Two thing have to happen in the 2020 election: a Democratic president and the end to Mitch McConnell's Senate leadership. He makes that clear in an op-ed in The New York Times Thursday. He explains how he destroyed the Senate as an institution and installed "Justice Neil Gorsuch, Justice Brett Kavanaugh and 43 new lifetime circuit judges—the most ever at this point in a presidency," to own the libs. Literally. This is the follow up to that sentence: "The consequences of taking Senator Reid’s advice will haunt liberals for decades."
He's throwing down the gauntlet to all the Democratic presidential and Senate candidates, threatening all-out war if they have the temerity to break his iron grip on the Senate by getting rid of the legislative filibuster. He throws some stuff in about the sanctity of the Senate as an institution, even invoking Madison and Jefferson. But it's clear that this is about raw power. His raw power.
He broke the Senate and the judiciary, he says gleefully, because the Democrats made him do it: "Unfortunately, Senate Democrats bought what Senator Reid was selling," he writes about the decision of Democrats to nuke the filibuster for lower court nominees, continuing "but buyer’s remorse arrived with lightning speed. Just one year later, Republicans retook the majority. Two years after that, Americans elected President Trump. In 2017, we took the Reid precedent to its logical conclusion, covering all nominations up to and including the Supreme Court." That's a clear threat, that and saying outright they'll "regret it."
As if there's worse that McConnell could do than what he's doing right now—allowing Vladimir Putin and the NRA call the shots on what the Senate does.
He's not just trying to intimidate Democratic moderates—looking at you, Joe Biden, who still persists in the idea that he can be the McConnell whisperer. He's also making the case to the Republican base for returning control of the Senate to Republicans, basically daring the 2020 slate of Democrats to run on nuking the legislative filibuster so Republicans can motivate their voters by saying the only way to keep destroying the next Democratic president and all her ambitions—just like he did with much of President Obama's agenda—is by keeping him as majority leader.
There's only one valid response to this from Democrats: "Fuck you, Mitch." They don't have to say it quite so bluntly, but he's given them a huge opportunity here. This op-ed is a very clear threat that he intends to continue to put partisan warfare—and his own power—ahead of the interests of the United States. He is promising he will grind the next president's agenda into dust. Simply because he wants to and he can. What better justification do Democrats need to embrace nuking the filibuster?
He has to be stopped, once and for all. Please give $1 to our nominee fund to help Democrats end McConnell's career as majority leader.