thepoliblog

Mitch McConnell’s Conflict of Interest

Mitch McConnell at the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. Photo by Gage Skidmore.

Mitch McConnell has a conflict of interest.

Elaine Chao, Trump’s Secretary of the Department of Transportation.

His wife, Elaine Chao, is Secretary of Transportation in President Chump’s Cabinet.  Hence she is a member of the Trump Regime.

This explains why McConnell suddenly stopped barking at Trump, and now wags his tail instead.

This is a clear conflict of interest: a member of Congress is the spouse of a member of the executive branch.  That undercuts the effectiveness of the Constitution’s deliberate separation of powers, which was intended to have each of the three branches of government prevent abuses and mistakes by the other two branches.

Instead of trying to temper the effects of his conflict of interest, McConnell has embraced them.

When Mitch McConnell refused to do his duty when Merrick Garland was nominated for the Supreme Court, he had abandoned most of his principles, but not all of them.

Now he has abandoned the rest.

Merrick Garland. This photograph was provided to the press by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2016 on the occasion of Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States by US President Barack Obama. At the time Garland was chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, having served as a federal judge on the court since 1997.