Opinion: Mitch McConnell is going to turn me into a socialist

I’ve admired Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ focus on trying to level the economic playing field but have never considered voting for him — I thought him to be too radical. I’ve long gotten New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s blue collar appeal but have vehemently disagreed with her on policies, believing some of them would be taking us too far to the left. I’m among the small minority of Black voters who chose former President George W. Bush in 2000 and have voted for well-known Republicans such as South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

The push-and-pull, the constant re-centering of our politics, is what I’ve long believed was our strength, even when I did not get my way politically. I see no other way to hold fast to that truth without becoming as radical as McConnell and his cheerleaders have become.

It matters not that he robbed Obama of an opportunity to appoint a new justice — nearly nine months before the 2016 election — after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia and supposedly set a new standard of not allowing the Senate to fill an empty Supreme Court seat before an election. And there’s every reason to believe nearly every Republican senator will go along with McConnell’s plan, because all they care about is maintaining power no matter how much it tears the country asunder. Their willfulness simply can’t stand. (So far, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Maine Sen. Susan Collins are among the few Republican Senators firmly standing on principle, saying they won’t support a quick confirmation before the election.)

Pragmatism can’t balance their GOP extremism.

If they go through with this, I’m willing to sign up for whatever political extreme necessary to undo their damage. The thought of Democrats increasing the number of seats on the Supreme Court if they retake power once turned my stomach. Not anymore. That should be the first thing on their agenda if they maintain the House and retake the Senate and White House. You can’t defeat your enemies by becoming like the enemy, we’ve long been told. But it’s nonsensical to allow McConnell and those of like mind to pervert this democracy without a bare-knuckle fight, especially because we’ve already accepted too much.

We should have screamed when a Senate report confirmed that McConnell was one of the factors that stood in the way of the Obama administration’s desire to better alert the public to an attack on our elections by Russia. In the past, McConnell had denied that he stopped the Obama administration from speaking out about Russia’s meddling, and the report said that the Obama administration moved too slowly in responding to the threat of election meddling.

Every now and again I’d remind myself of the way things should be, the way they could be, the way the Al Gore campaign returned a stolen video of George W. Bush’s debate prep instead of using it against Bush in a race so tight any small advantage could have tipped the scales in his favor. Just recently, I spoke to one of my classes about it, about how the Gore camp called the FBI rather than accept that ill-gotten bounty. It was a prime example of good-faith democracy, the kind we say we want.

And yet, we’ve come to accept President Donald Trump used the power of his office to withhold military aid from Ukraine unless the Ukrainian president agreed to investigate Trump’s political rival Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, over unsubstantiated claims (Trump denies there was any quid pro quo).

It doesn’t seem to matter that with ample evidence, Trump was impeached by a Democratically-led House over the Ukraine scandal for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress and then McConnell quickly pledged to work in “total coordination” with the White House on impeachment — giving Trump and his actions a stamp of approval with an acquittal.

The extremism we see from the GOP today didn’t begin in the Trump era. We’ve also accepted a John Roberts-led Supreme Court coming up with what had been an…

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