Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is pounding his finger on the panic button. And it's exactly what he deserves.

As Politico detailed Tuesday, a super PAC with ties to McConnell is plowing some $25 million into Senate races across the country in an effort to prevent the upper chamber from falling to the Democrats. And it looks like that investment is necessary: According to the analysts at the Cook Political Report, Democrats are poised to pick up five to seven seats on Election Day, more than enough to flip the Senate into their control. The number-crunchers at FiveThirtyEight give Democrats a two-in-three chance of holding the Senate come January.

The down-ballot effect of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, which for a while appeared close to nonexistent, now threatens to wash away Republicans in New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and even Missouri. Republicans have taken to explicitly running as a check on a future President Hillary Clinton, so bad are their numbers. And both President Barack Obama and Clinton have taken to tying GOP senators much more tightly to Trump, hoping to bring a congressional wave in after them. It must be giving McConnell a bit of heartburn.

But to be clear, McConnell fully earned every bit of any angst he's feeling. While much of the palace intrigue regarding Trump's effect on Republican officeholders has focused on Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and his weak, wishy-washy, denounce-but-never-renounce approach to the charlatan running at the top of his party's ticket, McConnell too hid his head in the sand as Trump trampled democratic norms and slimed just about everyone, from most minorities to his fellow Republicans.

In his home state of Kentucky this month, as the Associated Press explained, McConnell has avoided talking about Trump at all. When asked about Trump's evidence-free contention that the election will be "rigged" against him, "McConnell laughed and walked away." His party's nominee dealt a knock to the democratic project itself, and McConnell tried to act like it didn't happen.

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Even when he has issued comments on the least savory of Trump's many unsavory remarks, McConnell did so in a way that left little question he still thought Trump belongs in the White House. A profile in courage, McConnell has not been. So he isn't deserving of any sympathy if indeed his majority slips away at Trump's tiny hands.

There's something perhaps fitting in this situation, because while it's Trump who has made the railroading of governing norms explicit during his campaign, McConnell has implicitly been doing so for years. It was McConnell, after all, who employed an unprecedented use of the filibuster to bugger up the opposing party while he was in the minority. What was once a power reserved for the most extraordinary of circumstances became the usual way of doing business, so abused that 60 votes was normalized as the threshold for moving anything through the Senate, despite the filibuster being an accident of history. McConnell nearly single-handedly made the radical obstruction of government routine.

McConnell also fully embraced the weaponization of the debt ceiling, a once unthinkable idea with the potential to morph into a wholly self-inflicted crisis due to one party's fit of pique. And he spouted some historical nonsense to justify leaving a Supreme Court seat open for months just because he could.

If American governmental dysfunction had a poster boy, in fact, you could do much worse than Mitch McConnell.

To be sure, McConnell isn't solely to blame for Washington gridlock or the fact that his party nominated an unqualified con-man for the presidency. But he sure has some share of it. He encouraged a quiet breakdown in governance and embraced strategies that empowered the fringes of his party. When Republicans inevitably couldn't fulfill the pie-in-the-sky promises they'd made to their constituents, a backlash ignited, prompting some voters to desire burning the whole thing down.