There sits the United States Senate, doing virtually nothing as multiple crises crash down on the nation. "You must be under the mistaken impression that I care" is a line I have quoted before, once belched by Mitch McConnell to Vice-President Joe Biden about a Democratic initiative. It reflected President Obama's creepy assessment of the Senate mogul's sole raison d'être: "the single-minded and dispassionate pursuit of power."
And here we are, again, mired in McConnell's overpowering, do-nothing swamp, even though Democrats took the Senate, the House and the White House through broad promises of action. How many times must America endure this really bad horror film?
The Washington Post reports that days before President Biden's inauguration, McConnell informed his caucus that "he would deliver [Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer a sharp ultimatum: agree to preserve the legislative filibuster … or forget about any semblance of cooperation." But his ultimatum is more of a kidnapping demand; an instance in which the victim's family members know the hostage will be killed once the kidnappers receive their payoff.
Permit McConnell the non-constitutional privilege of legislative filibusters and you're green-lighting the murder of necessary responses to America's severe crises. His love of filibusters isn't that of Democrats' past defenses of them, which were grounded in opposition to typically reckless GOP legislation. Mitch merely wishes to screw over the party in power. That he's also screwing American citizens simply does not factor into his calculations.
Although the reconciliation process allows tax and spending bills to bypass the filibuster process, Democrats would remain stymied on other legislation, such as shoring up voting rights — whose neglect would permit Republicans, just coincidentally of course, to keep suppressing Americans' right to remove those same Republicans from public office.
Quite aside from the immense tragedies of inaction, politically, Democrats will be blamed — as the party "in power" — for having done nothing to alleviate national pain. Voters care as much about "organizing rules," procedural mechanisms and invented Senate traditions as Mitch cares about suffering Americans; they just ask that somebody with the elected wherewithal do something — as promised.
Should Democrats grant McConnell the quarter he would never grant them, the odds of a returning, doubly pernicious Republican Senate will be vastly enhanced.