Year: 2014

On August 7th I wondered aloud what kind of chaos a GOP controlled Senate would unleash on the nation. There is no longer any need to wonder. Senate Minority Leader and soon to be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is very candid about the mayhem he is going to sow.

Interviewed by Politico aboard his campaign bus, the Senate minority leader offered his vision for the Senate should he be promoted to majority leader: confrontation, manufactured crises, and the ever-present threat of a government shutdown: In an extensive interview here, the typically reserved McConnell laid out his clearest thinking yet of how he would lead the Senate if Republicans gain control of the chamber. The emerging strategy: Attach riders to spending bills that would limit Obama policies on everything from the environment to health care, consider using an arcane budget tactic to circumvent Democratic filibusters and force the president to “move to the center” if he wants to get any new legislation through Congress. “Move to the center” is a clever euphemism for “pay ransom in exchange for hostages.” And I’m not putting words in anyone’s mouth here – back in 2011, McConnell was asked what lessons he learned from threatening to put the government in default in order to extract concessions from the White House, and he said the debt limit was “a hostage that’s worth ransoming.”

Some on the left expect President Obama to wade into the Ferguson protests and demonstrations and condemn the police, to excuse the violence as justified and righteous, and take sides. Some expect a new Race Speech, like what he gave in Philadelphia during the 2008 campaign during the height of the Jeremiah Wright mess. I call bullshit on that. For a couple of reasons. First, he is the President, and as such he, as the head of the Federal Government, cannot bias any coming federal investigation or intervention with his own one sided views. Second, there is every indication that the election of President Obama was made race relations far worse in this country. It is not his fault, it is the fault of the racists. But far from isolating existing racists into further obscurity, the election of a black man as President was a Batman signal for all of the racists to let their freak flag fly. Racists, once embarrassed by admitting their racism, are now proud to. Because it is a sign of opposition to Obama, and because a legitimate political party embraced racism as an acceptable form of opposition to the President early on, even before his inauguration. So, knowing that, what can the President say that will not make the situation worse?