Category: Republicans

Fascism: Personnel director quits in ongoing Trump purge of non-loyalists from government

Posted on by Hunter

Every single paragraph of this Politico report on the resignation of Office of Personnel Management (OPM) director Dale Cabaniss somehow manages to be its own special brand of terrifying.

The short version is that ex-Trump "body man" John McEntee, who Trump appointed to head the Presidential Personnel Office despite zero qualifications other than the requisite suck-up-ness, seems to have so infuriated Cabaniss that he bailed out with zero notice on Tuesday. The longer version is that McEntee and allies seem to be a rolling catastrophe, combining demands for absolute loyalty with what appears to be a fairly solid attempt to reactivate the Hitler Youth.

There are, bizarrely, now three college undergraduates moved by McEntee and crew into positions of new appointee vetting, with no good (or any) explanations from McEntee as to just why some of the most sensitive hiring decisions in government are going through Trump-loyal college seniors taking a break from doing their coursework. John Troup Hemenway, James Bacon, and Anthony Labruna are all college seniors with no apparent qualifications for their positions other than, again, Trump loyalty.

But there's also the arrival of a new "White House liaison" to the OPM, Paul Dans, who appears to be assisting McEntee in his fascist-premised purge of disloyal-to-Trump government officials but, again, has seemingly little relevant experience for his new position or duties. Reading between the lines, it appears Dans' performance so far is not impressing the people in government with actual work to do.

All of this, in other words, is becoming a complete sh-tshow in the post-impeachment days of Trump attempting to remove anyone and everyone in government who is not loyal to him while, simultaneously, a pandemic sweeps through American cities on a six-week head start due to the astonishing incompetence of Dear Leader and his boot-licking loyalists.

It doesn't seem possible to imagine how the Trump team's response to the current crisis could get worse than it currently is, but Trump's ex-soda-bringer is assembling a team to make sure it absolutely does get worse, and that anyone with subject-matter expertise who might have slipped through initial appointment cracks is quickly replaced with new, invariably compliant toadies who know better than to contradict Trump's various imaginary pronouncements about how Actually he is doing the best job of anyone who ever lived, so shut up.

Again, with no pushback from Republican lawmakers or anyone else in the party. With no worry, on the part of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Republican Senate, that Trump's purge of non-loyalists will further wreck an already incompetent government response to a pandemic that could kill untold numbers of Americans. Not a peep.

That time congressional Republicans postponed recess to rush … the deportation of DACA recipients

Posted on by Gabe Ortiz

The U.S. is hurtling full-speed toward an iceberg, but the bumbling idiot at the helm continues to insist that everyone is safe to go back to their cabins. In fact, as Daily Kos’ Laura Clawson pointed out earlier on Thursday, impeached president Donald Trump has declared emergencies where there are none as a public health crisis is exploding across the nation. But he’s not alone in this criminal negligence: He’s getting an assist from the congressional Republicans who protected him from impeachment and removal from office.

“McConnell ally says Senate won't take up House coronavirus bill until after recess,” tweeted CNN correspondent Ana Cabrera. “’The Senate will act when we come back and we have a clearer idea of what extra steps we need to take,’ Sen. Lamar Alexander told reporters.” People’s lives are at stake, but Republicans are clearly laying out their priorities, immigration policy expert Tom Jawetz points out: “I'm old enough to remember when House GOP postponed August 2014 recess in part to make sure they voted on a bill to strip protections from DACA recipients.”

Roll Call reported at the time that the anti-immigrant legislation wasn’t going to be “taken up any time soon” by the Democratic-led Senate, “which already left for August recess.” Nor did this legislation, which would have effectively ended DACA, have had any chance of being approved by President Obama, who had implemented the program in 2012. That didn’t matter to House Republicans, who, led by Iowa’s most infamous white supremacist, Steve King, were really just trying to send immigrants a message: Get the fuck out.

I'm old enough to remember when @HouseGOP postponed August 2014 recess in part to make sure they voted on a bill to strip protections from #DACA recipients. https://t.co/NroDLmPSX5 https://t.co/lqNTDzmBhA

— Tom Jawetz (@TomJawetz) March 12, 2020

Our nation installed in the Oval Office a white supremacist sexual assaulter grifter who has no idea what he’s doing, but the blame for this incompetence isn’t solely his to bear. It’s also on the congressional Republicans helping him worsen a true national crisis, and who as a body had already shown themselves to be cruel and inhumane when the impeached president was nowhere near the White House and still on television judging a reality show.

