It is a neat irony that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) announced his resignation as minority leader on the same day that the Supreme Court agreed to decide whether former President Donald Trump should stand trial for plotting to overturn President Joe Biden’s 2020 election win.
The justices expedited their intervention but not as fast as demanded by special counsel Jack Smith and the most unhinged Trump haters. Smith had been rushing to trial in early March, but the justices fixed April 22 to consider the constitutional questions. So a trial on the substance, if Trump’s bid for immunity fails, could start at about the same time as the Republican National Convention on July 15, when he is likely to be the nominee, and might not be over before Election Day.
The Left vented Smith’s frustration for him, denouncing the court’s 6-3 majority of Republican-appointed judges as corrupt “Christofascist traitors” despite there being no dissent from the three Democratic-appointed justices.
Hey-ho, this is a sample of the election-year commentary we’re in for from the foam-flecked Left.
Its adherents have for decades tried to force their radical agenda forward by getting federal courts to approve items they can’t secure democratically in Congress. The Left loves judges when they do this but hates them when they prove recalcitrant. When courts thwart Democratic efforts to impose regulations or seize powers that neither the Constitution nor statute allows, all hell breaks loose among those who like to think of themselves as “progressive.”
That’s when Democrats demand “reform,” by which they mean impeaching conservatives or packing the court with “living Constitution” jurists who’ll find penumbras and other shadowy avenues through which to smuggle whatever the imperial progressives want. In other words, the Left throws a hissy fit when it doesn’t get its way. It regards those on the Right as not just wrong in their opinions but evil, which justifies unlimited self-righteous indignation when lefty hopes are dashed.
McConnell was crucial to confirming Trump’s three “Christofascists,” the excellent originalist and textualist Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. He did this by refusing hearings on Merrick Garland’s nomination in Barack Obama’s last year as president and by leaping to the wheel of the procedural bulldozer first driven by the Democrats’ former majority leader, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, to demolish filibusters on judicial nominations.
McConnell no longer gets credit for this from the MAGA crowd, nor for his work securing the 2017 tax cuts. They can’t abide his admirable refusal to knuckle under to Trump. So he will leave his leadership post heartily detested by antagonists on both sides.
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But that detestation is a measure of his effectiveness. Throughout his record tenure as the Republicans’ leader in the upper chamber, he understood that politics takes place at the nexus of what is right, what is wanted, and what is practicable. That doesn’t suggest a lack of principle but merely an understanding that you will sometimes get more of what you seek and sometimes less.
He knew the rules and he used them effectively. The Left, as its attacks on the court show, tries to work the refs. But McConnell knew how to play the game.
