Chuck Ross on August 14, 2019
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi referred to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as “Moscow Mitch” Wednesday, embracing a nickname created to portray the Republican as a Russian asset.
Speaking at a political event in Springfield, Illinois, Pelosi criticized McConnell for blocking several bills passed this year in the Democrat-controlled House, including one aimed at beefing up election security.
“We’ve sent our legislation to the Senate. Moscow Mitch says that he is the grim reaper. Imagine describing yourself as the grim reaper, that he’s going to bury all this legislation,” Pelosi said.
“Well, we have news for him. All this legislation is alive and well in the general public,” said the Democrat, adding that, “We all want to invest in building our democracy and saving it from any enemies, foreign and domestic.”
McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, on July 25 blocked a Senate vote on the election-related bills, calling them “partisan legislation.”
He has further pledged to act as the “grim reaper” for far-left legislation passed in the House. While McConnell has embraced that label, as well as the nickname “Cocaine Mitch,” he has bristled at the “Moscow Mitch” pejorative, first coined by MSNBC host Joe Scarborough.
McConnell responded to the nickname and to a Washington Post column entitled “Mitch McConnell is a Russian Asset” during a fiery Senate floor speech last month, as well as on Twitter.
“Modern-day McCarthyism is poison for American democracy,” he wrote on Twitter on July 29. “It is shameful to imply that policy disagreements make the other side unpatriotic. The people who push such unhinged smears are doing Putin’s destabilizing work for him.”