Colbert Discusses Coronavirus: Says He Wishes We Could Go Back To When ‘We Were Looking Forward To Impeaching Trump’

Posted on by LifeZette

March 12, 2020

Late night television host Stephen Colbert has had enough of living in the dark times surrounding the coronavirus. On his show last night, Colbert reminisced about the “good old days” when he and his fellow Democrats were “looking forward to impeaching” President Donald Trump.

“A few months ago was great, it was the holidays, I was drunk on eggnog, I was watching Cheer, I was falling in love with Baby Yoda,” Colbert said to open his show on Thursday night. “I was looking forward… I was looking forward to impeaching the president, remember that feeling? We’re going to get you, Trump! John Bolton is going to testify and Republicans are going to do the right thing!”

Republican senators ended up dashing the dreams of Democrats when they voted to acquit Trump in his impeachment trial.

MORE NEWS: If he wins the Democratic nomination, can Joe Biden make it to November?

“2020 has done the impossible… and made me nostalgic for 2019,” Colbert added, as his typically liberal audience laughed and cheered enthusiastically. Colbert should enjoy this reaction while he can, because starting next week, his show and all other late night television programs will not be filmed before live studio audiences because of the coronavirus, according to Breitbart News.

Colbert’s monologue serves as proof that Democrats were lying when they tried to pretend that they were taking pleasure out of trying to impeach Trump. Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats tried to pretend that the impeachment effort was a somber affair for them, but they could barely contain their excitement over it.

While it comes as no surprise that a liberal like Colbert, who takes pleasure out of bashing Trump on a nightly basis, would fondly reminisce about the impeachment witch hunt against the sitting U.S. president, it doesn’t make it any less despicable. This is the kind of hate that Trump has had to deal with every day since he was elected, which makes all that he has accomplished for this country since taking office all the more impressive.

We can’t wait to see Colbert’s reaction at the end of 2020, when Trump is reelected for a second term. I wonder what year Colbert will be reminiscing about then.

This piece originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

Read more at LifeZette:
Biden trashes American republic, tells voter ‘I’m not working for you’
Schumer gets bad news as GOP moves forward with historic censure for Supreme Court threat
What would a Democrat White House and Congress look like? Look to Virginia

The post Colbert Discusses Coronavirus: Says He Wishes We Could Go Back To When ‘We Were Looking Forward To Impeaching Trump’ appeared first on The Political Insider.

Reuters: White House classified COVID preparedness meetings, blocking experts and hampering response

Posted on by Hunter

At every possible moment Donald Trump and his team of Republican incompetents chooses the worst possible path. Reuters is now reporting via four administration sources that the White House "has ordered federal health officials to treat top-level coronavirus meetings as classified."

"The officials said that dozens of classified discussions about such topics as the scope of infections, quarantines and travel restrictions" have been held in a secure room—excluding government experts who did not have the requisite security clearances, says Reuters. The administration has literally been keeping coronavirus response discussions secret from some of the government's own experts.

Did it make a difference? It likely did. Reuters quotes an anonymous official as saying "some very critical people" were not allowed in those discussions, which began in January. It also seems evident that the classification was used by the White House, yet again, to withhold information from the public that the White House believed could be damaging to Donald Trump: The news that the now-pandemic was all but certain to arrive here, would have real and damaging effects, and would cost American lives.

This is Sen. Moscow Mitch McConnell's fault, and the fault of the other Republican senators. They knew full well during impeachment that the White House was improperly classifying his discussions with foreign leaders so as to avoid disclosing them to the public. They knew full well he was placing his own interests, and his own ego, over public safety. They gave him full authority to continue doing it.

Trump’s self-absorbed incompetence continues to drive federal coronavirus response

Posted on by Hunter

Hello there. It is whatever day of the week it is, and Donald Trump's blazing incompetence is still severely hampering a federal coronavirus response that should have been in full swing many weeks ago.

But don't worry: Things aren't as bad as they seem. The Washington Post reports,"Inside the White House, some officials privately acknowledged Monday that Trump has exacerbated the problem with his misleading and false statements, as well as his callous comments."

See there? We may have lost our only chance to keep a new coronavirus from reaching epidemic levels throughout the nation, but White House staffers are willing to at least privately acknowledge that Trump may be screwing things up, even if they aren't willing to say so publicly. Feel better? No? Huh. Well, they tried.

