Hanging his head, but not in shame.

While impeachment understandably is getting most of the attention now, in our messaging to the nation Democrats should keep reminding the public that the attack on the Constitution did not begin when Divine Right Donald stepped into the Oval Office and plunked himself down in the big chair behind the big desk nearly three years ago. Nor did the effort to stomp most Democrat-introduced legislation begin on that dreadful day.

Donald Trump was still a joke candidate when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decided to undermine the Constitution by refusing even to hold a hearing on President Barack Obama’s moderate choice of Merrick Garland to replace the late Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. And the presidency wasn’t even a gleam in Trump’s eye when McConnell, in 2009, before Obama was even sworn in, vowed to follow Rush Limbaugh’s implicit advice and try to force the new president to fail by blocking everything he tried to do. First up was stopping any legislation to soften the impacts and shorten the duration of the economic crash that had sent the economy into the most devastating economic downturn since the 1930s. Less than a handful of renegade Republicans was the only reason that recession-ameliorating legislation managed to clear the Senate. The blockade got worse when Republicans regained congressional control after the 2010 election.

So what we have going on now, legislatively speaking, is not an aberration from the recent GOP norm, but rather an extremist extension of it. Republicans have concocted a message of their own that they repeat endlessly: Do-nothing congressional Democrats have failed to work across the aisle or to generate any useful legislation since Trump arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

This flat-out fabrication is no surprise coming from the man of 15,000 lies or the likes of the Republican toadies on the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees who claim the impeachment inquiry is a hoax because Democrats failed to seek the testimony of witnesses with firsthand knowledge of Trump’s devious stratagem in Ukraine. This assertion totally ignores Ambassador Gordon Sondland’s and Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch’s testimony and the subpoenas the White House got more than a dozen witnesses to defy. Just as they ignore McConnell’s defiantly throwing up obstacles to all but the most innocuous legislation.

But, as disinformation specialists know so well, repeat a lie often enough and a certain portion of the populace will believe it’s true. You can fool some of the people all of the time, and that obviously can be enough to achieve whatever scheme you have in mind. Saying Democrats have not done anything can act like an ad jingle, permanently engraving BS on the brain of fooled people.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a few other Democrats have taken public note of the Republican blockade:

x Hats off to @HouseDemWomen and the @HouseDPCC for marching over to the Senate today to demand Leader McConnell finally act on the more than 275 pieces of House-passed, bipartisan legislation collecting dust on his desk. Americans elected us to lead Ã¢ÂÂ not sit on our hands. pic.twitter.com/w1fIeIapJI — Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) December 11, 2019 x 2019 is coming to a close.



Here's just some of the legislation @senatemajldr and the @GOP have BLOCKED this year...



-Gun safety

-Voting rights

-Election security

-Clean energy investments

-$15 Minimum Wage

-The Violence Against Women Act

-LGBTQ protections



...the list goes on. — Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) December 15, 2019

The numbers originally came from the House Democratic Party Communications Committee in this Nov. 22 press release. Below is a linked list of bills the House had passed as of Dec. 5, 283 of which Democrats call “bipartisan.” To get that label, a bill only requires a single vote from across the aisle, and a few of these bills only received one. But some received overwhelming Republican support in the House. This makes no difference to McConnell.