Mitch McConnell Is Barking Scared Now That Corporate Power Is Against Him
When we first traced the rise of shamelessness as a superpower in American politics, we tried to give Mitch McConnell his due. At the time, we primarily focused on the then-Senate Majority Leader's procedural shamelessness: his abuse of arcane rules and mechanisms to block popular legislation, or indeed, to block President Barack Obama from exercising his constitutional prerogative to appoint judges to the federal bench. Through sheer brassness of balls, McConnell ground the federal government into a dramatic slowdown, which happened to be in the interests of many of the people who pay his campaign bills. If the system is already working for you, you might not want government doing much of anything. The Kentucky senator was thus a loyal servant to the most powerful corporate interests and the billionaires whose fortunes were intertwined with them.
But maybe we failed to fully appreciate the shamelessness of McConnell's words, too. Because the big guy has a new statement out reacting to Major League Baseball's sanctions against Georgia following that state's Republican legislature passing a new "election reform" bill—the MLB is pulling this year's All-Star Game from Atlanta—and this scrap of parchment is something to behold.
"We are witnessing a coordinated campaign by powerful and wealthy people to mislead and bully the American people," says the guy who helped pioneer the modern system of ultrawealthy citizens pouring millions of dollars into our elections, often anonymously, to influence votes and policy. Democrats have now taken to Dark Money in a big way, too, but McConnell is also opposed to reform measures, like H.R. 1, that might actually do something about these problems. (Last month, McConnell's aide was recorded on a call with Koch operatives in which they admitted that H.R. 1 was broadly popular, including with Republican voters, despite their attempts to tarnish it through spin and deception. They resolved to try to kill it by working lawmakers privately.) McConnell attacked the legislation in the statement, casting it as a Democratic "power grab." And then the Mitch McConnell Corporation Bashing continued.
It’s jaw-dropping to see powerful American institutions not just permit themselves to be bullied, but join in the bullying themselves....Our private sector must stop taking cues from the Outrage-Industrial Complex. Americans do not need or want big business to amplify disinformation or react to every manufactured controversy with frantic left-wing signaling.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/mitch-mcconnell-barking-scared-now-173500751.html
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