Last week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked a series of proposals to improve election security because, the Kentucky Republican explained, they amounted to “partisan legislation” designed to benefit Democratic candidates.

The same day, the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee released a report noting that Russian hackers had cased election systems in every state and had the ability to alter voter information in one, Illinois — all largely unbeknownst to American officials. “The U.S. was unprepared at all levels of government for a concerted attack from a determined foreign adversary on our election infrastructure,” the committee’s Republican chairman, North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, said in a statement.

The day before, Rep. Will Hurd, a Texas Republican, asked former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, a Republican nominated to key posts by three Republican presidents and a Republican deputy attorney general, whether Russian interference in the 2016 election was an isolated incident. “It wasn’t a single attempt,” Mueller replied. “They’re doing it as we sit here. And they expect to do it during the next campaign.”

The threat to American elections, in other words, is far from a figment of the Democratic imagination.

Nor did the legislation at issue appear likely to confer partisan advantage under the guise of election security (like, say, a plethora of voter-identification measures pushed by GOP officials across the country). The most comprehensive election security bill stymied by McConnell — sponsored by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, and passed by the House with a single Republican vote last month — would provide $600 million to ensure voting machines include security features such as a verifiable paper trail and disconnection from the internet. Such precautions have been recommended by the Intelligence Committee and others.

Another blocked bill, by the Intelligence Committee’s ranking Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, would require campaigns to notify federal authorities of any contacts with foreign nationals attempting to influence an election — a step the president recently doubted he would take given a second opportunity. The majority leader also stopped a similar bill sponsored by Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., with a concurrent measure in the House carried by Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Dublin.

McConnell has also blocked bipartisan proposals to gird the Senate against foreign cyberattacks, provide federal expertise on voting equipment standards and require disclosure of foreign purchases of online political ads. Nor has he backed any major alternative to the election security proposals at hand.

The Republican leader’s all but open invitation to foreign attacks on the next presidential election comes as his chamber prepares to consider Trump’s nomination of Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, to succeed Dan Coats as director of national intelligence. A Republican former senator and ambassador to Germany, Coats has steadfastly insisted on the gravity of Russian election interference even as the president has doubted and downplayed the threat. Ratcliffe, by contrast, is best known as a fiercely partisan defender of Trump who has doubted the intelligence and law enforcement consensus that the Russians strove to bring about his election, making him a troubling choice to lead the nation’s intelligence agencies.

The inescapable implication of such maneuvers is that Trump and McConnell are not above any means of retaining power — even the assistance of the nation’s enemies.

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