Article about Mitch McConnell by Alexandra Chalupa, which I endorse as timely and appropriate

Bold Leadership Is Needed to Deal with the Most Dangerous Man in America: Mitch McConnell

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“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.”

?–?Oath of Office Required of U.S. Members of Congress

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More than forty years-ago, on August 3, 1981, months after his inauguration, President Ronald Reagan, the country’s first Commander-in-Chief to have served as a union leader, saved the United States from immense chaos and a potential national economic crisis with global reach.?A union representing federal air traffic controllers, including many veterans, that endorsed Reagan during the presidential election after he pledged in a letter to the union that he would improve its members’ wages and working conditions, spent seven months negotiating with the Federal Aviation Agency. Though both parties reached and signed an agreement for improved benefits, better working conditions, and a salary increase twice the amount any other federal workers received, and despite the union leaders’ assurances to members that the deal was fair, the union’s members voted to reject it and demanded seventeen times the amount the government had offered. When their demands, which one economic expert referred to as “suicidal,” were not met, the union declared a strike, “for as long as it takes” the union’s president promised. That summer morning, hours after the strike started, President Reagan took bold action.

Standing before the White House press corps in the Rose Garden, with his Attorney General and Secretary of Transportation by his side, President Reagan clearly explained the situation to Americans, reminded the federal traffic control workers that their walk-out was illegal (it violated the Taft-Hartley Act prohibiting federal workers from going on strike), and read them the oath they each pledged when they accepted their government positions, an oath that shared the same spirit as the one he took as President. He announced that the union members had 48 hours to comply with the law and return to work or they would be terminated. The Attorney General also threatened immediate criminal charges. Two days later, President Reagan followed through on his promise and fired the 11,359 workers who failed to comply with his order and banned them for life from serving in the government; some of the union’s leaders were prosecuted; the union was forced into bankruptcy and decertified.

While this event changed the course of history for how corporations treated workers and weakened unions representing private sector employees too, in the immediate, it protected the airline industry from collapsing, which would have caused the economy to spiral; an impact Osama bin Laden unsuccessfully tried to achieve two decades later with the attacks on 9/11, but U.S. officials prevented by creating the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund, which Brett Kavanaugh tried to weaken while serving as White House Counsel to President George W. Bush.

During his remarks, President Reagan said, “Government cannot close down the assembly line. It has to provide, without interruption, the protective services which are the government's reason for being.” Today, leaders of President Ronald Reagan’s Party are trying to close-down the assembly line and the consequences of their malicious actions will be far more devastating to national security, public safety, and the economy, negatively impacting all of America’s federal workers and every American family while threatening global turmoil, than the threat President Reagan was faced with during the air traffic controller’s strike four decades earlier. Today, the nation is spinning in a crisis as elected government officials refuse to honor their oath of office, threaten the Constitution and economy, and continue to aid and abet foreign and domestic enemies, using their power to cripple the federal government. It is time for President Biden to lead boldly and stop playing “pattycake politics” with traitors waging hybrid warfare on America and declare a national emergency. The nation is faced with a clear and present danger and the threat is from within, with all roads leading to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the most dangerous man in America.

Sen. McConnell has demonstrated he is willing to pull the United States down a path of devastation with global consequences. He has spent the past five years betraying the country and is currently committing economic terrorism by threatening to push the country off a fiscal cliff during a pandemic, endangering countless Americans and further damaging the nation’s standing on the world stage. Sen. McConnell leading the United States to default on its debt for the first time in American history should not be viewed as extreme bipartisan political theater, but rather, as treason.

It is beyond a reasonable doubt that McConnell has betrayed the nation, aiding, and abetting both foreign and domestic enemies, and using the power of a U.S. Senate seat and Minority Leadership position to wage deadly political warfare against Americans that now threatens to lead the country into a recession, if not a depression. He has left his dark mark on this nation on all three branches of government. This includes propping into power a Kremlin-backed U.S. president supported with Russian military intelligence operations; stacking the courts with a historic number of judicial appointments of far-right justices, many financed by dark-money, including Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and his two colleagues; and holding Congress politically hostage by weaponizing the debt-ceiling and filibuster against America’s wellbeing. His motives are always the same: power.

