Kentucky is known as a coal state. What has happened to coal under Donald Trump’s presidency is exactly what Hillary Clinton said would happen. Clinton was vilified for her statements on this, but her clear point if you listened to the full statement was that there was no saving or reviving the coal industry — the free market was killing it — and the important thing was to have a plan for what coal miners and others in the industry could transition to in order to not be left out in the coal. She had a plan. Donald Trump didn’t. He simply claimed that he would magically save the coal industry.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, US electricity from coal dropped from 26.9% of US electricity to 17.7% in the past two years. And that’s down from 33% in 2015. In other words, it has nearly halved in the past 5 years.
Change is something we have to accept in this world, and we should try to watch and prepare for that change in order to come out the other end better. However, some people try to claim we can’t change, we shouldn’t change, and change is horrible. Those people and the people who follow them get left behind. Unfortunately, some people in power go out and make such claims for their followers while gobbling up a trail of money for themselves at the same time.
#KYSen McConnell brags he enables KY to "punch above it's weight" with him as majority leader. pic.twitter.com/2ACx40SBXI
— Risky Liberal (@RiskyLiberal) October 12, 2020
Mitch McConnell has become one of the richest members of Congress over the decades that he has been sitting in DC. Meanwhile, Kentucky has ended up #44 in the country in health care, #48 in health care quality, #45 in fiscal stability, #44 in employment, #43 in higher education, and #38 in education. What has McConnell done for Kentucky? What has he done for the United States? He is specifically the one responsible for slowing the country’s economic recovery under Obama, because his admitted primary goal was to make Obama lose and look bad, not to help the American people. He has had a second economic relief package on his desk for months that he has decided to ignore, as he did to infrastructure bills, health care bills, and other important matters to the American people in the past few years. Despite ignoring nearly every other thing that came to his desk, he decided it was time to work when he got the opportunity to put an extremist judge on the Supreme Court in the final weeks before the election, even though he made a big fuss in 2016 that the Senate could not even listen to the arguments for Obama’s Supreme Court pick, Merrick Garland, 8 months before the election — because it was an election year. The hypocrisy burns about as badly as Kentucky has been burned by McConnell for years.
The COVID crisis in not funny, #MoscowMitch. Sitting on a 4-month-old COVID relief plan is not funny. Rushing thru a SCOTUS nominee to pack the court is not funny.
But, you know what is funny? Amy McGrath is kicking @senatemajldr out of his seat! #DitchMitch #VoteBlue https://t.co/BtN8aHYccz
— F. Andy Seidl (@faseidl) October 13, 2020
#KYSen Debate Fact Check: Despite McConnell's promises, Kentucky lost 89% of its jobs in coal between 1989 and 2020, a loss of more than 25,000 jobs.
— Team Amy McGrath (@TeamAmyMcGrath) October 12, 2020
Holy shit. Mitch just challenged Amy to talk about her plan to improve Eastern Kentucky, expecting her not to have one. Spoiler alert: She had a hell of plan providing clean energy, infrastructure, and broadband. #KYSen
— Luke Johnson #BLM (@TheLukeJohnson6) October 12, 2020
Who has McConnell helped in all these years as Kentuckians have gone without the same level of care and economic prosperity as the rest of the country, and as Americans as a whole have lost from McConnell’s extremely anti-democratic “do nothing” approach to government? Well, as the tweet and graphic below shows, McConnell has gotten bloody rich while serving the wishes of a few corporate masters — or the billionaires and multimillionaires that benefit from government corruption.
#MoscowMitch got his ass handed to him, not only by #AmyMcGrath but from himself.
Kentucky, wtf are you people thinking? You enjoy making him wealthier & wealthier while you suffer? One of the poorest states in the nation & bottom in education #DitchMitch pic.twitter.com/Ubpe28gk3Y— NoUnityWithoutAccountability (@Deadhead722) October 13, 2020
If there’s one politician who has enabled the tremendous corruption of the Donald Trump administration and his recklessness more than any other, it’s probably Mitch McConnell. If there is one politician who has killed clean energy progress across the United States more than any other, it might well be Mitch McConnell. He set the policy of absolutely no cooperation with Obama and Democrats, which meant almost nothing could be done legislatively for years, and then he helped orchestrate and enable the election of Donald Trump by blocking Obama’s rightful Supreme Court nomination only to completely reverse course on his supposed political ethics 4 years later.
Some politicians clearly stand for country over party, and some Senators clearly work hard to help the people of their state more than seek out personal fortune. I don’t think McConnell could end up on anyone’s list for either of those things. He has used his power from being in the Senate for decades to knock out a kneecap of American democracy while enriching himself.
Full disclosure: I donated to Amy McGrath’s Senate campaign, because I’d like to see a better America.
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