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mitch mcconnell

Heroes

Mitch McConnell mocked Jon Stewart's work on behalf of 9/11 victims. Big mistake.

Mitch slapped.

Jon Stewart Won't Let Mitch McConnell Off That Easywww.youtube.com

Jon Stewart's work on behalf of the 9/11 Victims Fund has truly elevated him to hero status. His tireless efforts to raise awareness and restore funds to survivors and the families of victims have earned him much-deserved praise and literally helped push funding through a House committee last week.

But it shouldn't have to be like this.

There is room for almost any kind of political debate within the storied halls of Congress but providing basic healthcare for survivors of the worst terrorist attack on American soil in history should not be a place of neglect, or a talking point for one political party.

And yet, here we are.

Despite moving out of the House committee, the funding bill faces an uncertain future when it makes its way to the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate, after expected passaged by the full House.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been non-committal in terms of when or even if the funding measure will get a full vote in the Senate and whether or not he will direct Republicans to support what should be just about the least controversial bill to come before lawmakers.

Yet, during an appearance on the Fox News Channel, McConnell was dismissive of Stewart's impassioned efforts, calling the former "Daily Show" host "bent out of shape" and insisting the Senate was too busy to rush its attention on the bill: "Many things in Congress have [come] at the last minute," McConnell said. "We have never failed to address this issue, and we will address it again."

His statements were not only insensitive but ironic after McConnell drew much ridicule in recently after tweeting support for the idea that the Senate shouldn't move forward with any meaningful legislation until Democrats submit to President Trump's legislative priorities, i.e. funding for a border wall with Mexico.

Well, McConnell should have known that Stewart wasn't going to take this lying down.

Instead, he stopped by to visit his old pal Stephen Colbert and delivered an epic 6-minute monologue on McConnell's comments. Some highlights below:

Keep going Jon Stewart. It's a shame you're having to do the work our elected representatives are being paid to do. But until they do their jobs, please keep doing yours. America needs you, the 9/11 Victims Fund needs you, and we could all use a little more of the common sense decency you're casting an illuminating light upon.

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Reminder: McConnell overcame polio as a kid with big help from the government.

Long before Mitch McConnell was attempting to dismantle the Affordable Care Act as majority leader of the U.S. Senate, he was fighting for his health as a small child growing up in Alabama — with help from the federal government and private donations.

When he was just 2 years old, McConnell was diagnosed with polio, Death and Taxes reported. As McConnell explained to his Senate colleagues in 2005, his mother had been "perplexed about what to do"; his father was serving overseas in World War II at the time, and — as these were the days before Medicaid or Medicare — health care options were limited. McConnell's mother worried her son might become disabled.

McConnell was fortunate to live a short drive away from Warm Springs, Georgia, where a polio rehab center had been established by President Roosevelt.

It was funded, in large part, through public efforts.

A child in bed recovering from polio in 1950. Photo by Douglas Grundy/Three Lions/Getty Images.

In the mid-1930s, roughly a decade before McConnell started receiving treatments at the center, Roosevelt's March of Dimes fundraising strategy for the center grew into a remarkable success. The president had asked Americans to send dimes to the White House in support of children living with polio, and within just one month, $268,000 (about $4.6 million today) had been raised. Kids like McConnell benefited greatly.

“We had left Warm Springs for the last time, and the physical therapist there had told my mother, 'Your son can walk now,'" an emotional McConnell told the Senate in 2005. "'We think he’s going to have a normal childhood and a normal life.'"

McConnell's health scare from seven decades ago —concerning a disease that's now eradicated in the U.S., no less — is incredibly relevant today.

Children who are in similar circumstances as McConnell once was — kids living with costly, threatening health ailments, whose family situations complicate their access to care — could be harmed greatly should the Republican leader's attempts to overturn the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) be successful.

Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.

GOP senators are hovering around the 50-vote threshold to pass an alarmingly heartless bill that would strip Medicaid funding by billions of dollars — a move that'd disproportionately hurt the poor, the elderly, and the disabled. The overhaul would also allow states to drop certain benefits, like maternity care and mental health services, set in place by the Affordable Care Act.