An enemy of democracy and grave danger to the United States Constitution and national security, McConnell first opened the floodgates of authoritarianism in America shortly after the 2008 election when he declared that his top priority as Senate Minority Leader was?not?to bring Senators together to work for the common good of the country, but instead, to block a U.S. President who was elected by a record-breaking amount of votes and a clear electoral college win, from executing an agenda the American people overwhelmingly voiced their support for through the democratic process; a presidential agenda that had at the top of its list ensuring that Americans had access to affordable quality health care. While he used his platform to block a sitting U.S. president from serving Americans’ interests. His obstructionism was normalized as “partisan politics as usual” in Washington rather than understood as totalitarian behavior that would lead to the decay of democracy with a potential catastrophic impact on the economy. While McConnell was busy trying to block a popular U.S. President from advancing an agenda in the interests of Americans, Donald J. Trump was busy undermining and trying to delegitimize the U.S. President by promoting a racist birther conspiracy.

McConnell planted the toxic seeds that helped sprout fascism in the form of Trumpism. His years of draconian obstruction poisoned America’s political system and created an environment of gridlock in Washington, hurt countless families, especially the most vulnerable, crippled America’s standing in the world, and evolved into something even more visibly lethal by the 2016 election when he, in violation of his oath to protect America’s Constitution and sovereignty, enabled and emboldened a hostile foreign power – the Russian Federation – in its hybrid warfare attack against the United States to install a mentally unstable Russian-mafia-linked criminal in the White House – Trump - who had been cultivated by the KGB and first started to publicly promote the Kremlin’s interests by the late 1980s. Despite warnings from top national security officials, McConnell refused to cooperate with the U.S. Intelligence Community to protect the nation, and the nation continues to pay the price today.

Under Sen. McConnell’s treasonous leadership, top ranking members of his Senate Caucus participated in Kremlin-sponsored disinformation operations through Trump’s presidential term, in some cases, working directly with Kremlin agents that have since been placed on U.S. sanctions lists, and against Americans on the frontlines protecting democracy, with countless attacks to undermine the 17 U.S. Intelligence agencies, while these agencies were working tirelessly to counter Russian hybrid warfare against the U.S. and allies and combating a rapid spike in white domestic terrorism fueled directly by the Kremlin-installed Commander-in-Chief himself.?McConnell and his top Kremlin-propaganda promoting comrades in the Senate, including Senators Chuck Grassley, Lindsey Graham, Ron Johnson, Rand Paul, John Kennedy, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio, among many others, and their allies in the House, used their platforms and positions of powers to obstruct the federal government’s multiple Russia investigations while gaslighting Americans in ongoing operations of deceit, and some even executed maliciously fraudulent investigations based on Kremlin disinformation, and launched disinformation missiles at a U.S. ally at war defending itself from Putin – Ukraine. As McConnell led a team batting for Moscow’s interests, he and some of his political allies were awarded with financial deals in their states by one of Putin’s most obedient Russian oligarchs – Oleg Deripaska, a longtime associate and financier of Paul Manafort (a business colleague of Trump’s and former top advisor of his presidential campaign), who federal investigators confirmed was directly connected to Russian active measurers in the 2016 election.

Both McConnell and Trump played a monumental role in putting America’s democracy on life support. In addition to blocking legislation to protect American elections, McConnell also blocked (twice) the Kremlin-installed Commander-in-Chief from being removed from office for serious crimes and visibly psychotic behavior that alarmed national security and mental health experts who sounded the alarm bells for years about the severe and imminent threat Trump posed to democracy and national security. He was directly responsible for emboldening Trump by ensuring that he served a full presidential term at any cost to the nation and despite obvious warnings he would grow increasingly dangerous with time. It was McConnell who demonstrated to Trump, during the first impeachment, that he could abuse power to hold onto power without paying any consequences. After, Trump a.) intentionally worsened a pandemic that continues to cost hundreds of thousands of American lives; b.) tried to overthrow an election to install himself as dictator, with a plan drafted by his lawyer and supported by a violent insurrection that he and his associates fueled while he prevented the U.S. Capitol from being protected from an attack; c.) threatened nuclear war to the point the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman had to intervene through proper channels of protocol to help prevent massive loss of life.

