'It shows you everything that is wrong with Sen. Mitch McConnell'

By BERRY CRAIG

AFT Local 1360

Trailing in the polls, Amy McGrath, Mitch McConnell's Democratic challenger, may have given herself a late boost by quickly jumping on the Senate majority leader for again elevating his party's wants above the country's needs. 

"While millions of Americans faced yet another dark night without pandemic relief, Mitch McConnell and Republican senators rammed through the lifetime appointment of a new Supreme Court justice," McGrath, the first woman Marine to fly in a jet in combat, said in a new fundraising email.

Polls aside, the Annapolis grad, who retired a lieutenant colonel, has been on a roll. She bested--or at least held her own--in her debate with McConnell. (She challenged him to three.) 

Now she's all over McConnell's the-public-be-damned, Barrett-or-bust play.

"It shows you everything that is wrong with Sen. Mitch McConnell, and Kentuckians really get this," she said in a CNN interview. "Here we have a man in the middle of a national crisis where we have a million Kentuckians that have filed for unemployment sometime in the last few months; we have 300,000 Kentuckians that don't have health care."

McConnell doesn't care, she added: "We have 40 percent of Kentucky renters facing eviction right now, and instead of working on...coronavirus aid that Kentucky needs, that our country needs, he's ramming through a Supreme Court nominee."

She pointed out that on Nov. 10, the high court will hear oral arguments in a Republican-backed lawsuit to end the Affordable Care Act. President Trump and McConnell, his chief enabler on Capitol Hill, want the ACA gone.

"That is absolutely not looking out for Kentuckians when you consider that 500,000 Kentuckians will be thrown off their health care if the Affordable Care Act goes away," McGrath also said on CNN.

McConnell and the Republicans bulldozed the Amy Coney Barrett nomination "fully conscious" that she'll "cast a vote to strike down the ACA completely," McGrath also said in the email. "That’s been their plan from the start."

Barrett, a far-right-wing ideologue, tilts the high court 6-3, conservative. 

In the long term, Trump, McConnell and the rest of the GOP also see Barrett as extra insurance on cases to overturn Roe v. Wade and roll back government regulations that safeguard consumers and the environment and promote job safety. They're also counting on her in cases that would erode union rights and minority voting rights.

Trump, McConnell and the Republicans cheered Janus v. AFSCME Council 31, which forced public employee unions into a "right to work" framework. The election of Joe Biden as president and a Democratic Senate flip wouldn't stop the high court from siding with a Mark Janus-like plaintiff or plaintiffs in a case to put all unions under RTW.

In the short term, Barrett is expected to join the five other conservative justices to keep the president in office if the election is close and disputed.  

McGrath claimed, "It’s not an exaggeration to say that Mitch’s own constituents will be hit the hardest thanks to his maneuvering in Washington. Our estimated job losses will be second highest in the nation—and the increase in the uninsured population the third highest.

"Thanks to Mitch’s abandonment, our state is already one of the sickest and poorest in the country. Now, thanks to his rush to win a partisan fight, it’s about to get even worse."