By Will Bunch

The Philadelphia Inquirer

So this is how liberty dies — with a hideous, utterly shameless smirk on the face of arguably the most cynical political leader in American history, as the warriors in his political tribe cackle with laughter.

The end came May 28 in about the most out-of-the-way venue you could imagine: a chamber of commerce luncheon in Paducah, Kentucky, where Mitch McConnell — the 77-year-old son of bluegrass country, now one of America’s three most powerful politicians as Senate majority leader — was finally asked a question that’s long been on people’s minds, about how he might handle an unexpected Supreme Court vacancy if one occurs during the 2020 presidential election.

It was in 2016, you surely remember, that Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly and McConnell wouldn’t even allow a hearing for President Barack Obama’s nominee, a thoroughly decent federal appeals court judge named Merrick Garland. This wasn’t, McConnell insisted at the time, what it looked like — denying Obama his constitutional power to fill a vacancy that was never questioned for the 42 (cough, cough … white) presidents who came before him, and a naked power play to make sure pro-business judges set our laws for the next 40 years.

No, the Senate leader told us, this was about the highest democratic principles, that “the American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice,” while also claiming political precedents that didn’t really exist. Three years later, McConnell is now telling us that the people’s voice is only audible when it’s Republican voters looking to replace a Democratic POTUS.

“Oh, we’d fill it,” McConnell said last week, unable to suppress his laughter that quickly spread through a room of Kentuckians who also see the lighter side of 21st-century neo-fascism.

That comment got some news coverage, but not as much as it should have. For one thing, the Senate leader’s amoral political cynicism has been barely concealed (if at all) ever since the dawn of the Obama presidency, when he declared the goal of what was once known, years ago, as “the world’s greatest deliberative body” was no longer to pass laws but to deny Obama a second term. And a lot of important news gets drowned underneath the Iowa-level flooding that is President Trump’s daily barrage of inane tweets and increasingly dictatorial policy pronouncements.

But May 28, 2019, should be marked on the calendar of American history as the day democracy was taken off life support and officially declared dead — because there’s no longer even the slightest pretense that the ancient words of the U.S. Constitution, fealty to the rule of law, and 243 years of imperfectly upheld democratic norms matter anymore.

McConnell and Trump — soon to be helped, no doubt, by the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court —are now in an arms race to see who can blow up America’s founding documents faster, through illegal wars and arms deals, tariffs by dictatorial fiat, ignoring subpoenas and now judicial orders … all with that same knowing smirk.

Let’s quickly review a couple more of McConnell’s past and probable future crimes against democracy, lest you think that was an exaggeration:

• For all the (justified) talk about efforts to cover up the extent of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, arguably no actor did more damage than McConnell, who in September of that fateful year explicitly blocked the Obama administration from warning the public about Vladimir Putin’s ploy and from taking stricter measures to stop it. (Then, in a cynical ploy almost as shameless as his Supreme Court flip-flop, he used April’s release of the Mueller report to blame it all on Obama.) In 2019, McConnell is blocking bills that might prevent Russian interference in 2020.

• What does McConnell get out of his less-than-vigilant approach to Russian meddling in our democracy? One of his biggest donors (a whopping $3.5 million to McConnell’s leadership PAC) is Russian-born U.S. citizen Len Blavatnik, who’s maintained close ties in his homeland and has business partnerships with two Russian oligarchs who’ve figured prominently in Trump-tied scandals: Viktor Vekselberg and Oleg Deripaska. McConnell recently used his Senate clout to get U.S. sanctions lifted on Deripaska and his large aluminum company Rusal, which promptly announced a plan to invest $200 million in a new plant … in McConnell’s home state. (His biggest home state newspaper wrote flatly that “Kentucky might be going into business with the Russian mafia.”)

• Since Trump’s election, McConnell has taken a running tit-for-tat with Democrats over judicial nominations to its ultimate nuclear extreme, ramming through not just the president’s two high-profile Supreme Court picks but more than 100 federal judicial nominees (the vast majority of them white men, naturally) while refusing to even consider a slew of progressive bills like the Equality Act sent over since this winter by a Democrat-led House. These judges will guarantee for decades a legal order that protects the white patriarchy and business elites, in opposition to the will of the American people who are becoming ever younger, more diverse, and less enamored with the inequality baked into today’s capitalism.

How can McConnell be stopped? In the long term, his rise and his unholy reign pose hard questions about the very nature of American democracy and its foundation — whether the constitutional checks and balances of a Senate that gives citizens in Wyoming so much more power than their fellow Americans in California makes sense in today’s world.

For anyone who cares about keeping liberty alive, beating McConnell next year is every bit as important as beating Trump. That’s why it’s so frustrating that the elites of the Democratic Party don’t seem to get it. Rather than making a reclamation of the Senate the national moral crusade that it needs to be, the allure of the Trumpian reality show has sucked the top tier of potential candidates into the presidential race or related pursuits. Vanity and shortsightedness could leave a President Warren or Harris or Biden one vote short in 2021 of the progress that their voters demanded.

The only good news is that the 2020 general election is still 16 months away — plenty of time for the Democrats and concerned voters to shift gears, make the Senate a priority, keep liberty alive and wipe the smirk off Mitch McConnell’s face.