Should the bill become law, wealthy Americans and drug companies — on the receiving end of massive tax breaks — would benefit greatly.

Anxieties over the bill's passage prompted dozens of demonstrators — many of whom were disabled and use wheelchairs — to protest the deep spending cuts outside McConnell's office on June 22.

In total, 43 were arrested. Many were forcibly removed.

"People with disabilities depend on Medicaid for our lives and for our liberty," Stephanie Woodward, one demonstrator who was arrested, explained in an interview.

A video of her chanting, "no cuts to Medicaid," as Capitol police carried her away from the senator's office quickly went viral in the protest's aftermath.

A lot has changed since McConnell's brush with polio in the 1940s, but the importance of valuing basic compassion in our health care system hasn't.

If anyone's experiences underline that, it's Senator McConnell's. Let him and every legislator know how you feel when it comes to access to health care.

Call your senator to tell them you don't support the GOP's efforts to overhaul the Affordable Care Act.

Please note: Upworthy has reached out to Sen. McConnell for comment. This article may be updated.

This article was updated 6/26/2017 to clarify the difference between public funding and private donations.

"I feel like people feel like everything has to be this huge thing. This was not a lot of work," says Molly Shah, a stay-at-home mom who helped convince a few dozen of her neighbors to protest outside Mitch McConnell's house in Louisville, Kentucky, last Friday.

The Louisvillians swarmed the Senate majority leader's residence on Feb. 10 to read Coretta Scott King's letter opposing Jeff Sessions' 1986 federal judgeship nomination — the one Sen. Elizabeth Warren was blocked from reading on the Senate floor.

Photo by Molly Shah/Facebook, used with permission.

Putting it together was no big deal, really. According to one organizer, turning out the crowd was a matter of a few Facebook posts.

The protest made headlines across the country.

Good old-fashioned, in-person activism is having a moment in the wake of Donald Trump's ascension to the White House.

Much of that activism has been driven by groups affiliated with the Indivisible Movement but also by established groups that are seeing a surge of interest and participation.

The protest in Louisville was organized by Parents for Social Justice, which Shah and others founded two years ago to help fellow parents with busy schedules stay active in politics.

Protestors gather in front of McConnell's home. Photo by Jim Gardner, used with permission.

"Our voice isn’t always at the table because we have trouble getting there," Shah explains. Since the election, however, she's seen an increased desire to do something from friends and fellow parents, many of whom were novice activists and saw the McConnell protest, which was planned just two days ahead of time, as an "easy way in."

"Refusal to engage with constituents ticks me off," explains Jim Gardner.

Gardner, a tech industry consultant, went to McConnell's house to protest what he sees as the majority leader's "poor constituent services" — refusing to answer calls and respond to criticism.

"If he'd do his job, I would never demonstrate at a private residence," Gardner says. "But, the senator left us no choice."

Around 300-400 people attended the event, according to several participants.

The protestors took turns reading sections of King's letter, and the event lasted about an hour.

A protestor reads King's letter as a fellow attendee shines a light. Photo by Jim Gardner, used with permission.

"It’s like our own little Arab Spring going on here," said Lynda Clark, a Louisville accountant, who found out about the event through Facebook. She praised the police officers, who cooperated with protestors, and defended the group against accusations leveled in conservative media that the crowd was a "mob."

"The funniest part about it was, for a while you couldn’t hear because there was a bunch of little kids that I assume were with their parents who were rolling down a hill and laughing and giggling," Clark says.

That McConnell happened to be in town for the protest was a happy accident according to Shah, who hopes the Senate majority leader realizes that "Kentuckians are done" with being ignored.

"We’re going to speak out, and we’re going to be there. We’re going to show up to everything," Shah says. Next on her radar is Kentucky's HB14, a "Blue Lives Matter" bill that defines offenses committed against law enforcement — potentially including resisting arrest — as a hate crime.

Photo by Jim Gardner, used with permission.

In the meantime, she hopes to see more small actions like the McConnell protest, which are symbolic, simple, and — perhaps most importantly — fun.

