(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day: Marsha Blackburn- 2023 Update [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-09-16 On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, as well as 2022, that “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” published profiles of U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, who as a member of the U.S. House, voted against equal pay for women multiple times, insisting that “women don’t want it”. She was also a co-sponsor of the “Birther Bill”, denies that Mitt Romney ever passed a healthcare program in Massachusetts, and gave an infamous interview where she falsely claimed that the Affordable Care Act (which she also was a part of the “lie of the year” at Polifiact, predicting it would lead to death panels) was a violation of HIPAA, and when asked repeatedly to explain how that’s even possible, she just kept repeating the same falsehood robotically without actually providing any logical answer. She was also a big proponent of the 2013 Government Shutdown, and on the day it began, went on FOX and Friends to optimistically predict that it would actually teach ordinary Americans about all the “big government” ideas that were being defunded that they can do without (which the opposite actually happened over the 16 day stretch). Our update on Blackburn continued covering her hyper-conservative voting record, as well as the fact that she spoke at the South Carolina Freedom Summit and claimed Christians were a persecuted minority in the United States. When reporters followed up on her remarks and asked her to name an example of such persecution, she failed to be able to cite a single one. Marsha Blackburn was also particularly awful during the GOP's witch hunt after the Center for Medical Progress released their deceitful smear of Planned Parenthood, insisting that after all investigations had been concluded that Planned Parenthood had still been caught "selling baby body parts", and during the paranoia around the affair, attempted to use the House Intelligence Committee's investigation as a means to demand a complete list of every medical students, residents, or other medical personnel around the country who have ever participated in an abortion, because there's no way that such a thing would enable domestic terrorists in the radical anti-choice movement to assassinate those people (when they already have done so). Through 2017, continued to make the rounds on cable news and with the media, where she can do things like insinuate that James Comey is a liar to help provide cover for Donald Trump while he’s investigated for accepting help from the Russians to get elected in exchange for dropping sanctions against them, or when she can be one of the few politicians who actually defended Donald Trump’s spur of the moment decision to ban transgendered soldiers from the military before he ever consulted the Pentagon about what kind of impact that might have. Make no mistake, she’s “all-in” on the Trump administration, and with any luck, she might get swept away with it at some point. Maybe when she was caught in the middle of the NRA/Russia connection, someone should have thrown a flag. After she started catching some serious hell at her town halls in 2017, where she was raucously booed and openly been accused of lying, she responded to that treatment by going on CNN a week later to claim that the people who booed her weren’t actually from her district. The usually passive Wolf Blitzer fact-checked her on, pointing out that people had to show ID to prove they were from her district to get into the building in the first place. Marsha Blackburn takes advantage of how red of a state Tennessee is, winning election to ther U.S. Senate to replace the retiring Sen. Bob Corker in 2018 with 55% of the vote so she could rubber-stamp whatever nominees the Trump administration puts in front of her for two years, regardless of how terrible of people they are, or how wildly unqualified they are for the job. We’re also going to note that Marsha Blackburn unilaterally blacked a bill in the Senate that would have required any presidential campaign that receives offers of assistance from an agent of a foreign government to report it to the FBI, opening the door for Russia to assist the 2020 Trump campaign the way they did in 2016. (And at least a dozen GOP Congressional candidates also accepted help from Russian hackers, per the Mueller report). This should come as little surprise, though, because Blackburn knows exactly how deep Trump is in it with Russia… after all, she was on the Trump transition team. She deemed the bill, submitted by Mark Warner, as “over-broad” and that “it should be done in a bipartisan way” even though outside of Blackburn, it had unanimous support. And that Warner offered to allow her to suggest how to amend it to make it not “over-broad” or “more bipartisan”, however the hell she assumes to interpret those words. In January of 2020, Sen. Blackburn was predictably among the Republican senators who voted against allowing witnesses in the first impeachment trial for Donald Trump, thereby making it a “trial”, and then voted to acquit him after said “trial” in spite of the mountain of evidence that he tried to solicit foreign aid in the 2020 elections from Ukraine by threatening to withhold aid from them. For all the effort she put towards doing that, she’s been mostly twiddling her thumbs to do anything to help the country survive the economic impact of the coronavirus since passing the original stimulus bill back in March. She saves all of her energy for lashing out at the media for daring to fact-check her habitually lying ass, like the did after her fib-filled speech at the 2020 RNC. Some of her activities, just since 2020: Now, Marsha Blackburn is up for re-election in 2024, and even as deep red as Tennessee is these days, she seems oddly spooked that her likely Democratic opponent will be Gloria Johnson, one of the Tennessee Three who are now heroes among members of the opposing party in the face of Republican partisanship reaching levels where they’re trying to declare anyone not a Republican worthy of expulsion from the state legislature. For that to take place… would be a HUGE upset. Even with Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, and what that would do to members of the GOP downballot… if Marsha Blackburn is sent packing in 14 months’ time, Election Night will be true cause for celebration. 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