[LI] There was a lot of phony media reporting this week about how Democrats were supposedly treating their impeachment of President Trump as a "somber" moment in American history.But one place where there actually were somber faces was on Monday’s "MSNBC Live" show, where co-hosts Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle were busy hitting the panic button over the amount of Trump-nominated judges Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has successfully confirmed.
In speaking with liberal attorney and legal analyst Danielle McLaughlin during a segment on how Trump was "moving federal courts to the right," Velshi asked McLaughlin if it was normal to have 98 vacancies in the federal judiciary. Here’s a partial transcript of their back and forth, via Newsbusters:
McLaughlin declared that, "No, this goes back to the historic actions of Mitch McConnell and others during the Obama presidency."
Despite Democrats holding the Senate for six of Obama’s eight years, she added, with a noticeable emphasis on personal pronouns, "I think we had the Senate for about 14 months, a majority in the Senate, we actually got rid of the filibuster, which has come back to bite us, the idea that you used to have a super-majority to approve a federal judge or an appellate court judge, but now its only a simple majority and of course that’s what Republicans have."
... McLaughlin accused Republicans of taking, "some gleeful pleasure in messing up the system and messing with the system and stopping a president [Obama] from really exercising the power that is given to him, fundamentally by the Constitution."
After Velshi interjected to voice his agreement, McLaughlin concluded the segment by falsely accusing Republicans of not doing their constitutional duty in 2016 and that they are therefore hypocrites: "Advice and consent is obviously a power that the Senate has, but they did not even exercise it. I think for all their talk about standing by the Constitution and being the party of law and order, in fact they have been historically obstructionist ‐ as it relates to President Obama especially. They did not do what the Constitution wanted them to do."
The looks on the faces of Velshi, Ruhle, and McLaughlin as they discussed McConnell’s track record pretty much said it all. Watch this exchange below: