McConnell: GOP should focus on future, not 'rehash' 2020

The Hill ^ | 10/19/2021 | JORDAIN CARNEY

[ChicagoConservative27]

Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) urged his party to focus on President Biden heading into 2022, and not relitigating the 2020 election that former President Trump still falsely claims was stolen.

McConnell, speaking to reporters during a weekly press conference, was asked if he was comfortable with the party embracing Trump. The former president was at a retreat over the weekend for Senate Republicans' campaign arm and endorsed Sen. Chuck Grassley (R) for reelection in Iowa earlier this month.

“Well I do think we need to be talking about the future, not the past,” McConnell told reporters Tuesday.

[slowhandluke]

You can’t undo murder either, but you can hang the murderer.

[Bruce Campbells Chin]

You’re not going to do anything to anyone unless we actually win future elections. Meaning the priority should be reforming election laws for future elections, not rearguing an election that is over.

[slowhandluke]

If the reform doesn't include finding and punishing the malefactors of 2020, it won't do any good. Write all the laws and rules you want, but if there is no penalty for flouting them, they will be honored only in the breach.

We won't win unless we put enough fear into the cheaters that they don't cheat.

[Bruce Campbells Chin]

If the reform doesn't include finding and punishing the malefactors of 2020, it won't do any good.

Your argument is circular, and defeatist. We can't find and punish all the malefactors of 2020 because we don't control the legal/judicial system, but we can't control the legal/judicial system until we first punish all the malefactors.

You're never going to find and punish all the malefactors, nor fix every hole in the system. But getting some of them fixed will help. One of the reasons we lost Georgia is because the laws since passed were not in effect back then, which meant that fraud was tougher to detect. That has been fixed with the passage of that new Georgia voting law, and others have done the same.

You're tilting at windmills because we're never going to know who all the malefactors were in 2020 because much of that fraud is inherently undetectable after the fact. You have to change the rules up front to make it tougher to accomplish in the first place.

[slowhandluke]

Circular? Like your vote harder next time approach?

I didn't say we needed to find all the malefactors. Just punish enough to encourage the rest to stay honest.

It's your argument about punish & owning the judicial system that is circular. We don't own all the judiciary surely, but we do own some and some are still honest. We don't need to win all the cases to make our point.

We lost Georgia because Kemp's future son-in-law as murdered and so he did not enforce the laws on the books at the time. The fraud was never hard to detect.

If you can't enforce the rules now, you won't be able to enforce the rules in the future.

Why is it always fight tomorrow and never, never fight today? Is there never a hill to die on?