“McConnell’s Genius Pitch”: Vote GOP, Get Another Shutdown
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is often hailed as one of Washington’s most tactically cunning politicians, and for the most part it’s true. But McConnell does have a serious political flaw: His tendency to actually tell the truth about those tactics.
Senator McConnell did it again in an interview with Politico, published on Wednesday. Previewing a Republican-controlled Senate, McConnell made it clear that he plans to escalate congressional confrontation with the president, potentially leading to another government shutdown:
In an extensive interview here, the typically reserved McConnell laid out his clearest thinking yet of how he would lead the Senate if Republicans gain control of the chamber. The emerging strategy: Attach riders to spending bills that would limit Obama policies on everything from the environment to health care, consider using an arcane budget tactic to circumvent Democratic filibusters and force the president to “move to the center” if he wants to get any new legislation through Congress.
In short, it’s a recipe for a confrontational end to the Obama presidency.
“We’re going to pass spending bills, and they’re going to have a lot of restrictions on the activities of the bureaucracy,” McConnell said in an interview aboard his campaign bus traveling through Western Kentucky coal country. “That’s something he won’t like, but that will be done. I guarantee it.”
When asked if this strategy could force a government shutdown, McConnell “said it would be up to the president to decide whether to veto spending bills that would keep the government open.”
“He could,” McConnell later said of the probability that President Obama would veto must-pass appropriation bills that are loaded with riders to undo policies that the White House supports. “Yeah, he could.”
It’s difficult to overstate what a horrible idea this is. Although some Republicans may not have noticed it, the last government shutdown was a debacle. The GOP’s hopeless effort to blackmail President Obama into defunding the Affordable Care Act failed miserably, wasting $24 billion and dragging Republicans’ poll numbers into the sewer along the way.
The poll numbers haven’t really recovered, but the combination of President Obama’s own political struggles and a very favorable electoral map still have them set up to make gains in 2014. In fact, Republicans have a good chance of winning the Senate. But promising to ramp up the brinksmanship that caused the last shutdown gives Democrats their best argument for why voters should deny Republicans full control of Congress.
Democrats recognize this, of course; numerous party leaders have already turned McConnell’s remarks against him, and they are certain to resurface in Democratic campaign pitches from now until November. Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democrat giving McConnell the fight of his career in Kentucky’s Senate race, surely appreciates the minority leader’s Kinsley gaffe most of all.
If Republicans do manage to win the majority and follow through on McConnell’s threat, it would virtually guarantee that they don’t hold control for long. The 2016 Senate map is as favorable to Democrats as this year’s is to the GOP. It will be difficult enough for Republicans to hold on to seats in blue states like Florida, Illinois, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; if they spend the next two years threatening vital services for the sole purpose of making a hopeless ideological stand, it will be nearly impossible.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, August 21, 2014
“The 2014 Midterms Do Matter”: McConnell Eyes More Shutdowns Following GOP Gains
It’s tempting to think the 2014 midterms may not matter much. Assuming Republicans keep their House majority, which seems very likely, the legislative process in 2015 and 2016 will probably look an awful lot like the legislative process since 2011 – congressional inaction. GOP lawmakers will continue to reject compromises and negotiations no matter who controls the upper chamber.
As this line of thought goes, the part that enjoys the Senate majority will have the power to watch the other party filibuster, and little more.
But there’s a flaw in these assumptions: if rewarded by voters with their first Senate majority in a decade, Republicans don’t intend to use their new-found congressional power to just spin their wheels. Manu Raju reports today that GOP leaders have a very different kind of plan in mind.
Mitch McConnell has a game plan to confront President Barack Obama with a stark choice next year: Accept bills reining in the administration’s policies or risk a government shutdown.
In an extensive interview here, the typically reserved McConnell laid out his clearest thinking yet of how he would lead the Senate if Republicans gain control of the chamber. The emerging strategy: Attach riders to spending bills that would limit Obama policies on everything from the environment to health care, consider using an arcane budget tactic to circumvent Democratic filibusters and force the president to “move to the center” if he wants to get any new legislation through Congress.
In short, it’s a recipe for a confrontational end to the Obama presidency.
McConnell told Politico, “We’re going to pass spending bills, and they’re going to have a lot of restrictions on the activities of the bureaucracy. That’s something [President Obama] won’t like, but that will be done. I guarantee it.”
There’s no reason to think this is campaign-season bluster. McConnell is more than comfortable making demonstrably false claims about public policy and his partisan rivals, but when it comes to process and legislative strategy, the Kentucky Republican is one of Capitol Hill’s most candid officials.
The result, however, is a curious pitch: just 76 days before this year’s midterm elections, the Senate’s top GOP leader wants the voting public to know that a vote for Republicans is a vote for government shutdowns.
Indeed, McConnell isn’t even being subtle about it. If his party is rewarded by voters in the fall, GOP senators, working with a Republican House majority, will add measures to spending bills that undo the progress of the last several years. If the White House refuses to go along, Republicans will simply shut down the government – yes, again – until the president gives the new GOP majority what it wants.
In other words, the 2014 midterms do matter. As ridiculous as Congress has become of late, McConnell has mapped out a deliberate strategy to make things considerably worse. The question isn’t whether he’ll follow through on his threats; the question is whether voters will empower him to do so.
