Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the human embodiment of a silent, funky-ass fart, thinks it’s pretty hilarious that the federal courts are being stacked with conservative judges and that he led the Senate in blocking President Obama from installing his own pick for the U.S. Supreme Court.
McConnell is so pleased with himself, he bragged about all of this during a television interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News Thursday night.
HuffPost reports that Hannity said to McConnell, “I was shocked that former President Obama left so many vacancies and didn’t try to fill those positions.”
McConnell gleefully informed Hannity that the reason those vacancies were left after Obama is that the GOP-controlled Senate blocked him from filling them.
“I’ll tell you why,” McConnell said. “I was in charge of what we did the last two years of the Obama administration.”
And then he laughed diabolically, sounding like the gaseous old poot he is.
Let’s not forget that McConnell refused to consider Obama’s SCOTUS pick Merrick Garland, claiming the so-called “Biden rule” meant withholding confirmation hearings until after presidential elections. But he told Hannity that he would “absolutely” give Trump’s appointee a hearing even as we head into the election season.
More from HuffPost:
McConnell not only blocked federal judges, he prevented Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland from even getting a hearing. In 2018, McConnell told Kentucky Today that the decision to block Garland’s appointment was “the most consequential decision I’ve made in my entire public career.”
This matters, because as a Vox report notes, in the three years since he took office, Trump has had nearly as big of an impact on the federal judiciary as Obama did during his entire eight years in office.
From Vox:
Trump hasn’t simply given lots of lifetime appointments to lots of lawyers. He’s filled the bench with some of the smartest, and some of the most ideologically reliable, men and women to be found in the conservative movement. Long after Trump leaves office, these judges will shape American law — pushing it further and further to the right even if the voters soundly reject Trumpism in 2020.
Vox posits that while Trump and Obama both installed two new justices each to the Supreme Court, Trump’s appointees have more impact because he “replaced the relatively moderate conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy with the hardline conservative Brett Kavanaugh (that was after appointing conservative Neil Gorsuch to fill Antonin Scalia’s vacant seat),” while Obama’s appointees—Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan—“largely maintained the balance of power on a conservative Court, while Trump has shoved that Court even further to the right.”
Additionally, Trump has appointed 48 judges to the federal appeals courts—again, in just three years—whereas, by the end of his presidency, Obama had appointed 55.
The deck is stacked, and this is intentional. The system is working exactly as planned, let Mitch McConnell the human sneaker fart tell it.
As Vox notes: “The judiciary is where policy is made in the United States. And that policy is likely to be made by Republican judges for the foreseeable future.”
Let that, as well as the rest of this spooky prediction from Vox sink in:
There are likely now five votes on the Supreme Court, for example, to effectively give the judiciary a veto power over all federal regulations. Similarly, the Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) signals that religious conservatives may now ask the judiciary for an exemption from any law — and courts are likely to become quite generous in passing out such exemptions in the coming years. Republicans spent most of 2017 trying and failing to repeal Obamacare — but that failure means little to a federal appeals court that is expected to strike down the Affordable Care Act any day now.
And that’s not all. In the coming months, the courts are poised to gut abortion rights, eviscerate gun control, and neuter landmark environmental laws. Federal judges have already stripped workers of their ability to assert many of their rights against their employers, and this process is likely to accelerate in the near future. Many of our voting rights lay in tatters, thanks to conservative judicial appointments, and this process is likely to accelerate as well.
All of this, coupled with the fact that the GOP-led Senate is unlikely to vote to remove Trump from office can only mean one thing.
The Hunger Games under Dictator Trump soon come, my friends.