"They don’t have to be big. They don’t have to be epic. You can just keep moving forward. Just keep doing something."

Correction 2/15/2017: An earlier version of this article said that organizer Molly Shah estimated the protest was attended by 100 people. She and other participants actually estimated 300-400 people attended the event.

On Feb. 9, 2017, the Senate invoked Rule 19, effectively barring Sen. Elizabeth Warren from speaking on the floor.

Warren was silenced after reading parts of a letter Coretta Scott King wrote to Sen. Strom Thurmond in 1986 to oppose the nomination of Jeff Sessions for a federal judgeship.

"They can shut me up, but they can't change the truth," Warren told CNN's Don Lemon of her colleagues' decision to revoke her speaking privileges.

In response to invoking the rule and removing Warren from the Senate floor, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell explained: "She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted."

With that declaration, Warren was instantly added to the long long of women and girls throughout history who've persisted, even as those who opposed them try to shut them down. As Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wrote in 1976: "Well behaved women seldom make history."

McConnell didn't realize it at the time, but he had just coined a feminist rallying cry. What he presented as a rebuke of Warren's behavior quickly picked up steam on social media, where people used it to highlight powerful women from history who refused to be silenced.

Here are some of the strong, badass women who nevertheless persisted against all odds:

1. Dolores Huerta, founder of the nation's largest farmworkers union.

2. Ruby Bridges, one of the first black children integrated into an all-white school.

3. Edie Windsor, whose lawsuit against the federal government paved the way for marriage equality.

4. Harriet Tubman, a former slave and spy who led hundreds of slaves to freedom.

5. Bree Newsome, who climbed a pole at the South Carolina capitol and removed the Confederate flag.

6. Ida B. Wells, iconic writer, activist, and suffragette.

7. Hillary Clinton, former senator and secretary of state, and winner of the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election.

8. Rosa Parks, a seamstress trained in civil resistance who helped launch the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

9. Vera Rubin, the astrophysicist who confirmed the existence of dark matter.

10, 11, and 12. Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor, who hold it down for women in the judicial branch.

13. Angela Davis, an activist, educator, writer, and fierce advocate for prison reform and gender equality.

14. Nellie Bly, the pen name of Elizabeth Cochrane, a pioneering journalist.

15. Ieshia Evans, who stood strong at a demonstration in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

16. Anita Hill, who stepped forward with accusations of sexual harassment against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

17. Grace Lee Boggs, a Chinese-American social activist and revolutionary from Detroit.

18. Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to enter the Boston Marathon.

19. Dorothy Height, esteemed educator and advocate for civil rights and women's rights.

20. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States.

21. Alice Allison Dunnigan, the first black female journalist to earn White House credentials.

22. Shirley Chisholm, unbought and unbossed, the first black woman elected to Congress and the first black woman of a major party to run for president of United States.

23. Gloria Richardson, civil rights activist and leader of the Cambridge Movement in Cambridge, Maryland.

24. Rachel Carson, ecologist and nature writer who stood up to chemical companies and private science.

25. Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist who helped organize the 1964 Freedom Summer voter-registration drive.

Sen. Warren joins a long line of women throughout history who've stood up and remain unbowed in the face of adversity.

She's not the first, and she won't be the last. Who among us will stand up and be next?

Who knows? It might even be you.

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On Feb. 7, 2017, Elizabeth Warren began reading a letter by Coretta Scott King on the Senate floor.

The senator from Massachusetts read the letter, written three decades ago, in which the widow of Martin Luther King Jr. expressed her opposition to the nomination of Jeff Sessions — now a senator from Alabama — for a federal judgeship.

Sessions, whose work to suppress black voters prevented him from becoming a federal judge in 1986, is expected to be confirmed as the next attorney general of the United States by the Republican-controlled Senate on Feb. 8.

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Warren, however, didn't make it through the whole letter — on the Senate floor, that is.

Republicans, claiming she had violated Senate rules by impugning a colleague, voted to silence her. Warren was no longer allowed to speak out against Sessions' nomination.

Of the decision to bar Warren from reading the letter, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell explained:"She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted."

