Mitch McConnell, holding a lit fuse and a match, says Democrats are making him blow up the Senate

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is trying to play his favorite game—Democrats made me do it—on the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. He's already decided he's going to end the use of the filibuster on nominees to the high court, and the Democrats will make him do it.

"If the shoe had been on the other foot, they wouldn't have filled a Republican president's vacancy," McConnell said during an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press," when asked if he had any regrets over the matter. […]

During a separate interview on "Fox News Sunday," McConnell would not say whether Republicans would unilaterally change the Senate rules via what is known as the "nuclear option" in order to confirm Gorsuch.

"Judge Gorsuch will be confirmed," he said. "The way in which that occurs is in the hands of the Democratic minority."

Make no mistake—if McConnell goes nuclear, it's because he's chosen to do so, continuing on a path that he forged both in the minority under President Obama, and then in the majority, when he led the total blockade of Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland. Adam Jentleson, a former deputy chief of staff to Senator Harry Reid, points out in a New York Times op-ed that McConnell's relentless opposition to everything Obama attempted to accomplish led to Reid's decision to end the filibuster on lower court nominees. "By the time Democrats exercised the nuclear option, Senator McConnell had unleashed nearly 500 filibusters and spent years twisting Republicans' arms to prevent them from working with Democrats, regardless of the substance of a given issue, in pursuit of his goal of denying President Obama a second term."

That included arm-twisting his fellow Republicans into refusing to work with Democrats on the Affordable Care Act because, he said in an interview "if the proponents of the bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this is O.K., they must have figured it out." Just because he had to deny Obama a victory, forget whether or not it was good for the country.

McConnell is the embodiment of the party before country philosophy that resulted in the Trump presidency. He's the one who will be responsible for allowing a dangerous ideologue nominated by a president who might have committed treason have a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court. And he's the one holding the sledgehammer to destroy what's left of the Senate as an institution.

Ready to take action? Click here to call your Democratic senator(s) and tell them to filibuster Neil Gorsuch's confirmation if they're on the undecided list.

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