GOP governor says McConnell will prevent Senate gridlock. Yes, that McConnell.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who has decried “extremism” and gridlock, wants Georgia voters to keep Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader. Despite the Kentucky Republican’s long record of obstruction and partisanship, Hogan claimed keeping him in charge of the Senate would somehow lead to more “moderation and compromise.”

Hogan, who has branded himself as a different kind of Republican and refused to support Donald Trump, penned an opinion piece Monday in the Washington Examiner endorsing Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue (R-GA) in their January runoffs.

“Although Joe Biden won the White House, Republicans added a governorship in Montana, far exceeded expectations in Senate races, gained seats in the House and in state legislatures. The result was a mandate for moderation and compromise — not for more gridlock, extremism, and dysfunction,” Hogan wrote. “For the sake of our nation, I urge Georgians to uphold America’s mandate for moderation and compromise by voting to keep David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in the U.S. Senate.”

Hogan is correct that Republicans won a governorship in the very small and typically GOP-leaning state of Montana this year. But Democrats also won a majority of seats in the House of Representatives and gained at least one seat in the Senate, pending the two Georgia races.

If Georgia voters elect Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the Senate, the party will net three seats and will narrowly control the Senate (with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris able to break a 50-50 tie after she is sworn in January 20).

Loeffler and Perdue have been among the most partisan supporters of the lame-duck administration.

Loeffler is campaigning on her 100% pro-Trump record, her inability to think of a single time she has disagreed with Trump, and her “more conservative” than Attila the Hun ideology.

Perdue voted with Trump about 95% of the time. He and Loeffler have joined together to back Trump’s debunked conspiracy claims about the 2020 election.

A Hogan spokesperson did not immediately respond to an inquiry for this story.

But Hogan’s claim that a GOP Senate would mean less “gridlock, extremism, and dysfunction” is not borne out by recent history and he knows it.

As the Senate’s minority leader for most of the Obama administration, McConnell perfected a strategy of filibustering nearly every nominee and bill, setting all-time records for obstruction.

As majority leader since 2015, McConnell refused to consider Obama’s judicial nominees — even holding open a Supreme Court seat for a full year to let Trump fill it. He singlehandedly blocked more than 400 pieces of House-passed legislation in the last two years, killing action on voting rights, LGBTQ equality, the minimum wage, health care access, equal pay, Dreamers, and the climate.

Also among the bills he obstructed was a $3 trillion pandemic relief bill that passed the House in May and never got a vote in the Senate. McConnell decried its funding for struggling state and local governments as a “blue state bailout” and vowed to block it.

Hogan called McConnell’s attack “complete nonsense” in late April, saying he hoped to “convince Sen. McConnell that maybe he shouldn’t let all the states go bankrupt.” But McConnell stood firm, preventing Maryland from getting any of the $9.5 billion the House was offering.

In September, Hogan also denounced McConnell’s scheme to ram through a Supreme Court appointment in the weeks before the election, saying this would be playing “partisan games with the Supreme Court.” McConnell did so anyway, confirming Justice Amy Coney Barrett without a single Democratic vote just days before Americans elected Biden.

McConnell is reportedly already plotting to block Biden’s Cabinet nominees if he controls a majority in the new Senate.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.