Where Is He? -The one legislator with greatest control over this outcome is Mitch McConnell.

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… The fact that Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, to this point, has managed to keep him name mostly out of the debate is a tribute to his congenital dishonesty, unquenchable thirst for power, or some combination thereof.

This bears repeating every day until the government is open: Less than 24 hours before the shutdown, by voice vote, McConnell’s Republican-controlled Senate passed a then-uncontroversial bill that did not contain wall money to fund the government through February 8. The next day, all the country’s worst right-wing media personalities crawled inside Donald Trump’s ear and worked him into a frothy rage, and to spare the president the humiliation of having to fight a spending bill passed by his own party, disgraced lickspittle Paul Ryan decided not to bring the bill to the House floor. The shutdown began shortly thereafter.

… Only two things have changed since that unanimous vote: First, Democrats control the House, which means that Ryan’s spinelessness is no longer an obstacle to holding votes. And second, Donald Trump told them McConnell he wouldn’t sign any bill that doesn’t include wall funding, and so McConnell has pretended to forget all about it…

McConnell, of course, has a proven track record of getting his way when he stakes out unprincipled policy positions on high-risk-high-reward grounds. The next election is a long way off, and voters’ infuriatingly-short memories may prevent them from punishing his party for any of this in a meaningful way in 2020.

But a Supreme Court nomination and a government shutdown are different in kind: Hundreds of thousands of federal workers and government contractors are going without paychecks as a direct consequence of his party’s failure to govern itself, and as the shutdown’s consequences become more salient, Americans everywhere are going to get angrier with each passing day. No matter how vociferously any dissenting senators complain, they have no recourse unless McConnell stops enabling the president and stands up to his intransigence. His refusal to do so makes him as blameworthy for the shutdown as anyone else.




More plus links:
https://www.gq.com/story/mconnell-shutdown