Since the coronavirus emerged in China, the Trump administration's response has been focused largely on massaging Donald Trump's ego. Trump did not want virus concerns to disrupt the stock market, so Trump played down those concerns. Trump went further, claiming that those warning of the virus' danger were partisans whose only aim was to damage him.

Public officials either went along with these claims or did not—and when they did not, Trump appointed Mike Pence the new head of COVID-19 communications so that the administration's messaging could be better monitored and shaped.

That initial stalling for Trump's own personal benefit may turn out to be tremendously costly. Trump's blustering press conference performance on Monday, speaking almost exclusively in economic terms before bailing from the room early, didn't help. On Tuesday the White House continued to flog economic concerns, suggesting a vague program of tax cuts would soon be revealed but being stubbornly opaque about the status of virus testing and other medical details.

The common refrain throughout from White House officials has been the “bold” and “decisive” decision-making of Dear Leader. Mike Pence lathers it on thick and heavy in every televised appearance: Every decision Dear Leader has made has been bold and decisive and not at all similar to or worse than those of a potted plant. Even now, the primary concern of Trump's White House team is the stability of the notoriously unstable Trump; all other coronavirus concerns are voiced only after the requisite cradle-rocking to soothe Trump's nerves for another few hours.

It might be self-serving on the part of the coronavirus "task force." But it also might be necessary. Trump's incompetence and unwillingness to take the epidemic threat seriously has damaged the public response, but he is still incompetent and unstable, and can still damage the public response much, much more. If he believes public health experts are not properly praising him, he can replace them with full-time toadies, as he has elsewhere in his post-impeachment sweep of insufficiently loyal public officials. If he watches Fox News and sees people being angry about containment measures affecting their lives, he can go on television or on Twitter and demand that containment measures be lessened simply because he believes the public would praise him for it.

Trump's incompetence doesn't just matter. It's the driving force behind the federal government's disaster preparedness efforts, or lack thereof.

That continues, every day. Trump's reluctance to issue an emergency declaration in Washington state, for example, is hampering state efforts to expand medical capacity.

Trump's history of bold, decisive lying matters as well. During a public health emergency in which it is vital that the public believe and listen to health officials, Trump is a literally unbelievable figure. Trump has surrounded himself with liars proven on countless occasions to be willing to lie to the public; the White House has little credibility now, regardless of its declarations. Trump has claimed that any number of world events are "fake news," a conspiracy against him. His mocking dismissals of the seriousness of the virus have already spread to his supporters; will experts be able to reverse any of that damage?

This is what Republicans voted for when they ignored Trump's self-serving behavior, even when it became criminal. This is precisely the sort of national emergency that any president can face, at any moment: Republicans either presumed that this one would not face one, or that he would rise to the occasion (he cannot), or simply made the estimation that the damage done to the nation by having a president incapable of non-self-centered calculations would be worth it, because that damage would not be done directly to them.

That's quite the risk. But they knew, from Mitch McConnell down, that they were taking it.

Trump’s coronavirus response is a disaster—and Senate Republicans own Trump’s failures

Posted on by Laura Clawson

U.S. coronavirus response has been … not the best. And that’s coming from the top, expert after expert says. While the career officials and scientists working on the issue throughout the government remain the same as in previous disease outbreaks, Donald Trump has set the conditions under which they’re working in important ways, through his emphasis on political messaging, his aides’ reluctance to give him news he doesn’t want to hear, and his own vast and sweeping ignorance.

From the moment COVID-19 started making news, Trump’s public statements have focused on the message that everything is fine. “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China,” told Sean Hannity on February 2. “But we can’t have thousands of people coming in who may have this problem, the coronavirus. So, we’re going to see what happens, but we did shut it down, yes.” Fast forward five weeks and around 580 cases in the United States and it’s clear that Trump did not “shut it down, yes.”

It's time to take back the Senate. Can you chip in $3 to help elect Democrats in key 2020 states?

Of course not every case of coronavirus in the U.S. is attributable to Trump’s failures. The disease was always going to spread—but there’s the big problem. It was always going to spread, and Trump was working against preparedness. Jeremy Konyndyk, former director of the USAID’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance under President Barack Obama—including during the Ebola outbreak—told Vox that once Trump has declared victory for his response to any crisis, “if in reality the response is anything less than a great success, it’s very, very hard for the government to acknowledge that and adjust accordingly.”

