Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is reportedly plotting his exit from politics, and he has reportedly named his protégé, state Attorney General Daniel Cameron, as his top replacement.
According to multiple reports, McConnell plans to step down before the end of his term. Under the current state law, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear would choose the person to fill the vacancy until a senator is formally elected. However, McConnell is allegedly trying to eliminate this statute by pushing new legislation that would allow the state GOP to select his successor. Beshear is a Democrat and McConnell wants his seat to go to another Republican.
“The new legislation, Senate Bill 228 — dubbed by some inside the state Legislature as the Daniel Cameron Election Bill — was filed on February 10, 2021, during the Kentucky General Assembly’s 30-day “short” session,” The Intercept wrote.
Read More: Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron should be impeached
Cameron, the first Black attorney general in the state of Kentucky, tops McConnell’s list of potential successors. As theGrio previously reported, three grand jurors in the Breonna Taylor case have filed a petition to impeach Cameron over his handling of the proceedings, citing prosecutorial misconduct. The petition says Cameron breached the public trust and the duties of his office when he misrepresented the findings of the grand jury in the Taylor case.
An earlier report by theGrio noted that Cameron stood in the way of justice for Taylor — a Black woman killed by police for simply being home — and he sought to block the votes of Black people who made Biden the president. He faced fierce backlash from celebrities over his failure to arrest the police officers responsible for Taylor’s death. Cameron also appeared to defend the angry mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol during former president Donald Trump’s Stop the Steal rally on Jan. 6.
McConnell, meanwhile, blamed Trump for sparking the attack. “There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it. The people that stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president,” he said.
“And having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories and reckless hyperbole, which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on the Earth,” McConnell added.
Read More: AG Daniel Cameron wants Breonna Taylor evidence to stay sealed
McConnell also said the mob breached the Capitol because it was fed “wild falsehoods” by Trump, who was “angry he had lost an election.”
The 79-year-old Kentucky Republican has held his Senate seat since 1985 and won a seventh term last November. According to the Intercept, two other names on McConnell’s list of successors are former United Nations Ambassador Kelly Craft and Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams.
If Senate Bill 228 becomes law, per The Intercept, “the appointment to fill a vacancy will be selected from a list of three names submitted by the state executive committee of the same political party as the senator who held the vacant seat,” the outlet writes.
theGrio’s David A. Love contributed to this story.
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