Mitch Mcconnell Supreme Court

Tommy the Hamburger is here again, and this is Historical Depravity, where we dig up the polished bones of history, crack them open, and show you the rot they tried to dress up as greatness. They called these people kings, visionaries, captains of industry, patriots, reformers, whatever flattering bullshit helped the blood dry faster. I'm here to show you what they actually were. Mitch McConnell gets defended by one of the nastiest little lies in American politics: the idea that if you can do something procedurally, then doing it carries no deeper moral stain. In the cleaned up version he is the master tactician, the disciplined institutional hardball player, the Senate operator who understood power better than sentimental fools did. In the softer version he is simply a partisan mirror image, no better and no worse than what the other side would have done given the chance. Both versions are crooked. The actual record shows a man who exploited constitutional ambiguity, Senate custom, media cowardice, and partisan loyalty to capture the federal judiciary for long term minority rule, then bragged about the theft like it was some noble act of statesmanship. That is the myth versus reality split. The myth says McConnell was just playing by the rules. The reality says he broke the governing logic that made those rules tolerable in the first place. The myth says he defended the people's voice in 2016 and respected precedent in 2020. The reality says he invented one rationale to block Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee and then scrapped it when the same rationale would have slowed Donald Trump's. The myth says this was all ordinary Senate combat. The reality says he helped convert the judiciary from an institution shaped through contested but recognizable process into a prize to be captured through open bad faith. The Merrick Garland blockade is the cleanest receipt. Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, with nearly a year left in Obama's term. Obama nominated Garland, a mainstream, institutionally legible choice, and McConnell refused even to allow hearings or a vote. The justification came packaged as democratic reverence: let the American people decide. It sounded high minded if you wanted to be conned. Fuck me sideways, that line was perfume on a robbery. But the meaning was plainer. A Democratic president, even a twice elected sitting one still fully empowered under the Constitution, would not be permitted to fill the seat because Republicans controlled the Senate and wanted to gamble on the election. That was the whole story. Everything else was perfume sprayed on a shakedown. What made it especially filthy was not just the obstruction itself but the attempt to dress it up as institutional principle. If McConnell had gone on television and said, "We have the votes and we want the seat," that would at least have been honest barbarism. Instead he framed raw power as civic virtue, which is what procedural cynics always do. They take a power play, wrap it in constitutional incense, and dare the public to call theft by its right name. Garland was not rejected after a hearing. He was not voted down on the merits. The process was frozen because the outcome might have inconvenienced Republican long term judicial plans. And then came 2020, which turned the earlier lie into open contempt. Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September, with the presidential election only weeks away and voting already underway in parts of the country. Suddenly the noble concern for voter voice vanished. Amy Coney Barrett was rushed through at speed. No hesitation. No patience. No reverence for letting the public choose the next direction. The rule was not a rule. It was an instrument. When it served Republican power, it was sacred. When it hindered Republican power, it evaporated. That is not hardball inside a shared constitutional order. That is proof that the order is being treated as stage scenery. This is one of the key mechanisms in the McConnell file: norm destruction through asymmetry. A norm only works when both sides understand that preserving the process has value even when it costs them. McConnell repeatedly demonstrated the opposite philosophy. If a norm advantages him, keep it. If it restrains him, kill it and invent a justification later. That method is corrosive because it teaches every political actor that only suckers respect unwritten rules. Once that lesson becomes common sense, institutional life gets hollowed from within. The forms remain. The trust that made the forms meaningful rots out. That would already be ugly enough if the prize had been symbolic. It wasn't symbolic. It was the Supreme Court and, more broadly, the federal bench. McConnell understood what a lot of lazy political observers kept underestimating: if you cannot reliably win majoritarian consent, you can still lock in power through judges. Judges serve long terms or life terms. They decide voting rules, reproductive rights, labor rights, environmental limits, administrative power, campaign finance, gun law, and the legal boundaries around nearly everything else. Capture enough courts and you do not need broad public legitimacy all the time. You can keep losing cultural ground and still win structurally. That is why his project belongs in this category rather than being filed under ordinary Washington cynicism. The consequences were concrete. The Court that emerged from this captured process helped overturn Roe v. Wade. It further weakened voting protections. It empowered reactionary readings of administrative and constitutional power. It shifted the country's legal terrain in ways