Democrats share their fears about Mitch McConnell’s successor

Few people like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell less than Senator Elizabeth Warren. In 2017, during the confirmation vote for Donald Trump’s attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions, he led Republicans to silence her when she called out the then-Alabama Senator’s racism. McConnell infamously said, “She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” His push for unlimited money in politics has created the exact type of plutocratic system that Warren rails against.

Nonetheless, McConnell and Warren both ardently support funding Ukraine in its war against Russia. That is probably why she told me she worried about the hole that he will leave behind after he announced he would step aside as Senate minority leader.

“I am concerned that the next Republican leader in the Senate will just bend a knee of whatever Donald Trump wants, no matter how crazy it is,” she told The Independent.

McConnell has been the chief roadblock to much of what Democrats want. A master of Senate procedure, nobody used the filibuster to block Democratic priorities more effectively than McConnell. He notably refused to join Barack Obama and other congressional leaders to denounce Russian interference in the 2016 election. He blocked Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court on the basis of not wanting to confirm a justice in a presidential year and then, in 2020, broke his own rule to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Arguably McConnell is more responsible than Trump for the death of Roe v Wade due to his fundamental altering of the federal judiciary.

He prided himself on being the “Grim Reaper” of Democratic priorities, blocking everything from