Seth Meyers spent several minutes Monday morning exposing the blatant hypocrisy of Republican senators trying to jam through President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee when they wouldn’t even allow a vote on President Obama’s four years earlier—all while admitting the entire exercise won’t have any effect whatsoever on their behavior
“Now look, I get that highlighting their hypocrisy is mostly pointless,” the Late Night host said. “Hypocrisy only matters if you have shame. They don’t. Mitch McConnell certainly isn’t capable of feeling shame. He looks like a haunted wooden doll you’d find at an estate sale and has the same level of emotional complexity.”
“Their bad-faith justifications were obvious bullshit back then,” he added of 2016, “and their bad-faith reversals are obvious bullshit now. But it’s still worth taking stock of just how insulting and transparent their lies were and remembering that for the future. Because it’s not just hypocrisy, it’s nihilism. They’re moral black holes who only care about the raw exercise of political power.”
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After playing an epic montage of Republican Senators McConnell, Chuck Grassley, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and Marco Rubio along with 2020 incumbent candidates Lindsey Graham, Thom Tillis and Cory Gardner, explaining why they believed Obama should not be allowed to pick Antonin Scalia’s replacement 11 months before the end of his term, Meyers said it’s “worth documenting just how obvious and degrading the lies were.”
The host had particular admiration for the “striking” specificity of their promises, saying he’s “shocked” Lindsey Graham didn’t stand up in front of the Senate and say, “Mark my words, if 45 days before the 2020 presidential election an iconic liberal justice passes away and requests as her dying wish that she not be replaced until after the election, which is taking place during a once-in-a-century pandemic just two weeks after it’s announced that Keeping Up With the Kardashians is ending, then you can use my words against me.”
Ultimately, Meyers said he thinks it’s possible that “the lying and the hypocrisy are the point,” that Republican senators are “trying to rub our noses in just how shameless and unaccountable they are,” that “they don’t care about democracy and can do whatever they want.”
“Democrats have to internalize the fact that this is not about principle, this is about raw political power,” he concluded. “And they need to use every tool at their disposal to stop it.”
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