By Ralph Nader
\nFebruary 3, 2021<\/p>\n
Since 2015, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell has ruled the Senate with an iron hand, describing himself as \u201cthe Guardian of Gridlock.\u201d He was Senator \u201cNO,\u201d except for confirming over 200 mostly corporatist federal judges.<\/p>\n
Now comes a new challenge for Mitch McConnell as he leads 49 other Republican Senators, twenty of whom are up for re-election in 2022. Earlier this month, McConnell broke with Trump publicly in a Senate speech holding the wannabe American Fuhrer responsible for the January 6th storming of the Congress. On that day, Trump had just spoken to a crowd on the Mall and incited his followers to rush the Capitol and \u201cstop the steal.\u201d In the aftermath of this insurrection, the Kentucky Senator said he was keeping an open mind about his vote during the coming impeachment trial of Trump.<\/p>\n
Predictably, McConnell received a flood of criticism from the Trump supporters for daring to distance himself from the dangerous, unstable, Liar-in-Chief.\u00a0 Senate insurrectionists Senators Cruz and Hawley stood firm with Trump, even after the Trumpsters\u2019 violent riot in their hallowed workplace.<\/p>\n
Then came Senator Rand Paul, a crypto-libertarian opportunist and Trump toady (a scheming shadow of his father, ex-Rep. Ron Paul) to propose a vote on whether a president who is impeached while in office could be tried after his term was up. In a January 21, 2021 letter, an overwhelming number of liberal and conservative constitutional law experts said, \u201cIn sum, the Constitution\u2019s text and structure, history, and precedent make clear that Congress\u2019s impeachment power permits it to impeach, try, convict, and disqualify former officers, including former presidents.\u201d (The full text of the letter is available online at Medium.Com<\/a>) Not to do so, as Republican constitutional law specialist Bruce Fein said, \u201cwould fail to a set a precedent to deter future presidents from committing all kinds of impeachable offenses during the last days of their presidency and would undermine the\u00a0 additional sanction, by majority Senate vote, of banning Presidents who have committed \u2018high crimes and misdemeanors\u2019 from ever running for federal office again.\u201d<\/p>\n McConnell, reverting to form, voted with Rand Paul and all but five courageous Republicans for the nonsense assertion that the Constitution prohibits a trial of an impeached president after departure from office. Since it would take seventeen Republicans to join with fifty Democrats to convict Trump, the media pundits quickly prejudged the outcome as an acquittal.<\/p>\n Inside McConnell’s brain, however, the path ahead is not preordained. McConnell still insists, as one of 100 Senate jurors, he is keeping an open mind as he weighs the evidence at the open televised trial starting on Tuesday, February 9th in the Senate. This might be true.\u00a0 Allowing the Trumpian half of his brain to overpower his judgment and vote to acquit Dangerous Donald would spell disaster for the Republican Party (assuming the Democratic Party doesn’t go to sleep as it did after Obama’s win in 2008).<\/p>\n Here is what the \u201csurvival\u201d part of McConnell\u2019s mind may be thinking:<\/p>\n \u201cMy GOP is a minority Party. We’ve only won the popular vote for President once since 1988, having been saved by the Electoral College in 2000 and 2016. Our majorities in the House have been due to gerrymandering designed to produce safe Republican districts in key states. We can’t assume that the cowardly Democrats will continue to give us seats in the Senate that they should have won, apart from giving up contesting many seats altogether.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe should break completely with Trump and his uncontrollable, delusional, hardcore extremists dedicated to \u201ccivil war,\u201d that the Department of Homeland Security has deemed the \u201cleading domestic terrorist\u201d threat. Conviction of Trump is the way forward. He wouldn’t be able to run again. We won’t be bullied, intimated, and lied about every day in order to push us toward these political militias and their crude, violent talk and actions by acquitting Trump.\u00a0\u00a0 We can\u2019t be the \u201claw and order\u201d Party if we don\u2019t accept that \u201cno one is above the law.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAlso, the media would demand answers for out-of-control Republican outlaws and their Trumpian grip on state Republican Party committees. We will be so relentlessly distracted daily by Trumpian chaos and Trump’s 2024 candidacy that we won\u2019t be able to reset the traditional stable GOP and advance our conservative agenda. Trump is causing us to lose our campaign contributions from frightened corporate CEOs who cannot tolerate daily political disruptions and overtly divisive rancor that rankles the workplace.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSome of our own legislators already are being investigated by the FBI for their involvement with these extremist groups.\u201d (See the New York Times<\/em> article: Republican Ties to Extremist Group Are Under Scrutiny<\/a>).<\/p>\n \u201cFurthermore, letting Trump go triumphantly into the electoral arena would increase the risk of internally splitting the Party with Trump either saying \u201chis way\u201d or creating a new \u201cPatriot Party\u201d. For many reasons, that would end our electoral chances for a generation.\u00a0 It will be worse than what FDR did to our Party.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI make these arguments to my Senate Republicans, having just been re-elected. The Senators up for election in 2022 are fearful of being primaried. They cannot stand the burst of hate mail they would receive.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTo them, I would say: \u201crelax, look at the huge margins most of you won by in 2016. You’re just too cozy and not used to a primary challenge, which should make you an even better campaigner. Besides, you\u2019ll raise much more campaign money by standing tall against the tyrant who attacked America, who will turn on you at a tweet\u2019s notice if you’re not 100% with him.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cGiven the super-safe seats \u2013 no one is going to beat Thune, Moran, Lankford, Kennedy, Crapo, Boozman, and Shelby in any primary. Besides, any ultra-extremist candidates who win primaries are sure to lose in the general election. That’s what happened in Delaware in 2000. The great majority of sane GOP voters know a suicide drive when they hear and see it.\u201d<\/p>\n Such is the swirling mind of Mitch McConnell these days. With more incriminating evidence coming out about Trump’s attempted election coup, and the expected alarming under oath testimony at the Senate trial, the sheer political self-interest and regard for the GOP\u2019s future should result in the Senate voting for conviction.<\/p>\n See: Wrecking America Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All by Mark Green and Ralph Nader<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>for a detailed expos\u00e9 of Donald Trump, Liar-in-Chief.<\/p>The post The Struggle Inside Senator Mitch McConnell\u2019s Brain<\/a> first appeared on Ralph Nader<\/a>.\n This post was originally published on Ralph Nader<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Ralph Nader February 3, 2021 Since 2015, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell has ruled the Senate with an iron hand, describing himself as \u201cthe Guardian of Gridlock.\u201d He was Senator \u201cNO,\u201d except for confirming over 200 mostly corporatist federal judges. Now comes a new challenge for Mitch McConnell as he leads 49 other Republican\u2026<\/p>\n The post The Struggle Inside Senator Mitch McConnell\u2019s Brain<\/a> first appeared on Ralph Nader<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":145,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[425],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24808"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/145"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24808"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24809,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24808\/revisions\/24809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}