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The daily beast
Republican pensions are the price Mitch McConnell pays to sell his party to Donald Trump
It was already a difficult year for Mitch McConnell, having a public end-of-life crisis after being returned to minority status, and seeing his wife, the former transportation secretary, screened for using their official positions to help a company. seafarer his family owns. Then Roy Blunt went on and became the fifth GOP senator to retire. Blunt cited his 23 years on Capitol Hill for surprise retirement, not afraid of the former social media influencer who resides in Mar-a-Lago. Blunt, an affable insider married to an affable lobbyist for Kraft, had done what it took to avoid a Trump-inspired revenge primary: he voted not to impeach Trump (twice) and this week voted against the legislation signature of the new president which the former president still does not recognize that he lives in the White House. You must continue to pay. What you haven’t done for Trump lately can kill you. With Blunt’s retirement, the Democrats’ chances of increasing their slim Senate majority and depriving McConnell of regaining his have increased. It still won’t be easy. Missouri is Trump’s country, and Republicans won former Senator Claire McCaskill’s seat in 2018, electing promising man on the move Josh Hawley, who has become MAGA’s hard core to keep it. in 2024, after blaming him for Capitol RiotBlunt joined planet Earth curators Pat Toomey, Rob Portman, Richard Shelby and Richard Burr, who had a good chance of taking on a challenge from the sidelines, encouraged by The Sorest Loser, who might feel offended (two of the five voted for impeachment in January), or to find a new sycophant he prefers, or both. The party waits for the senses. Charles Grassley and Ron Johnson announce their intentions. If Ron “Anon,” who is not from our planet, leaves, imagine how bad those who will compete to replace him will be. Uncertainty isn’t enough to keep the moat away, but it helps. The more senators who retire, the more magic McConnell will have to master to win, and the more he will have to do to prevent the rise of mini-Marjorie Taylor Greenes. Whoever currently sits in the House has approved the proposal to fire Nancy Pelosi “with a bullet to the head.” McConnell had something to work with during the Obama years, like the threat of not being able to keep the doctor you loved and paying through the nose for the insult. Republicans will try, but making Biden dangerous – unlike his rescue German Shepherd, temporarily banned for biting security personnel – will be difficult. A radical socialist, he is not. McConnell has already lived through bad primaries when the judged, the true and the informed were challenged by the uninformed, the far-right clerics and the wacky just wacky. During the mid-term of 2010, McConnell got to sample his large office with a balcony large enough to host cigar parties during the days when then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was considered to be a walking dead man. That was until former Nevada State MP Sharron Angle issued a frivolous challenge to a formidable opponent, Sue Lowden, the party chair and former state official who held a steady lead. two digits. Angle was a Scientology sympathizer, if not a member, believed Sharia law was gaining the upper hand in Dearborn, Michigan, and was so scared of the press that she asked staff to say “It’s time to water the plants.” to signal that a journalist was approaching. But Angle won the primary. In the general, a group of Nevada Republicans backed Reid, and Angle sank like a stone, down 18 points at a time. Chief Reid would haunt McConnell until the Senate overturned in 2015 and he retired in 2017. McConnell’s worst nightmare of 2010 was Christine O’Donnell, who posted an ad stating that she didn’t was not a witch in a special election to replace then-vice president Biden. After defeating former nine-term GOP Governor and Congressman Mike Castle in the primary, who was favored to take over the Democrats’ seat, it turned out his resume was a fiction, but the privileges on his property for unpaid taxes were not. She couldn’t answer questions about the Constitution that an alert sixth grader might pull off. Even for a party of family values, its abstinence crusade was too much. She lost to Chris Coons by 17 points. O’Donnell was the eighth Tea Party-backed candidate to win a primary that year. Among them was Indiana Treasurer Richard Mourdock. He understood that it was time for Senator Richard Lugar to leave. Although nominated for a Nobel Prize, Lugar was a modest member of a bygone era, garnering 12,000 votes over 35 years leisurely, eating lunch on an apple and yogurt almost every day. Lugar gave Mourdock an opening when he took his frugality a bridge too far by selling his residence among the Hoosiers for a place across the Potomac in suburb of Virginia. Having your residence where you serve is allowed in Indiana, but Mourdock has pulled a lot of populist effort into painting Lugar as a native-born Washington elitist. Lugar’s reputation for bipartisanship was the last nail in the coffin. As a candidate, Mourdock was too right on issues like social security, but he defended his strict stance on abortion by claiming that a pregnancy resulting from rape is “something God willed” – a precursor of nutso candidate Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin, who cost Republicans a secure seat in Missouri in 2012 – that ended his hopes. Indiana sent Democrat Joe Donnelly to Washington. It’s surprising that Blunt , a moderate not practicing since Trump’s arrival, retires after having managed to avoid Trump’s wrath for four years. Officials at the NRSC, the campaign arm of the GOP’s Senate caucus, must tear themselves apart hair. How hard could it be for Blunt to leave his soul in the hock a few more years like the others and earn one for the team? For a moment after Trump’s acquittal, it seemed McConnell could get his soul back. his “no” on constitutional grounds, McConnell had a moment of conscience and held Trump morally responsible for what happened on January 6. But soon after, as Trump made it clear he would not be purged, McConnell admitted that if the person who instigated a mob to overthrow the government was to be the candidate in 2024, he would back him. His post-impeachment speech was another hollow gesture from a man who made a career in it, for McConnell it will be a sad day when he says goodbye to his Lt. Blunt and even sadder as he sees the office with the best view in Washington might go with him. McConnell came back up. He took out a second mortgage on his soul, for the next year and beyond. Maybe that’s why Blunt is retiring. Read more on The Daily Beast. Get our best stories delivered to your inbox every day. Register now! Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside delves deeper into the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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