There Can Be No American Revival Until Mitch McConnell Is Gone

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader who has dominated Republican politics in that body since assuming control from Bill Frist after the 2006 elections, is 80 years old. He’ll be 82 when he comes up for re-election in 2024.

That is too old to be leading a majority party. And McConnell, who has been in Washington since 1985 after being elected to the Senate in the 1984 elections, is entirely out of ideas and energy. He’s a fossil, a relic of a time when William F. Buckley conservatives and Daniel Patrick Moynihan liberals were the flip side of a political consensus which is long gone in America.

McConnell is like a hockey team consisting solely of a goalie. It plays no offense and its defense isn’t all that good, either.

The proof of this is virtually everywhere now, but most notably it exists with McConnell’s having acceded to this “bipartisan” compromise to fritter away by a few more minor cuts the 2nd Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans. Some details…

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday announced he supports a bipartisan framework on gun safety and will likely vote for legislation that reflects it.

“For myself, I’m comfortable with the framework and if the legislation ends up reflecting what the framework indicates, I’ll be supportive,” McConnell told reporters after the weekly Senate GOP conference lunch.

McConnell is the 11th Republican to signal support for the bipartisan framework, meaning that legislation based on its principles will likely have enough votes to overcome a filibuster.

Every Democrat is expected to vote for the legislation.

The bipartisan framework negotiated by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) would provide funding to states to implement laws to keep guns out of the hands of people deemed dangerous to themselves and others.

The proposal would also provide billions of dollars for community mental health centers, as well as money to improve school security.

One of its more controversial provisions would be to close the so-called “boyfriend loophole” to deny firearms to current and former dating partners that are subject to domestic violence restraining orders.

The framework would also clarify the definition of a firearms dealer to require people who sell a high volume of guns to conduct background checks and crack down on the the illegal trafficking of guns by straw purchasers.

The framework calls for giving the national criminal background check system access to the juvenile crime records of gun buyers between the ages of 18 and 21 but it does not raise the age for buying AR-15-style rifles, as many Democrats want.

“If this framework becomes the actual legislation, it’s a step forward,” McConnell said Tuesday.

McConnell claims that support for this deal is “overwhelming,” but to the extent that’s true it’s because nobody on the Republican side is questioning what’s in it.

Tucker Carlson questioned it, though, and Carlson was spot on in his assessment of the “red flag” laws this bill would incentivize…

Red flag laws are a denial of due process. How can Republicans in the U.S. Senate, equipped with all the information they have about the federal government’s manifest assaults on civil rights and individual freedom as the Left becomes more and more authoritarian and our political consensus becomes less and less present, accede to a diminution of due process in America?

Carlson is correct in noting eviction moratoria and other COVID emergency measures denied Americans due process of law before having lives and livelihoods disrupted or ruined. Shouldn’t it be obvious, given that evidence, what a mistake compromising on red flag laws and other federal encroachments on individual rights would be?

Again Mitch McConnell is 80. He’s been around long enough to have seen and noted these controversies and issues before. There is zero good reason why the leader of the Republican Party in the U.S. Senate would be knuckling under to the Democrats on an erosion of our rights in the middle of an historic public shift away from the Democrat Party.

McConnell demanded that his party present no broad agenda, no Contract For America, as part of the GOP’s efforts to retake the House and Senate in this fall’s elections. He just wants to trash the Biden administration and the Democrats. Well, Biden and the Democrats are eminently trashable, so there’s that, but the issue for Americans watching in horror over the past…well, essentially since Mitch McConnell took power as the lead Republican in the Senate in 2007, is not whether we trade out Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi for Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy to run Capitol Hill but whether putting Republicans in charge actually means anything.

Because frankly, McConnell’s track record as majority leader from January 2015 to January 2021 wasn’t all that good. He confirmed a bunch of judges, and he got the Trump tax cuts passed. He couldn’t pass an Obamacare repeal and he did very little to pass other key pieces of Trump’s legislative agenda. And the McConnell Senate had zero fiscal discipline at all.

With that kind of track record, it isn’t encouraging that he wants Republicans to run on nothing in Senate races. That’s a signal that Mitch McConnell wants his next stint as Majority Leader to be the same uninspiring bore as his previous stint was.

It’s thought that Rick Scott, a freshman senator from Florida elected in 2018 who served two highly successful terms as governor of that state before moving up to the Senate, might be the chief rival to McConnell for the top job in the Senate should Republicans take control. Scott has put out a 12-point agenda articulating an aggressive – one might well say revivalist – platform on which Republicans might stand this fall.

And thus, should the current trends continue to Election Day, achieve a mandate for that agenda.

Scott is also dropping ads demanding Biden’s resignation. The ads say Biden has destroyed America’s economy. Scott is pulling zero punches. And he’s nowhere near this stupid gun control bill McConnell has now signed on to.

The era of political consensus is over. William F. Buckley and Daniel Patrick Moynihan are dead. Team Biden is a leftist cabal which would seize every privately-owned firearm in America if they thought they could get away with it. Compromising with those people on any terms other than dealing from a position of absolute dominance is no longer tenable.

But it’s all McConnell knows.

He has to go. New blood is needed. The only way that happens is a massive rout in Senate elections this fall which results in a majority of revivalists (or MAGA conservatives, if you will) within the Republican Senate caucus to choose Scott or someone like him as leader.

Then maybe the Senate can be mobilized to fight for an American revival. Otherwise, that revival will be delayed, and America’s suffering will continue.