Letters to the Editor: Mitch McConnell wasn’t ‘savvy.’ He was an ethics-free, power-hungry partisan

To the editor: When the praises start rolling in for the longest serving party leader in U.S. Senate history, I hope people will remember that in 2010, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said that his top priority was to prevent President Obama from having a second term. (“McConnell will step down as the Senate Republican leader in November after a record run,” Feb. 28)

Not national security, not the economy, not peace in the Middle East, just a vitriolic promise of revenge for a race lost.

He failed, of course, but he succeeded in blocking legislation the administration favored and denying Obama a Supreme Court pick in 2016.

When we praise such an ethics-free, self-serving operator as a savvy politician, we inflict deep, structural damage to the institution we depend on to keep our society afloat.

Let him go home and retire in peace, but please, no parades.

Bart Braverman, Indio

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To the editor: Whatever else McConnell may have achieved for good or for bad, his unforgivable hypocrisy in blocking Obama’s constitutional right to pick a Supreme Court justice because it was an election year, and then allowing Donald Trump to do exactly that four years later, won’t be forgotten.

Other political commentators have expressed it best by saying that history will remember McConnell as a cancer on democracy.

Mort Tuchin, Poway, Calif.