McConnell is Playing Russian Roulette with the Nation

And the dangerous precedent he is following

Earlier this week, the Democrats passed a stopgap measure to fund the government until December. But a debt ceiling deadlines still looms on October 18 and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is threatening to tank the economy in pursuit of his own political power. I wrote about the shocking parallels between McConnell and the Slavocracy in the South, on the debt, on voting, and on free speech.

These tactics have a disturbing precedent in the playbook perfected by Southern congressmen before the Civil War — what some historians call “the Slavocracy.” Southerners of that era used their disproportional representation in Congress to push through official measures to defend their “way of life.” The millions of enslaved individuals inflated the population of the South, granting Southern leadership dominance in the House of Representatives. From 1801 to 1861 (from the 7th Congress through the 36th Congress), thirteen Southerners served as speaker of the House while just six Northerners did. To put the disparity even more starkly, a Southerner was speaker for nearly 80 percent of the time Congress was in session during those decades.

Read the FULL ARTICLE on The Bulwark.