Opinion

Since 2015, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell has ruled the Senate with an iron hand, describing himself as "the Guardian of Gridlock." He was Senator "NO," except for confirming over 200 mostly corporatist federal judges.

Now comes a new challenge for Mitch McConnell as he leads 49 other Republican Senators, twenty of whom are up for re-election in 2022. Earlier this month, McConnell broke with Trump publicly in a Senate speech holding the wannabe American Fuhrer responsible for the January 6th storming of the Congress. On that day, Trump had just spoken to a crowd on the Mall and incited his followers to rush the Capitol and "stop the steal." In the aftermath of this insurrection, the Kentucky Senator said he was keeping an open mind about his vote during the coming impeachment trial of Trump.

During his appearance on Steve Bannon's show Wednesday, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) proclaimed that he had the votes to remove Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) from the House Republican leadership. He told Bannon that somehow the "establishment" would stop the vote from happening to ensure she stayed in power.

As it turns out, Gaetz was not only wrong, he was overwhelmingly proven wrong with just 61 members being willing to vote out Cheney and 145 supported her. Gaetz and his team lost big and it was reportedly so embarrassing that Gaetz refused to do interviews after the vote.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon-loving construction heiress that recently won a deep-red congressional seat in Georgia, is getting quite a bit of attention for her nutty, violent, and racist views that she has long enjoyed sharing freely on social media. There is no doubt that she's a doozy, from her 2019 video demanding that her followers "flood the Capitol" and use violence "if we have to" to her 2018 Facebook post blaming wildfires on Jews with space lasers. Democrats in Congress have been making hay over Greene's committee assignments, using the presence of someone who stalked a school shooting survivor on the House Education and Labor Committee to embarrass House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and highlight the way that extremism has been mainstreamed in the GOP.

The whole situation is apparently too much for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who started to insult Greene in public on Monday, in a belated bid to suggest that the QAnon faction is more fringe in the Republican Party than it actually is. "Loony lies and conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican Party and our country," McConnell groused in a statement that named Greene explicitly. Sen. Todd C. Young of Indiana, a close colleague of McConnell's, picked up the baton on Tuesday, calling Greene "nutty" and "an embarrassment to our party."

Joe Biden wants a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package, Senate Republicans only a third that much. Both propose too little for too short of a time period. Even more important, both propose too little for where it is needed most.

The Republicans say America just can't afford more relief. Their skimpy plan would provide nothing for renters facing eviction, just the latest sign of how since Trump the Republicans have chosen to become the party of white skin privilege since its Black and Latino renters most at risk of eviction.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn't seem to know whether he's coming or going these days. One minute he's condemning Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene as "a cancer" on the Republican party and the next he's voting with the majority of GOP senators to reject the idea that Greene's mentor, Donald Trump, can constitutionally be impeached and convicted for inciting a violent riot. McConnell now appears uncharacteristically unsteady, unsure how to proceed in a world in which his party has become so radicalized that average Republican voters are capable of storming the Capitol and demanding the execution of a stalwart conservative and Trump loyalist like former Vice President Mike Pence.

He shouldn't be surprised by any of this, however.

Embattled Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) issued a scenery-chomping response to her critics as she faces calls for her resignation or expulsion for promoting bizarre and violent conspiracy theories.

The newly elected Georgia Republican is facing bipartisan criticism for suggesting her support for the execution of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats, and has expressed support for the cult-like QAnon conspiracy theory and questioned whether mass shooting and the 9/11 attacks were staged.

QAnon promoter U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) in a newly-surfaced video from 2019 brags about how she attacked Parkland school shooting survivor turned gun control activist David Hogg, calls him an "idiot," and compares him to a dog.

"He is very trained. He's like a dog. He's completely trained," Greene says in an interview with Georgia Gun Owners, Inc. in April 2019. NBC News first reported the existence of the video Tuesday evening.

Ten Senate Republican have proposed a COVID relief bill of about $600 billion. That's less than a third of Biden's plan. They promise "bipartisan support" if he agrees.

Their proposal isn't a compromise. It would be a total surrender. It trims direct payments and unemployment aid that Americans desperately need. Biden should reject it out of hand.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) suggested that President Joe Biden's administration inappropriately appointed an attorney to temporarily head the Department of Justice's criminal division, and he was served up a slew of reminders about the recently departed administration's appointees.

The newly elected president's younger son Hunter Biden hired former federal prosecutor Chris Clark to assist in his possible criminal defense in December, and his father nominated Nicholas McQuaid, one of Clark's partners at the law firm Latham & Watkins, to serve as principal deputy assistant attorney general in the criminal division.

When House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy went to Mar-a-Lago last week to meet with former President Donald Trump, it was obvious that he didn't view Trumpism as a thing of the past. Journalist Joan E. Greve examines Trump's hold on the GOP in an article published by The Guardian this week, noting the frustrations of some conservatives who wish Republicans could move on from Trumpism.

"Donald Trump may have left the White House, but his shadow still looms large in Washington and the Republican Party as the Senate prepares for his second impeachment trial," Greve explains. "The 50 Republicans in the Senate are grappling with how to appease Trump's supporters, who still make up a hefty share of the Party's base, while acknowledging that the former president incited the 6 January attack on the U.S. Capitol."

For weeks now, Republicans in Congress have been playing a rhetorical game regarding the impeachment of Donald Trump on charges — for which he is quite obviously guilty — of inciting an insurrection. On one hand, Senate Republicans want very badly to acquit Trump, even though this would allow him to run for office again, believing that the Republican voting base is more loyal to Trump than they are to the GOP or to the nation itself. On the other hand, they don't want to come right out and say that Trump was justified in sending a violent crowd to storm the Capitol on January 6. That sort of overtly fascist stance can hurt one's bookings on cable news shows and cause corporate donors to put you on ice for a cycle.

So Senate Republicans glommed onto what they thought was the perfect strategy to have it both ways: pretend that they are springing Trump on a technicality.

We couldn't help wondering what the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and other right-wing militia groups are making of the images of pro-democracy violence, mostly from anti-democratic police, on the streets of Moscow.

The inside-out juxtaposition of images of thousands in the streets in an attempt to take down the Vladimir Putin government for jailing opponent Aleksei A. Navalny with the constant airing of Donald Trump-clad militants attacking the U.S. Capitol to overturn democratic elections is startling.