In future dictionaries we will see a line drawing of Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell’s face next to that term. He’s always been an obnoxious man, exuding righteous certainty in his positions from every pore, but this January alone has cemented his place in my mind as the worst and most shameless hypocrite the US Senate has given a home to in my lifetime.

First he came out with this ridiculous statement:

“Apparently there’s yet a new standard now, which is to not confirm a Supreme Court nominee at all,” McConnell said, adding: “I think that’s something the American people simply will not tolerate, and we’ll be looking forward to receiving a Supreme Court nomination and moving forward on it.”

Of course, President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to fill the empty seat on the Court back in February of 2016 and McConnell and his Republican colleagues refused to even give the judge a hearing for the entire remainder of the President’s term, giving as a reason the idiotic “The American people should have the chance to pick the President they want to appoint a new Justice.” That ignored the fact that three years earlier the American people had in fact picked the President they wanted to perform all the duties of the job, including appointing new Justices to the Supreme Court.

As if that’s not bad enough, today the esteemed Senator said on one of the Sunday political talk shows that he wants to hold hearings for Trump nominees whether or not they have fully completed their ethics disclosure forms. This after sending a letter when Obama took office demanding that all his nominees’ ethics forms be given to the Senate before holding hearings.

“Prior to considering any time agreements on the floor on any nominee,” McConnell wrote, ranking members expect eight ethical standards to be met.

Among them: a completed FBI background check, a completed Office of Government Ethics letter, completed financial disclosure statements (and tax returns where they apply) and a completed committee questionnaires submitted to the respective Senate committees “prior to a hearing being noticed.”

In layman’s terms, McConnell not only required for “completion of disclosures but also review prior to floor consideration,” said Wayne Steger, a political science professor at DePaul University and the author of A Citizen’s Guide to Presidential Nominations.

Yet today he said he’s going ahead with hearings. He did suggest there would be no floor votes without all the documentation, but I suspect that was a smokescreen to appease the moderator and the rubes like us.

I wish Alison Grimes had beaten this so-and-so in 2014. There are a lot of Republican Senators I’ve despised; Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond and Orrin Hatch come to mind, for example. McConnell is in the top five, not so much for his ideology as for his naked grasping for power no matter how unprincipled he has to be.