“When I saw Mitch McConnell, all I saw was my brother’s face,” said Rankin, one of Cummings’s pallbearers.
Rankin’s brother, Jerry, died last October from cancer after being exposed to contaminated water while serving in the Marines at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Jerry did not receive the veterans’ benefits he was owed before he died, Rankin said — and he blamed McConnell in part for that family tragedy.
“Elijah Cummings reached across party lines trying to help my brother get his military benefits, and Mitch McConnell was one of the persons he reached out to,” Rankin said.
I could not put my hands in the man’s hand who refused to help somebody who served his country,” Rankin said, later adding, “I couldn’t do it, because I was thinking about my brother.”