Specifically, “President Trump’s insistence that the strategy of keeping the disease out of the country was succeeding really handicapped the rest of the response. Here’s why: It makes it harder for the government to plan for the moment the strategy stops working. That’s critical in this kind of situation,” Konyndyk said. “The whole point of an overseas containment strategy is to buy you time. It delays the arrival of an outbreak in a country, but it cannot ultimately stop it. You’re not, or you shouldn’t be, hoping that that will be all that you need to do.”

The White House response to the outbreak has also suffered from typical Trumpian management, with muddled lines of authority over the response and lots of infighting. “The boss has made it clear, he likes to see his people fight, and he wants the news to be good,” an “adviser to a senior health official involved in the coronavirus response” told Politico. “This is the world he’s made.”

Trump’s message to the public also poses dangers, as when, talking to Hannity again, Trump downplayed the fatality rate from COVID-19, saying that “we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work, some of them go to work, but they get better[.]” Talking about people with coronavirus going to work? Not helpful in slowing the spread of the disease, even though it was not expressed as a direct suggestion.

Trump is able to botch this so thoroughly in part because he has no serious pushback from his own party. Senate Republicans are not sending him a strong message that he needs to respond quickly and effectively—instead, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell dragged his feet on adequate funding to fight the disease and used it as yet another excuse to attack Democrats. In early February, Sen. Tom Cotton spread a conspiracy theory when he suggested that COVID-19 could have come from a “superlaboratory.” And, of course, every Republican senator other than Mitt Romney owns every damn thing Trump does after voting to acquit him in his impeachment trial.

 

GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik Suffers ‘Vicious, Vile, Sick Attack’ In Grocery Store

Posted on by LifeZette

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who made a name for herself during the House impeachment trial by staunchly defending President Donald Trump, was just viciously harassed and attacked while shopping at a grocery store.

Stefanik, who represents New York’s 21st district, took to Twitter to post a photo of a hateful note that was left on her windshield by a liberal who had recognized her.

“Rot in hell FASCIST PIG,” the note read.

“My husband and I went grocery shopping this morning before district events and enjoyed chatting with constituents throughout the store,” Stefanik wrote. “This vile anonymous note was left on our car.”

MORE NEWS: Hillary Clinton pushes false story that Trump called coronavirus a ‘hoax’

Republicans have long been warning Democrats that encouraging their followers to target GOP officials in public is a very bad idea. Maxine Waters (D-CA) infamously told her supporters in July of 2018 to confront Trump supporters whenever they see them in public.

“Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up,” Waters said, according to The Blaze. “And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere. We’ve got to get the children connected to their parents.”

Stefanik has asked Tedra Cobb, her Democratic opponent, to condemn the attack against her.

“As an elected official, I understand that respectful & passionate policy disagreements are foundational to our democracy. But this note is just sad hatred,” Stefanik said. “We are praying for the author. This hateful rhetoric should be publicly condemned by my opponent immediately.”

Cobb, however, refused to condemn the attack, only describing the note as “damaging and wrong.”

“I think it’s time you joined me in pledging not to name call in this campaign. I’d love to work with you to set a better example for #NY21,” Cobb said.

MORE NEWS: Vintage magazine cover of go-go boot-clad Melania kissing firefighter has Internet aflame

Stefanik responded by pointing out that Cobb didn’t condemn the attack.

“One is a policy difference (you have voted numerous times to raise taxes) the other is a vicious, vile, sick attack,” she said. “They are not the same and voters know it.”

Democrats and the mainstream media have vilified conservatives to the point where crazed liberals think it is acceptable to attack them in any way they see fit. Attacks such as this one are only escalating, and if Democrats don’t start condemning them soon, something really bad is likely going to happen to a Republican.

Please keep all Republican lawmakers in your thoughts and prayers.

This piece originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

Read more at LifeZette:
GOP lawmakers say Obama DHS whistleblower Philip Haney was ‘murdered’
Why the Democrat machine is terrified of Tulsi Gabbard
New Coronavirus models predicts a minimum of 15 million dead, $2.4 trillion economic collapse

The post GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik Suffers ‘Vicious, Vile, Sick Attack’ In Grocery Store appeared first on The Political Insider.

Obamacare lawsuit? What Obamacare lawsuit? Senate Republicans play dumb

Posted on by Joan McCarter

It's a horrendous look for Republicans, in the middle of a potential national epidemic and global pandemic, that their party and their White House are going to tell the Supreme Court this fall that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional and should be destroyed. So it's no great surprise that Republican senators who have to face voters in November don't want to talk about it.