Like Trump, McConnell grows more dangerous with time. While he was aiding and abetting a criminal installed in the White House with the help of a Russian military intelligence operation, as the Oval Office occupant stirred division and civil unrest throughout the country and tried to bulldoze relationships with America’s closest allies, during the peak of the Russia investigation in December 2017, McConnell pushed through Trump’s more than 7 trillion dollars in tax cuts, gifts to the most politically influential and financially well-off in the nation – corporations and the wealthiest percentage of Americans. As the Director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities testified before the House Budget Committee in 2019, the “fundamentally flawed tax cut ignored the stagnation of working-class wages and exacerbated inequality; weakened revenues when the nation needed to raise more; and encouraged rampant tax avoidance and gaming that undermines the integrity of tax code.”[1]?It also significantly contributed to America’s current three trillion-dollar debt. The tax cut, which failed to pay for itself despite Republicans’ deceitful insistence it would, caused an immediate spike in the federal deficit, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) confirmed in 2020. Six months before the tax cut passed in Congress, the CBO had “anticipated a deficit of 3.6% of the Gross Domestic Product for 2020,’ but because of the tax giveaways, in 2020, “the deficit was 27.8% greater than the CBO projected,” Christian Weller wrote in Forbes.[2]?Now, McConnell, who significantly contributed to the nation’s debt, is steamrolling ahead to try to get the country to default, with total disregard for the consequence this will have on the nation and American families.

Author Joshua Zeitz wrote for POLITICO last week, “…The political theater currently playing itself out on Capitol Hill places in sharp relief a core truth: The perennial debate over whether Congress should pay for what Congress already spent has become a political charade – entirely divorced from the original intent of the debt ceiling. Conceived to help presidents meet the demands of national emergencies and to ensure that the government can pay bills that Congress has already racked up, the debt ceiling has become a blunt instrument in the hands of a radical and destructive minority.”

That “radical and destructive minority” led by McConnell, is one of the greatest threats the country currently faces. As he weaponizes the debt ceiling and the filibuster at the risk of bringing the country to its knees, the same way he and other foreign-backed bad actors in his party’s leadership spent the past half decade weaponizing and covering-up Putin’s hybrid warfare against the U.S. to obtain and hold onto power, the depths he will go should not be underestimated or brushed off as bluffing or political theatrics. After refusing to impeach Trump a second time, McConnell blocked a bipartisan January 6th?Congressional Commission to investigate one of the most horrific domestic terrorist attacks on the U.S., which targeted Congress and endangered the lives of elected officials, their staff, and law enforcement, and tried to destroy America’s democracy, an attack fueled by the former occupant of the White House and his loyal soldiers, including members of McConnell’s Senate caucus who spread Trump’s disinformation about the 2020 election that motivated insurrectionists to attack the U.S. Capitol. Now, McConnell is waging economic warfare against Americans that may significantly worsen the pandemic, beyond what some governors in his party are intentionally doing by undermining the federal government’s efforts to fight the virus, including trying to prevent mask mandates and sowing seeds of distrust in vaccines that have proven to save lives as hospitals throughout the country are overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, almost all are unvaccinated.

What Americans still fail to understand, including Democrats in the White House and Congress, is that Vladimir Putin’s goal in installing Trump president of the United States, which would not have been possible but for Mitch McConnell and Russian military intelligence hybrid warfare operations, was to destroy America from within and turn it into a Russian Federation mafia satellite state. Though Trump and his accomplices face a tsunami wave of legal troubles and future criminal indictments, and Putin continues to experience turmoil domestically, as the world observed last month during Russia’s fraudulent elections, when Putin’s party – United Russia, with less than a 30% approval rating – went to unprecedented extreme lengths to hold onto power, sparking protests by even Russia’s communist leaders, Putin has not given up on his mission of destruction and continues to have a loyal American general in Mitch McConnell who continues to threaten economic Armageddon.?

While President Biden called out Mitch McConnell for playing “Russian Roulette,” with the U.S. economy, what he and other Democrats need to understand is that McConnell is not only the one holding the gun and aiming it at the U.S. economy, but his gun is fully loaded. McConnell should not be allowed to be in a position of power to continue to carry-out the Kremlin’s political dirty work against the United States, he should be removed from office immediately and prosecuted for treason. Bringing traitors to justice is the necessary path forward to best protect America’s democracy, national security, and sovereignty, while preventing even more loss of life. We are not dealing with Republicans that Ronald Reagan would view as colleagues and friends, we are dealing with Republicans who Vladimir Putin views as allies furthering his agenda, as they have done for the past years. This is a national crisis, a five-alarm emergency, and requires a Commander-in-Chief who understands to act accordingly and exhibit the same boldness we saw from the White House forty years ago.

[1]?https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/fundamentally-flawed-2017-tax-law-largely-leaves-low-and-moderate-income

[2]?https://www.forbes.com/sites/christianweller/2020/01/29/trumps-wasteful-tax-cuts-lead-to-continued-trillion-dollar-deficits-in-expanding-economy/?sh=8d99f1766c43

Copied from message sent to me by Alexandra Chalupa

Andrew Beckwith