GOP Senator admits just how dysfunctional the Republican Senate is
A new talking point parroted by Fox News and conservatives these days is that Democrats aren’t interested in governing and have zero accomplishments since they retook the House in January. This is just a little bit odd, because the House of Representatives have passed more than one hundred bills since the 116th Congress was sworn in. The majority of them were blocked in the Republican Senate by Mitch McConnell who not only refuses to allow a vote on them, he’s actually campaigning on his own obstruction – promising he’ll be the Grim Reaper if Trump loses in 2020.
Neither move from McConnell is all that surprising – as he’s called his blocking of Merrick Garland’s SCOTUS nomination one of his proudest moments in Congress. Now, one of his fellow Republicans is having second thoughts on the idea. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana tends to keep a fairly low profile in Congress, last making headlines when he highlighted his own ignorance of the internet during a hearing with Mark Zuckerberg last year. Giving a speech yesterday, Kennedy openly admitted that the GOP has accomplished nothing, short of rushing to confirm a number of unqualified right wing federal judges.
“Other than the nominations, which are important, we have done nothing. Zero. Zilch. Nada,” Kennedy said in his speech. It’s not that he’s suddenly concerned about bipartisanship as he pretended to be in his address, but he knows that the Republican Party will have to play defense in 22 states next year if they want to keep the Senate, and they’ll need to point to some legislative accomplishments – especially when it comes to issues as non-controversial as election security or infrastructure.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making