Asked by The Hill about their position on this lawsuit, they dodged and weaved. Freshman Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst is going to have a hard time making this answer work for the next eight months: "I'm not saying whether I support it or not. It's in the hands of the Supreme Court now, so we'll see," she said. Maybe she feels the need to tread lightly here—she does have a primary opponent. He's just "some dude," but apparently Ernst still isn't willing to go out on any kind of limb by saying she thinks affordable health care for people is good.

Please give $1 to our nominee fund to help Democrats end the Republican Senate majority.

Arizona's stand-in, Sen. Martha McSally, who is there by appointment filling the late John McCain's seat, is trying to use that hook from impeachment days—it's in the court now, it’s in a "judicial proceeding"—and she won't comment. As if the Supreme Court was hanging on the words of a fill-in senator it’s never heard of before to make its decision. That's about as pathetic a response as you can get. Even McSally's counterpart, the other just-filling-in-for-now senator, Kelly Loeffler from Georgia (who's only been there a couple of months), did better. Eventually. Stymied by the in-person question, she had her office follow up in an email. "Regardless of what the courts do or do not decide, there is no question Congress needs to address healthcare issues facing Americans," Loeffler's spokeswoman said, offering that the senator wants a bill that "lowers insurance costs" and "expands coverage options." Which the ACA does, of course, for most people. But she's new. How could she be expected to be prepared to speak intelligently about the one thing that has dominated electoral politics for 10 years?

Sen. Thom Tillis, a vulnerable Republican from North Carolina, also wouldn't defend the lawsuit or even give his position on it. "What I'm more focused on is how we get back to a rational discussion about protecting pre-existing conditions, the kinds of things that are potentially at risk that for the life of me I can't understand why anyone would be opposed to, providing some certainty by just voting those provisions into law independent of the lawsuit." None of us can understand why anyone would be opposed to protections for people with pre-existing conditions, so this legal challenge is kind of a mystery. Except for the part where Republican attorneys general and governors and the Republican president are saying they should be struck down by the court. That's something Tillis should have to answer for.

Steve Daines of Montana was nearly as bad as McSally. He just brushed the question off, saying, "We're going to be talking about a lot between now and next year." Which means nothing, considering they've been talking a lot about it for 10 years and have managed to do absolutely nothing. Well, not nothing, actually. Republicans held literally dozens of repeal votes in the House and also brought three lawsuits trying to destroy the law. Spoiler alert: They will not have a plan in 2021 if the Supreme Court invalidates the law. Perhaps the most pathetic of the lot is Colorado's Cory Gardner, who seems resigned to his losing fate and didn't even bother to respond to the question.

On the issue that flipped the House in 2018, and that is at the top of voters' minds in 2020, Senate Republicans still don't have any answers. But they've got several months to come up with something to say before the Supreme Court and the case are back in the news with the arguments in the case. Judging by past performance, they'll have nothing.

Mitt Romney Indicates He’ll Vote With Dems to Protect Hunter Biden From Subpoena

Posted on by Rusty Weiss

The Washington Post reports that Senator Mitt Romney is poised to join Democrats and vote to squash a subpoena related to Hunter Biden’s work with the Ukrainian energy company, Burisma Holdings.

Biden has been accused of leveraging his father Joe Biden’s status as vice president to get a role on the board of Burisma, while the company used that relationship to garner access to the State Department.

The Senate Homeland Security Committee has scheduled a vote next week to issue a subpoena related to the matter. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) told Fox News that “Joe Biden has never adequately answered these questions,” explaining Republican motivation behind the investigation.

Biden forced out a Ukrainian prosecutor who had been investigating Burisma

“I’ve said repeatedly, if there’s wrongdoing the American people need to understand that. If there is no wrongdoing, or if it’s not significant, the American people need to understand that,” Johnson added.

Enter Mitt Romney to save another corrupt (allegedly) Democrat …

RELATED: GOP Senator Preparing To Issue First Subpoena In Biden, Burisma Investigation

Romney Indicates He’ll Side With Dems

Romney told the Post that the Republican pursuit of Biden – the lead candidate for the Democrat nomination to the presidency – and his son’s dealings with Burisma, seem political in nature.

“I would prefer that investigations are done by an independent, non-political body,” he claimed. “There’s no question the appearance is not good.”

Romney went on to tell reporters that the investigation “appears political.”

“I think people are tired of these kinds of political investigations.”

