John Yarmuth

Opinion contributor

Methinks Mitch doth protest too much. Apologies to Shakespeare, and I am not comparing Sen. McConnell to any Hamlet character, but his op-ed in the Courier Journal last week was clearly the product of a man on the defensive.

As he should be. The Senate Majority Leader, usually a critical player in resolving Congressional deadlocks, has been missing in action in the current government shutdown debate. More than that, he has essentially ceded legislative power to the president when he said that he would not allow a Senate vote on any bill he wasn’t sure the president would sign into law.

Our Kentucky senior senator is under fire from many directions, which rarely fazes him, but his op-ed was an unusually clumsy attempt to mislead, mischaracterize and deceive.

In typical fashion, Mitch tried to make the government shutdown, now a month old, into an issue of Democratic reluctance to fund border security. But in the same piece, he referenced prior Democratic support for border security investment. It’s obvious by now that Republicans in Washington think hypocrisy is more a strategy than a sin, but now they also apparently think Americans all have short-term memory loss.

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On the one hand, he argues that Congressional Democrats voted for $1.3 billion for border walls just over a year ago. He conveniently forgets that his Senate unanimously voted to fund the government just a month ago.

He argues that Democrats voted for 700 miles of barriers in 2006. Of course they did. The 700 miles that have been built made sense. In fact, most experts have concluded that the places where walls make sense now have the protection they need. What he fails to mention is that during the 13 years since that vote, much of which saw Republican control of the Congress, no more funding for new wall structures was appropriated because there wasn’t a compelling case for doing so.

McConnell also failed to mention that the Trump administration has yet to make a case for $5.7 billion to Congress, which, under the Constitution, must approve any federal spending. I don’t doubt that Congress has sometimes written a blank check to a president, but if the wall means so much to Trump, he should be able to convince us.

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And on that same score, Mitch tries to argue that $5.7 billion is an inconsequential sum of money, only one-thousandth of the total federal budget. We will remind him of that when his party objects, as they constantly have done, to important investments that are one ten-thousandth of the budget or less. Others have remarked on how many different ways that same $5.7 billion could be spent to positively impact millions of lives. I won’t do it here. Suffice it to say that $5.7 billion is a lot of money, certainly not an amount that should be minimized. It is, in fact, roughly half the annual budget of Kentucky state government.

Perhaps the silliest argument in Mitch’s column is that Democrats think border security is immoral. He is, of course, referencing Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s comment that a border wall is immoral. Obviously, an inanimate object cannot be moral or immoral. What Pelosi surely meant, and which most Democrats and many American citizens believe, is that the fallacious arguments used by the Trump administration to justify a wall, and the racism that underlies those arguments, are immoral. They should not be accepted; they should be repudiated.

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For the record, Congressional Democrats believe in effective and smart border security. That’s why Senate Democrats, and a couple dozen Republicans, voted for $46 billion in border security in 2013. That’s why Democrats offered a deal including $25 billion for border security just a year ago. Trump rejected that offer. And yes, that’s why Senate Democrats helped provide $1.3 billion last year, and money for 700 miles of barriers in 2006.

The bottom line is that Mitch McConnell is only interested in one wall, and that’s the one he’s trying to build to protect his Senate majority in 2020. Meanwhile, the human misery across the country builds, the southern border is more secure than it has been in decades, and the senator looks on.

U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth is a Kentucky Democrat.