Senate Candidate Amy McGrath Is Running on a Very Convincing Platform: That Mitch McConnell Is the Worst

In 2018, retired Marine Lt. Colonel Amy McGrath was one of the many women running for public office for the first time. The former fighter pilot very nearly won her congressional race in deep-red Kentucky, but ultimately lost to incumbent Republican Andy Barr.

Now, she’s running for US Senate, and the seat she’s after is that of current Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. In a three-minute video announcing her campaign, she says that it was McConnell’s flagrant disregard for the needs of his constituents that directly inspired her to run.

McGrath mentioned McConnell in her congressional campaign launch video back in 2017. When she was 13, she wrote him a letter, saying she wanted to be a fighter pilot at a time when women weren’t allowed to serve in combat. He never wrote her back and in this new video, she says she often wonders, “how many other people did Mitch McConnell never take the time to write back?”

Everyone–Republicans, Democrats, and pretty much everyone outside and in between–seems to agree that the divisiveness in politics is way too destructive. What we disagree on is who’s to blame for that.

Trump is a symptom of that divisiveness, and one that exacerbates it, to be sure. I mean, just look at this actual madness:

That’s an actual official poll on the Trump reelection campaign website:

image: donaldjtrump.com

But Trump didn’t create partisan politics. And it’s not like the party line didn’t exist before Mitch McConnell took office but in many ways, he’s not just emblematic of everything wrong with modern politics–he’s the source.

In her video, McGrath calls McConnell out for his obstruction and his fecklessness.

“Everything that’s wrong in Washington had to start someplace,” she says. “How did it come to this? That even within our own families, we can’t talk to each other about the leaders of our country anymore without anger and blame.”

“Well, it started with this man, who was elected a lifetime ago,” she continues, displaying a picture of a young hatchling of the turtle now known as the Senate Majority Leader, “and who has, bit by bit, year by year, turned Washington into something we all despise. Where dysfunction and chaos are political weapons; where budgets and health care and the Supreme Court are held hostage; a place where ideals go to die.”

A place where ideals go to die.

It’s not just all the roadblocks McConnell set up and the goalposts he moved during Barack Obama’s presidency (although they were MANY). He’s blocked over a hundred bills coming out of the Democrat-majority House just this year. Back in May, Chuck Schumer said from the House floor, “We have multiple, House-passed bills awaiting action. Leader McConnell need only call them up for debate. But instead, the legislative graveyard, where good legislation doesn’t even get debated or amended—let alone passed—is upon us.”

Mitch McConnell is the poster child of everything wrong with politics today–the valuing of party over people and the unabashed rejection of voters’ needs and wishes. We are all focused on the 2020 election as a way to remove Trump from office, but let’s also remember how important it is to get McConnell–and also everyone who isn’t interested in listening to their constituents and instead uses them as political pawns but especially McConnell–out as well.

(image: screencap)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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