Prevent Abuse by the Senate Majority Leader

September 27, 2019 at 8:13 pm | Posted in Abuse of Office, Conceited, Dysfunctional Politics, Enemies of Freedom, Fairness | Leave a comment
Tags: Constitution, Mitch McConnell, Senate

Mitch McConnell at the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. Photo by Gage Skidmore.  (For more imformation see Post 141 in theploblog’s index of posts.)

 

Mitch McConnell abuses his position as the Majority Leader of the Senate.

Mitch McConnell has declared himself to be the Senate’s Grim Reaper, a position not forseen in the Constitution.

He has declared that the Senate shall not even consider any bill that the President wouldn’t sign, thereby rendering empty the Constitution’s provision for Congress to overturn a Presidential veto – a central ingredient of the Constitution’s mandating of checks and balances, including Comgressional oversight of the Executive.

McConnell has unilaterally declared that no nomination by a President will be considered during that President’s last year, if that President was from the opposing party. He sneered that no such restriction would apply to a similar nomination by a President belonging to McConnell’s own party.

McConnell has obstructed efforts to protect the integrity of American elections.

McConnell has obstructed efforts to prevent sensible limitations on access to weapons that enable mass killings, despite the large majority of Americans that now favor such limitations.

The Senate Majority leader has too much power.

The writers of the Constitution never foresaw the possibility of this type of abuse of power by a Senator, and certainly wouldn’t have wanted it to occur.

Either the rules of the Senate must be changed to prevent this sort of abuse, or the Constitution must be amended to do so.

The rule should be that within 10 days of receiving a bill passed by the House or a nomination from the President, the whole availible body of the Senate shall vote on whether to have debates and a vote to approve or to disapprove the bill from the House, or the nomination by the President. This first vote does not require the Senators to have studied the prospective bill or candidate: they need only to have a rough sense of what the bill is about, or a rough sense of the nominee’s background. If at least 40% of the Senate votes to debate and then vote upon the House bill or on the Presidential nomination, the debate and the legally-binding vote shall occur in a timely fashion. Those who voted for the debate and the binding vote shall schedule the date for the binding vote, allowing adequate time for Senators to scrutinize the bill or to interview the candidate. The Majority Leader of the Senate shall have no special role in setting that date, and may participate in setting that date only if having voted for the debate and binding vote to occur.

Most of the procedures in a legislative body should be independent of which party currently dominates the membership of that body. Of course the outcomes of many of votes will be determined by the majority. But not all outcomes will ne determined that way: legislators have the right to not always vote the party line. McConnell’s rule takes away some of that freedom of conscience, and assumes that all voting will be by unchanging blocks.

Mitch McConnell has chosen to become one of the major villains in American history.