Mitch McConnell is, by all accounts, a pleasant fellow. He is polite and has friends across the aisle, including President Joe Biden, with whom he gets along very well. It is said of him that he “loves” the Senate, even though he has spent a good portion of his career doing very serious damage to its credibility. When he leaves office at the end of this year, he will have been in the Senate for 40 years.

And yet, there are two things that I will never, ever forgive Mitch McConnell for.

1. Stealing two Seats for the Supreme Court

On March 16, 2016, President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States to succeed Antonin Scalia, who had died one month earlier. The nomination expired 310 days later after McConnell had failed to even give Garland as much as a hearing. His explanation was that it was “too close to the election,” even though it was still seven months and 23 days until the election; he claimed that the voters should “have a say” relative to the Supreme Court nomination.

Then, in an act of rank hypocrisy, he rushed through the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to fill in the vacancy left by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Trump nominated Barrett on September 26, 2020, at which point in time there was exactly one month and seven days until the election.

Seven months and 23 days vs one month and seven days.

The Republicans made some feeble arguments about the “Biden Rule” with respect to Garland’s nomination, and then completely abandoned those arguments with respect to Barrett. McConnell proved that the new rule was to promote or block a nomination because you can.

From here on ever more, the Republicans have permanently forfeited their right to object if the Democrats, when holding the power in the Senate, block or promote the nomination of a President based on the rank überhypocrisy of McConnell and the Republicans. 

2. Failing to convict Trump for the Insurrection

For all of those Republican politicians — and there are many — who did not want to donate the Republican party wholesale to Donald Trump, there was an easy way to get from here to there. All they had to do was vote in favor of a conviction in Trump’s second impeachment for the January 6th insurrection.

They were all there for the insurrection.

Many had their own lives threatened.

Both McConnell and former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had very short moments of sanity in the days following the insurrection where they saw the light, blamed Trump, and could have  rid themselves of his scourge forever.

And they didn’t do it.

These profiles in cowardice are, of course, all petrified of Trump now, and the legions he can summon against them. Multiple books have been written that have verified that many Republican members of Congress would love to move on from Trump, but are afraid of his voters.

Well, it was all there for the taking on February 13, 2021. If the majority of Republican Senators — with McConnell in the lead — had voted for conviction, that would have been that. Trump would have been barred from ever becoming President again, and his voters would have had to go somewhere else. Senators also have six year terms, and Trump partisans would not have been able, under the best of circumstances, to vote out any more than one or two Senators to replace them with more rabid partisans.

It would have been over.

God save the Queen. Or in this case, McConnell could have saved the Republic.

But he didn’t do it.

There are plenty of other lousy things that McConnell did, but these two, above all, will forever taint his legacy and the damage he did to the institution that he allegedly loved.

As the saying goes, with friends like that, who needs enemies?