Mitch McConnell Wants You To Forget That He Protected a Senator Accused of Sexual Misconduct

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Team Mitch is scurrying busily about trying to explain away the Republican War on Women and the Republican Senate Minority Leader’s Republican attitude toward women (vote against them and then come election time, convince them he really cares — Binders Full of Women style), including voting against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act with his Republican colleagues. His campaign claims he is the best candidate for women voters because way back in the 90’s, he recommended the resignation of then Senator Bob Packwood. But that was after he bullied the Senate committee in an attempt to protect Packwood.

They started this campaign when it became apparent that McConnell was going to need those women he had alienated. They claim McConnell surrounds himself with “strong women”. Perhaps he does, though if that’s true, none of those women are speaking up against the McConnell campaign’s hideous, unacceptable sexist attacks on his Democratic opponent, Alison Grimes, including calling her an empty dress and just days ago sharing one of the most vapid, nasty, sexist, and stupid editorials ever written about a female candidate, including accusing Grimes of not having any real experience in spite of being Secretary of State, and of smiling and chirping around the state.

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Things like Team Mitch snarking over that nasty bit of work makes me wonder just how much of a voice McConnell’s “strong women” are given. And that is precisely the point.

No one is questioning whether Mitch McConnell has a wonderful wife or knows many fabulous women or is related to strong women. This isn’t about his personal feelings for women or his relationships with them, though certainly I wouldn’t feel too comfortable with him as a role model for my child, especially after the way his campaign has treated Alison Grimes (the Obama girl photoshop was the last straw for me). This is about his record as a lawmaker, how he treats matters of policy. This is about how he uses his leadership position to either further or degrade women’s status. His record on this issue is dismal, and it’s not that he has never done the right thing. It’s that he blindly follows his party into gender cluelessness and misogyny whenever it’s expedient, even when women’s lives are at stake, as they were with the Republican refusal to renew the VAWA.

In 1995, Mitch McConnell was very busy protecting a Republican Senator from accusations by ten women and an accusation which involved a 17 year-old intern in Packwood’s Senate office, of sexual and official misconduct, resorting to “bullying tactics” to delay ethics hearings , per “Mr. McConnell’s Silly Ploy” from the New York Times via The Rachel Maddow Show:

Under rising pressure to hold public hearings on accusations of sexual and official misconduct against Senator Bob Packwood, Senator Mitch McConnell, chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee, has resorted to bullying tactics that betray the committee’s nonpartisan mission.

… In any case, it is improper for Mr. McConnell to hold the Packwood matter hostage to unrelated issues. That is an abuse of his power as chairman.

Did McConnell finally come around to the same, inevitable (given the evidence) conclusion as the rest of the Senate Ethics Committee? Yes. They unanimously recommended Packwood be expelled from the Senate for sexual and official misconduct. But this was after he did all that he could, including bullying and threatening, to get the committee to back off. It’s not as if he took up the banner for women.

NOW reported that Mitch McConnell said at a news conference at that time, “No work-place in America ought to tolerate the kind of offensive, degrading sexual misconduct that the ethics committee finds Senator Packwood to be guilty of. And it certainly cannot be tolerated in the United States Senate either.”

Both parties are guilty of having sexual predators, because sexism is pervasive in our culture. The difference is in how the parties treat the issue, and whether or not their policies seek to make it easier for men to get away with mistreating women, including killing them (3 women a day are murdered due to intimate partner violence). Sadly, the Republican Party’s version of the VAWA was a giveaway to abusers, and they have gone out of their way to give rapists’ more power over their victims.

So it hardly matters that McConnell finally got on board, or that he loves women in his life. That is the same claim made by Greg Abbott in Texas as he excused why he refused to support giving women legal protections regarding equal pay. But then it turned out that women in his own office were being paid less for the same job, so personal stories are irrelevant unless they formed the foundation of policy values.

Mitch McConnell doesn’t get to run around claiming he loves women when his own campaign team continues to behave like drunken frat boys mocking Alison Grimes for being a woman. McConnell continues to send the message that it’s perfectly okay to shame and humiliate women, and try to get them to drop out of the race because a big, bad, bully boy is going to call them names. That’s not a family value of which to be proud.


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