By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, July 30, 2019
There was a time when the Left considered McCarthyism the
worst of all political tactics. That was before it became useful to question
Mitch McConnell’s loyalty to his country.
The Senate majority leader’s offense is blocking
Democratic-sponsored election-security bills, which has occasioned the sort of
charges that Democrats have spent the better half of the past 50 years ruling
out of bounds.
The Washington Post headlined a column, “Mitch
McConnell is a Russian asset.” It wasn’t tongue-in-cheek. “Let’s,” urged Post
columnist Dana Milbank, “call this what it is: unpatriotic. The Kentucky
Republican is, arguably more than any other American, doing Russian President
Vladimir Putin’s bidding.”
Representative John Sarbanes, (D., Md.), said supporting
the bills was an opportunity for McConnell “to do the right thing in terms of
demonstrating his patriotism.” A CNN national-security analyst declared,
“I believe the only reason Mitch McConnell is doing this is that he believes
Donald Trump cannot win without the Russians’ help.” MSNBC host Joe
Scarborough dubbed McConnell “Moscow Mitch,” a moniker that trended on Twitter
and substituted alliteration for thought.
The occasion for the assault on McConnell was a naked and
cynical political setup. After Robert Mueller’s testimony, Democrats tried to
get so-called unanimous consent for election-security bills in the Senate. This
procedure is reserved for uncontroversial items that, as you might guess, have
unanimous support. While everyone in the Senate agrees we should combat Russian
interference, not everyone agrees on how to do it.
One of the Democratic bills would mandate the use of
paper ballots as a fail-safe against hacking. This may well be the best
practice, but running elections is the responsibility of states and localities,
not the federal government. As supporters of state prerogatives, Republicans
could be expected to oppose the bill, and sure enough, it got only one
Republican vote in the House.
Another bill would require campaigns to report offers of
foreign assistance, a superficially appealing idea. Yet, the more comprehensive
such a bill is, the more likely it is to sweep up minor and innocent
interactions that fall far short of the infamous Trump Tower meeting (that
itself came to nothing).
There’s no need to reach for extravagant explanations for
why McConnell would oppose these bills (He’s a tool of the Kremlin! He hopes
his Moscow minders will put Trump over the top in 2020!). The Kentucky senator
has an extensive record as an opponent of federal activism and of poorly
drafted campaign-reform bills.
What the case against McConnell comes down to is the
usual sophomoric Washington argument that if you don’t want to do this one
specific thing, you don’t want to do anything and have the worst possible
intentions.
McConnell supported the $380 million to aid in election
security funding that passed Congress. And he supported the bipartisan Senate
Intelligence Committee investigation into election interference that produced
an alarming public report last week.
McConnell’s critics rely heavily on the presumption that
if the Democratic bills don’t pass the Senate, nothing will be done to combat
Russian or other foreign interference. This, too, is false. The Department of
Homeland Security and other Trump-administration agencies have gotten high
marks for what they’ve done to bolster our defenses.
Russian interference is a legitimate cause of outrage.
The Left’s emotional investment in it, though, is clearly as much anti-Trump as
it is anti-Putin. There’s a good chance that the party’s newfound hawkishness
on Russia washes out as soon as Trump departs the national stage.
The one man we can expect to be consistent on the
question is, as it happens, Mitch McConnell. As he pointed out in a peppery
defense of his record on the Senate floor, he’s been a Russian hawk going back
to the Reagan administration, and has continued to call out Putin since 2016.
He doesn’t need lessons from anyone about how to be
cleareyed about Russia, let alone how to be patriotic.
No comments:
Post a Comment