that millions of people experience not as theory but as diminished rights, narrowed protections, and longer political odds. When defenders say McConnell was simply a clever parliamentarian, they are asking the public to ignore what his cleverness was for. And those consequences do not stay elegantly inside legal journals. They hit in clinic waiting rooms, polling lines, workplaces, union drives, poisoned water disputes, agency rulemaking fights, and every other place where ordinary people discover that judges can erase protections from a distance. That is why "court capture" is not some rarefied procedural complaint for civics nerds. It is a life shaping exercise in minority power. McConnell was not collecting judicial trophies for abstract sport. He was helping build a legal barricade against democratic demands that kept surviving elections. And the "both sides would do it" defense is as pathetic as it is common. Maybe some other bastard would have tried. That does not convert the act into virtue. Historical depravity is not erased by hypothetical symmetry. The record is the record. McConnell did it. He did it publicly. He took pride in it. He made no serious attempt to preserve even the appearance of consistent principle beyond what immediate expedience required. If a mugger says someone else might have taken your wallet too, you still call it theft. You do not praise his realism. The broader judicial project matters just as much as the headline Supreme Court seats. McConnell spent years slowing or blocking Democratic judicial appointments while fast tracking Republican ones when he had the power. He understood the bench as a generational weapon. That level of strategic clarity is exactly why some conservatives admire him so much. He was willing to subordinate almost every other dimension of public life to the long game of legal control. Legislation stalled? Fine. Public goods neglected? Fine. Federal legitimacy eroded? Fine. The courts were the target, and everything else could burn if needed. That is not legislative seriousness. It is siege politics in a tailored suit. His supporters love to call this brilliance. Maybe it is brilliant in the sense that a parasite can be highly adapted to its host. But brilliance in the service of democratic corrosion is not statesmanship. It is just more efficient sabotage. McConnell did not heal an institution. He trained millions of Americans to see that institutional rhetoric is often just cover for partisan extraction. That lesson did not start with him, but he helped carve it into the walls. Every time he invoked process selectively, every time he weaponized procedure while claiming to defend principle, he made cynicism look smarter than public trust. There is also a class element to the whole performance. McConnell's project fit perfectly with a broader conservative legal movement financed and cultivated by donors, ideological networks, and political operatives who understood that unpopular outcomes can still be imposed if enough of the legal machinery is captured. The judiciary became a place where money, movement conservatism, and anti majoritarian strategy met. McConnell functioned as their Senate instrument, the dry bureaucratic face of a much larger effort to entrench policy outcomes that do not reliably command democratic majorities. That is why the story cannot be reduced to one man's pettiness, though the pettiness was real enough. The victims are not abstract admirers of some old Senate civics textbook. They are women denied reproductive autonomy after Dobbs. They are voters whose protections against suppression grew weaker. They are workers and consumers who face a judiciary more hospitable to concentrated corporate power. They are communities harmed by a Court increasingly willing to narrow regulatory authority even in the face of environmental and public health crisis. They are also everyone forced to live in a political order where institutional bad faith has become an accepted route to massive durable advantage. And there is the false legacy, which is already working overtime. McConnell will be remembered by admirers as a strategic giant, a patient institutional operator who "won." That word, won, tells you everything filthy about the framework. Won what? Not better healthcare. Not a functioning legislature. Not a more trusted democratic system. Not a broader or fairer distribution of rights. He won a power struggle over the judiciary by proving that shamelessness, backed by party discipline, can outperform consistency in a decaying institution. That is not greatness. It is successful degradation. If you want the mechanism in one blunt sentence, here it is: McConnell took the Senate's constitutional role in judicial appointments and turned it into a one way ratchet for partisan court capture. That is why he belongs here. Not because he was the first politician to play procedural hardball, and not because every judicial controversy can be hung on one neck, but because he demonstrated with unusual clarity how democratic institutions can be emptied out while their language stays intact. The myth says Mitch McConnell was just a brilliant tactician doing what any smart leader would do. The truth says he helped steal the judiciary in broad daylight and called the theft institutionalism. Strip away the marble, the clerkly vocabulary, the solemn interviews, and the Senate mythology, and what remains is a man who looked at democratic norms, saw leverage, and chose to kill the norms for a generation of judges. That is the depravity on record. The myth is smaller now, the stink is stronger, and the body count is still the body count. See you in the next grave I have to dig up.