But Warren refused to be silenced. Instead, she read the letter in its entirety on Facebook Live in the hallway outside the Senate chamber. As of Dec. 21, 2017, the video has amassed a staggering 13 million views:

The letter illustrates why Sessions' past behavior makes him unfit to be our attorney general.

"Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge," King wrote, citing Sessions' partisan voting-fraud prosecutions to suppress black voters. "This simply cannot be allowed to happen."

While King outlined the progress that led up to and followed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, she also outlined why having a man like Sessions in a position of power is so dangerous:

King concluded:

The choice to silence Warren backfired spectacularly for Senate Republicans.

Within hours, hashtags like #LetLizSpeak and #ShePersists started trending.

In silencing Warren, Senate Republicans drew even more attention to King's letter, reminding many why Sessions is simply unfit to hold the position. It also didn't help that Sen. Jeff Merkley was allowed to read the same letter hours later; allowing a man to do the same exact thing you just barred a woman from doing is, at best, just bad optics.

If you're outraged over Warren's — and King's — silencing on the Senate floor, speak out.

Regardless of whether Sessions is confirmed, you should call your senator and tell them if you approved of their vote. Donate to organizations like the ACLU that will be crucial in protecting civil rights for years to come. And share your thoughts online using hashtags like #LetLizSpeak and #ShePersists to amplify the message.

Even if one senator is silenced, your voice can still be heard.

Read King's letter in full below:

Coretta Scott King 1986 Letter on Jeff Sessions by German Lopez on Scribd

Lawyers' Committee

Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights

Flip-flopping is a political no-no. Why do so many politicians do it anyway?

It seems like just yesterday, congressional leadership was pounding its chest about ensuring that the 45th president of the United States should be held to rigorous ethical standards. Step out of line and prepare to be hit with a subpoena to appear in front of the House Oversight Committee. Bam! Oh, and that Supreme Court seat they were holding open? Yeah, maybe they’d leave it open for another four years. Raring to go for an opportunity to flex some major “checks and balances” muscle, our legislative branch was making their bold intentions known.

And then something completely unexpected happened: Donald Trump was elected.

Photo by Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images.

Suddenly up became down, black became white (or orange, depending on how you look at it), and those firmly held positions became a whole lot more malleable.

Here are a few recent examples of politicians whose positions on things like ethics, conflicts of interest, and whether or not it's OK to criticize the president have changed since the election.

1. Republican members of the Senate were set on blocking any Supreme Court nominee for an indefinite amount of time. Now they say that's unacceptable.

In February 2016, Antonin Scalia died, creating a vacancy on the Supreme Court. With nearly a full year left in his presidency, Barack Obama set out to appoint Merrick Garland to the court. The Republican-controlled Senate had other plans and refused to hold hearings to confirm Garland to his spot on the court. At the time, the argument was that we should wait until the next president was sworn in to fill the open seat, but as a Clinton victory looked more and more certain, the goalposts began to shift a bit.

"If Hillary Clinton becomes president, I am going to do everything I can do to make sure four years from now, we still got an opening on the Supreme Court,” said Sen. Richard Burr (R-North Carolina) in November. Others — such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona), and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) — seemed to support to Burr's plan.

Fast-forward to January 2017, with Donald Trump's inauguration looming ever closer. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) held a press conference to discuss the party's legislative plans for the new session. While there, McConnell touched on plans for President-elect Trump's choice to fill Scalia's court vacancy, warning Democrats that "the American people simply will not tolerate" Democrats blocking Trump's future court appointments.

Yep, that's right. In the span of a couple short months, the same senators went from aggressively suggesting that it would be fine to keep a Supreme court vacancy open for four years to condemning such behavior and calling it unacceptable, while hiding behind the American people to justify the sudden shift. In truth, yeah, a lengthy vacancy was probably unacceptable from the start, but this is a major 180.

2. In 2009, Mitch McConnell took a stand for ethical standards prior to confirming Obama's cabinet appointments. In 2017, he says he'll be much more hands-off when it comes to Trump's appointments.

