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Mitch McConnell has announced he will step down from his leadership of Senate Republicans at the end of the year. Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer wished McConnell the very best. I do not. Instead, I scorn him for undermining the Senate's role in American democracy.
On Feb. 13, 2021, then-Senate Majority Leader McConnell declared to his colleagues that insurrectionists attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 "because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth — because he was angry he'd lost an election." McConnell went on to say, "There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day."
And yet, because of how McConnell reengineered the process for confirming federal judges, Trump may never suffer any consequences for his actions. Judges ushered through the Senate confirmation process by McConnell may hand the November election to Trump.
Let me explain.
Three members of the Supreme Court -- Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett -- owe their seats to how McConnell gamed their confirmations. Gorsuch took over the seat on the court left vacant by the 2016 death of Justice Antonin Scalia. An hour after Scalia's death was announced, McConnell announced, "This vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president." A nomination that, under the Constitution, belonged to President Barack Obama, went nowhere in the 11 months remaining in his term. Obama's nominee then-Chief Judge Merrick Garland did not even get a hearing.
In his 2016 memoir, McConnell wrote, "The Senate is the only legislative body on earth where a majority is not enough -- most things require sixty votes to pass." McConnell had the 60-vote requirement for Supreme Court justices eliminated in the first months of Trump's term so that Trump's nominee Gorsuch could be confirmed by a majority 54-45 vote.
McConnell's hypocrisy was shown when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died with only four months left in Trump's term. He rammed through Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation only one month after her nomination. In his memoir he'd called the Senate "a place where nothing is decided without a good dose of deliberation and debate."
Without the abolition of the 60-vote requirement, there's no way Brett Kavanaugh would be on the Supreme Court. Accused of lying under oath and of sexual assault, Kavanaugh was confirmed by a 50-48 vote.
By all rights, then, the seat held by Gorsuch should have been Merrick Garland's, the seat held by Kavanaugh should have been held by someone who could have garnered 60 confirming votes and the one held by Barrett by someone nominated by Biden.
How much difference would that have made? The Supreme Court has just rejected a major threat to another Trump term. Judges in Colorado ruled that Trump should be taken off the state's ballot. Upon review, five members of the U.S. Supreme Court, including Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, held that a statute must be passed by Congress for such a disqualification to take effect.