As the US government shutdown drags on and nears its fourth week, there are few left in America who don’t attribute the blame for it to Donald Trump. But as much as we here at DC Tribune would like to blame him ourselves as well, there’s really another guy that people should be looking at: Mitch McConnell.
For days now, various members of Congress have insisted that there are enough votes in both chambers of the deliberative body to create a veto-proof bill that would reopen the government and start getting our workers paid — including members of the National Guard, who missed a paycheck for the first time in 116 years.
But in order to pass any such bill, the Senate Majority Leader would have to allow it to the floor of the Senate for a vote, and Mitch has so far refused. He claims the votes aren’t there, but he’s spent so little time talking to either his caucus or to other members of Congress that it’s hard to tell how he thinks he knows there aren’t enough votes.
Four brand new Congresswomen set out yesterday to find out.
Reps. Jahana Hayes of Connecticut, Lauren Underwood of Illinois and Katie Hill of California joined the woman that conservatives can’t stop obsessing over, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, in an effort to track down Mitch and ask why he won’t let the Senate hold a vote that would end the shutdown once and for all. The House has passed multiple bills that could be taken up by the Senate, but it’s up to the Majority Leader to hold the vote.
What they found instead was that for a 76-year-old man, McConnell is pretty good at playing hide and seek.
The four visited McConnell’s office, the Senate floor, the Senate cloakroom, and even took the subway to another office building in search of the Kentucky Republican, but he was nowhere to be found. Ocasio-Cortez was on fire:
Eight-hundred thousand people don’t have their paychecks. So where’s Mitch?”
That’s an excellent question.
Featured image via screen capture