In 2009, just after Obama was sworn into office, McConnell warned then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) against trying to push the president's appointments through without proper vetting. In a letter dated Feb. 12, 2009, McConnell laid out eight requirements he expected presidential appointments to meet — clearance by the FBI, approval by the Office of Government Ethics, complete and accurate committee questionnaires, and the submission of financial disclosure forms, among others. While several of Obama's appointees had already been confirmed by the Senate when the letter was written, McConnell's letter urged the "fair and consistent application" of ethical standards moving forward.

In 2017, however, those standards seem a little less fair and a lot less consistent. A number of Trump's appointees have fallen short of McConnell's list of best practices.McConnell's response to those who want to put the brakes on confirmation hearings until those standards are met: "We need to, sort of, grow up here and get past that."

Noting the bit of hypocrisy, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) decided to send McConnell's own letter back to him verbatim, with some names changed.

Ethical standards exist for a reason, and McConnell was right to take a stand in 2009 to defend them. What happened to those values once his party was back in power?

3. Obama's critics slammed the president for "picking winners and losers," but offered Trump praise for doing the same thing.

Depending on who you ask, 2009's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was either a much-needed piece of legislation that helped pull the U.S. out of the Great Recession or it was a gigantic waste of taxpayer money. At the time it passed, critics of the bill, which was designed to provide a stimulus to the economy, argued that this sort of government intervention set a dangerous precedent of picking "winners and losers." Similar concerns were put forward when Obama took steps to save the auto industry.

"If you take a look at the president's policies he calls them 'investments,' it's borrowing money and spending money through Washington, picking winners and losers," Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) said in 2012. "Spending money on favorite, you know, people like Solyndra or Fisker. Picking winners and losers in the economy through spending, through tax breaks, through regulations does not work."

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

But in 2016, when PEOTUS Trump announced a plan to save a few hundred jobs at an Indiana Carrier plant at a cost of $7 million to taxpayers, Ryan's tune had changed.

"I’m pretty happy that we’re keeping jobs in America — aren’t you?" said the Speaker of the House. "I don’t know the details of the Carrier arrangement ... but I think it’s pretty darn good that people are keeping their jobs in Indiana instead of going to Mexico."

What happened to "picking winners and losers in the economy through spending, through tax breaks, through regulations does not work"? Ryan went from a politician willing to stand up for his values, and then became completely ambivalent to them once his party's candidate was elected.

4. Trump's rise in politics began with a multi-year campaign against Obama's legitimacy. Now, he — and his surrogates — are outraged that Rep. John Lewis would question his.

In an interview with NBC's Chuck Todd, Rep. John Lewis (D-Georgia) explained that he would not be attending Trump's inauguration, saying, "I don't see [Trump] as a legitimate president," referring to Russia's possible role in hacking Democratic National Committee emails to sway public opinion toward Trump.

Predictably, this comment led to a certain amount of controversy.

It makes sense that Trump's supporters would come to his defense. The defense they decided to go with, however, was a bit suspect. On CNN, conservative commentator Ben Ferguson said that he couldn't imagine what the reaction would be if a Republican were to suggest Obama wasn't a legitimate president.

There's only one problem with that. At least one prominent Republican spent years accusing Obama of not being legitimate — and we just elected him president. Others — such as Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Washington), Rep. Charles Boustany (R-Louisiana), Rep. Bill Posey (R-Florida), and more — have also fanned the flames of "birtherism" in the past.

Trump appears on "Good Morning America" on April 11, 2011, to question whether or not Obama was eligible to run for president. GIF from ABC/YouTube.

There's a troubling inconsistency in how politicians act and what they believe in when someone from their own party is in power as opposed to when they're discussing someone from the other party.

It's partisanship, pure and simple, and it's harmful to our country.

Whether someone has a "D" or an "R" next to their name should not change how someone feels about the policies they put forward or to what standards should be held. When we let political divisions stand in the way of trusting whether or not our representatives have the best interests of their constituents in mind, we all lose.

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Whether you voted for a Democrat, a Republican, or someone else altogether, shouldn't we ask that our representatives work together to find the best solutions for all Americans?