In other words, the mighty and righteous Romney is willing to take a stand against pursuits he feels are politically motivated. You know, except for that whole partisan impeachment hack job with which he also chose to team with Democrats.

If party lines hold, Romney’s vote with Democrats would create a 7-7 tie in committee, preventing the subpoena from being issued.

RELATED: Actor James Woods is Back on Twitter, Immediately Wrecks AOC, Hillary, and Mitt Romney

Romney’s Disgrace

Is it any wonder the Utah senator lost an easily winnable election against Barack Obama in 2012? In hindsight, how could Obama have possibly failed when he was essentially running against his clone?

Romney, as you well know, was the only Republican to betray the nation and vote with Democrats in their clearly politically motivated impeachment scam.

“The President is guilty of an appalling abuse of public trust,” Romney melodramatically claimed at the time, despite his Democrat colleagues in the House failing to prove Trump was guilty of anything.

Funny though, when it benefitted his career, the one-time actual Republican was more than willing to accept Trump’s endorsement for President in 2012 and for Senate in 2018.

Now he goes well out of his way to stab him in the back.

Romney is a snake. The only difference being, snakes are adept at sneaking up on their prey. You can see Romney’s betrayals coming a mile away.

The post Mitt Romney Indicates He’ll Vote With Dems to Protect Hunter Biden From Subpoena appeared first on The Political Insider.

You want to make the Supreme Court a fight for 2020, Moscow Mitch? You got it

Posted on by Joan McCarter

Moscow Mitch McConnell is clutching his phony pearls, shocked, shocked that Sen. Chuck Schumer would dare politicize the Supreme Court. Yes. Mitch McConnell. The McConnell who stole a Supreme Court seat from President Barack Obama and called it, "One of my proudest moments." The same McConnell who refused to allow an FBI investigation into credible allegations of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court nominee who had perjured himself, repeatedly, before a Senate committee.

In case you missed the brouhaha, Schumer spoke at an abortion rights rally at the Supreme Court Wednesday following the arguments in the latest abortion case, one that threatens the court’s integrity if it reverses a decision made just four years ago that protects access to abortion.

Enough of this. Please give $1 to our nominee fund to help Democrats and end McConnell's career as Senate majority leader.

Schumer riffed off of the threat Brett Kavanaugh made to Democratic senators during his confirmation hearing. "You sowed the wind," Kavanaugh snarled at the senators, and "the country will reap the whirlwind." He accused Democrats of "a calculated and orchestrated political hit fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election," and even said that his hearing was "revenge on behalf of the Clintons," since he was on Kenneth Starr's team during the Clinton impeachment. So what Schumer said Wednesday echoed Kavanaugh's words back to him. "I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh," Schumer said, "You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions."

Was the last sentence impolitic? Sure. Schumer admitted as much. Was it threat to Gorsuch and Kavanaugh directly? No. Of course not. It was Schumer telling it like it is: These justices played politics and paid lip service to respecting precedent to get on the court, and they are political actors now. But cue McConnell and his plastic pearls. This was a "threat," McConnell said, a "Senate leader appearing to threaten or incite violence on the steps of the Supreme Court" and "astonishingly, astonishingly reckless and ... irresponsible."

Yeah, right. And what did McConnell say when the occupier of the Oval Office he is enabling attacked Judge Gonzalo Curiel for his Mexican heritage? Or Judge James Robart as a "so-called judge." Or Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who he says should recuse themselves from "anything having to do with Trump or Trump related."

Where was McConnell's concern for the independent judiciary then? Yeah, invisible. McConnell did not say one word in defense of those judges, in defense of an independent judiciary, because he doesn't believe in it. He is more than happy to turn as much of the federal judiciary into Trump courts—TRUMP courts—as he possibly can. It doesn't matter if the judges he installs are unqualified or incompetent or raging extremists and white supremacists. All the better, in fact, for McConnell's vision for our republic.

McConnell is playing with fire here. If this court, now with Neil Gorsuch—the guy he installed by stealing a seat from President Obama—and Brett Kavanaugh—the accused sexual assaulter and perjurer—decides to overturn four-year-old precedent on abortion? If that happens, McConnell's majority is done. Which, by the way, was what Schumer was talking about at the Supreme Court Wednesday. It's what he said on the Senate floor Thursday morning: "The fact that my Republican colleagues have worked, systematically, over the course of decades, to install the judicial infrastructure to take down Roe v. Wade—and do very real damage to the country and the American way of life—that is the issue that will remain."

McConnell wants this fight? He's got it.