These are the wages
of sycophancy.
For more than four
years, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the Senate majority leader, enabled and
normalized Donald Trump. He didn’t join other Republicans in trying to oust
Trump as the nominee in 2016 after the “Access Hollywood” tapes. He hesitated to side
with Republicans who condemned Trump’s friendly words for neo-Nazis in
Charlottesville.
McConnell blocked
witnesses from appearing at Trump’s impeachment trial and boasted that he ran
the trial “in total coordination” with
the White House.
He supported Trump’s
plan to build an “emergency” border wall without congressional consent. He
averted his gaze as Trump trampled legislative powers, staffing his administration
with unconfirmed “acting” officials, shunning congressional subpoenas and
circumventing Congress with executive orders.
McConnell blocked
bipartisan efforts to protect against a repeat of foreign election interference
after Russia helped Trump in 2016. And he held off on acknowledging President-elect
Joe Biden’s win for six weeks, helping Trump to foment the fruitless coup
d’etat attempt that will occur on the Senate floor Wednesday.
Were it not for
McConnell’s efforts to rally big
Republican contributors behind Trump, there probably wouldn’t be a President
Trump. Never-Trump Republican operative Stuart Stevens, a former George W. Bush
and Mitt Romney adviser, calls McConnell
“Trump’s Franz von Papen,” the German politician who dissolved the Weimar
Republic.
Now McConnell
supposes he can turn all that off. He’s telling Senate colleagues not to reject
the electoral college results on Wednesday — not because it’s an inherently
authoritarian act but because he doesn’t want Republicans to face a “terrible
vote” — either against Trump or against constitutional democracy. He told them the Jan.
6 vote would be “the most consequential I have ever cast.”
But McConnell is
powerless to stop the Trump adulation he fueled for so long. Egged on by Trump,
a dozen Republican senators — a quarter of the GOP caucus — have defied
McConnell and said they will vote to reject the electoral college results, in
effect authorizing a bloodless coup.
And Trump now berates
his longtime lap dog as weak and ungrateful. “Mitch & the Republicans do
NOTHING … NO FIGHT!” he tweeted. Trump shared an
article reporting, “Trump allies slam Mitch McConnell for congratulating
Biden.” To “Mitch,” Trump added a message: “People
are angry!”
Republicans worry the
fracturing of the GOP will cost the party two Senate seats (and with them,
control of the Senate) in Tuesday’s runoff elections in Georgia, particularly
after Trump called Georgia’s (Republican)
secretary of state to say he wants him to “find” an additional
11,780 votes for Trump in November’s results. Neither Republican
candidate in Georgia took issue with Trump’s request to falsify the vote tally.
Republicans say they
need control of the Senate to be a check on Biden. But they’re acting now as a
check on democracy.
Even if Republicans
win in Georgia, McConnell’s Trump toadyism has left him atop a GOP caucus in
which a substantial proportion no longer accepts the central tenet of
democracy: that we honor the results of elections. How can democracy function
if one side proposes (even symbolically) rejecting the people’s votes?
Trump, of course, was
only ever in it for himself — as seen in the way he has turned against stalwart
allies who acknowledged Biden’s obvious win. Another Trump enabler, Sen. John
Thune (S.D.), is now, in Trump’s telling, “Mitch’s boy” and a “RINO,”
Republican in Name Only. The Republican governors of Georgia and
Arizona, both longtime Trump boosters, also get Trump’s RINO label now. Trump
turned against his own attorney general for affirming Biden’s victory, and he
even threatened a
fervent loyalist, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), for declining to participate in
Wednesday’s clownish overthrow attempt.
For weeks, McConnell
humored Trump’s refusal to accept the election results. McConnell declined to
refer to Biden as “president-elect.” He voted against a resolution from the
Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies — because it affirmed
Biden’s election. He remained silent as Trump alleged the FBI and Justice
Department were conspiring against him.
With the Senate
majority leader casting doubt on the election results, the most unscrupulous in
his caucus ran with the idea — until we ended up where we are now, with Sen.
Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) leading an effort Wednesday to ignore the Constitution and
reject the electoral college results.
We probably could
have avoided this moment if McConnell hadn’t made the cynical calculation long
ago that embracing Trump would best serve his own political ambitions. We could
have avoided it if McConnell had the courage of Utah Sen. Mitt Romney (who
called the election-overthrow attempt an “egregious ploy”),
Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse (“bad for the country”),
Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney (“exceptionally dangerous precedent”), Pennsylvania
Sen. Pat Toomey (“wildly inappropriate”)
or former House speaker Paul Ryan (“difficult to conceive of a more anti-democratic and
anti-conservative act”).
But McConnell didn’t
have the courage. And now, regardless of what happens in Georgia on Tuesday, we
all suffer for his sycophancy.