9/6/19
The diversion of military funds to pay for President Trump’s border wall obsession — which is taking money away from more than 100 military projects around the country, just as a junkie’s habit might take money from the grocery kitty — provides an opening to reconsider the extraordinary depths to which Mitch McConnell has sunk to enable Trump’s corruption. The Senate majority leader has not only assisted and protected Trump in doing great damage to our democracy, for naked partisan purposes, though that’s a major stain. But McConnell also has in effect now prioritized the mission of enabling and defending Trump’s corruption over the interests of his own state and its constituents. One project that will lose funding as a result of Trump’s wall — which is now being paid for out of funds diverted as part of the national emergency that Trump declared on fabricated grounds — is on the Kentucky-Tennessee border. That project is a planned middle school at the Fort Campbell army base. The Pentagon has diverted $62.6 million in money slotted for construction of that school, as part of the $3.6 billion that has been shifted toward Trump’s wall. McConnell himself had previously boasted of funding he had secured for Fort Campbell families. Yet subsequently, McConnell voted to uphold Trump’s national emergency, which will now take funding away.
So how does a McConnell spokesman justify this? By saying: “We would not be in this situation if Democrats were serious about protecting our homeland and worked with us to provide the funding needed to secure our borders during the appropriations process.” That’s a stunning statement, once you unpack it. Democrats are to blame for the emergency taking funding away from people, because Trump responded to their refusal to fund his wall by going around Congress! To be as clear as possible, an elected member of that body is claiming other lawmakers in that body are at fault for Trump’s corrupt circumventing of them, because they represented their own constituents’ will, rather than give Trump what he demanded, to fund something Trump himself has privately admitted is all about giving his supporters something to chant about before reelection. Let’s not forget that this is the same Mitch McConnell who refused to show a united, public bipartisan front against Russian sabotage of our 2016 election, and has refused to allow multiple bills securing our next election against more Russian sabotage — which Trump has openly invited — from coming to the floor. Yet somehow, McConnell is blaming Democrats for this result, thus spinning away and continuing to enable Trump’s profoundly corrupt and destructive role in all of it.