Update: I should add that McConnell’s strategy is an interesting departure from four years ago, when GOP leaders suggested that they’d still govern if Republicans took the House majority. At the time, some pundits even believed them. Now, however, McConnell isn’t even bothering with the pretense.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 20, 2014
“A Self-Accredited Ophthalmologist”: The Most Credible Candidate For President … Since Henry Clay
Kentucky’s annual Fancy Farm picnic is one of the state’s biggest political events, and this weekend was no exception. Rachel Kleinman had a helpful report on some of what transpired at the gathering.
But there was one quote from the weekend’s festivities from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that stood out for me. The Republican leader, who’s in a very tough re-election fight this year, reportedly had this to say about his fellow Kentuckian, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).
“I can say this without fear of contradiction: He is the most credible candidate for president of the United States since Henry Clay,” the minority leader reportedly told a county GOP breakfast earlier Saturday, a reference to the Kentucky senator who ran unsuccessfully for president in 1824, 1832 and 1844.
Sam Youngman, a political reporter for the Lexington Herald-Leader, also heard McConnell make the comment, though Youngman believes the senator probably meant the most credible presidential candidate out of Kentucky since Clay.
To be sure, Henry Clay was an accomplished public servant and an exceedingly credible presidential candidate – at different points in his career, Clay was a state legislator, a U.S. House member, a Speaker of the U.S. House, a U.S. senator, and the U.S. Secretary of State. Not too shabby.
Rand Paul was a self-accredited ophthalmologist up until four years ago, when he was elected to the U.S. Senate. To date, he has no major legislative accomplishments to speak of and he’s held no other public office.
I can appreciate McConnell wanting to say nice things about his in-state partner, but referencing Paul and Clay in the same sentence seems like a bit of a stretch.
Of courses, the fact that McConnell would even draw such a comparison in the first place speaks to a larger truth.
It’s easy to forget, but in 2010, McConnell desperately hoped Rand Paul would lose. The party establishment, including the Senate Minority Leader, enthusiastically backed Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson in the GOP primary and assumed he’d win with relative ease.
That, obviously, didn’t happen, and the McConnell-Paul relationship has always been strained.
But when it comes to campaign politics, McConnell is no fool – he and his team can read a poll as easily as anyone else, and they realize that statewide, Rand Paul is far more popular than McConnell. As such, we see the Minority Leader running around making claims he almost certainly doesn’t believe, including the odd notion that Paul “is the most credible candidate for president of the United States since Henry Clay.”
As for the junior senator from the Bluegrass State, Paul apparently sees the partnership as a marriage of convenience. Earlier this year, during an appearance on Glenn Beck’s program, the host asked the senator about his McConnell endorsement. “Uhh, because he asked me,” Paul said. “He asked me when there was nobody else in the race. And I said yes.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 4, 2014
“McConnell’s Obamacare Policy”: Repeal It, Then Immediately Reinstate The Whole Damn Thing
I think there’s one way, and only one way, to interpret Mitch McConnell’s position on the Medicaid expansion in Kentucky, and last night the Washington Post’s fact checker confirmed it. McConnell wants to repeal the Medicaid expansion (along with the rest of Obamacare) and then let the people who run the state of Kentucky (i.e. people other than him) decide whether to reinstate it, and pay for it out of state coffers.
That’s a difficult position to support, which explains why his campaign obscures it behind a bunch of rambling designed to convince people (including very politically savvy people) that McConnell has come around to supporting the Medicaid expansion.
But it’s actually identical to his position on Kynect—the state’s health insurance exchange—and perhaps he’ll apply it to other integral parts of Obamacare as well. As a general matter it amounts to arguing that Obamacare should be repealed, and then reinstated in full at the state level. But that’s a total fantasy.
When Obamacare is repealed, the funding Kynect relies upon, as well as the health plans and rules that make it a popular and widely used portal, will disappear as well. No biggie, says McConnell. Once they’re gone, the state can decide whether it wants to reinstitute those things on its own.
But of course, as with Medicaid expansion, it’s almost impossible to imagine states riding to the rescue of those harmed by Obamacare’s repeal. Running the exchange is fairly expensive on its own, but its costs would dwarfed by the resources required to recreate the actual market Obamacare has created in Kentucky. Remember, Kentucky flirted with creating Obamacare’s coverage guarantee without creating any incentives for everyone to purchase insurance. No mandate, no subsidies. And the system predictably collapsed. But it’s unlikely that Kentucky could afford to reinstate ACA-style subsidies on its own. And without them, the plans will be too expensive to justify a mandate. And so under McConnell’s policy, Kentucky’s newly insured would be left with nothing.
The idea that ACA politics are gruesome for Democrats is so deeply ingrained in the national media’s belief system that it won’t be shaken loose by McConnell’s dissembling alone. But if it were true, why would Republicans across the country be hiding their true views about Obamacare behind the word “fix”? Why would any Republicans, let alone the Senate GOP leader, be saying they want to get rid of everything Obamacare does except the things it does in their own states?
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, May 30, 2014
“The Big Dis-Kynect “: Mitch McConnell’s Big Obamacare-Kynect Lie
Here’s why all the super-smart insidery people privately say they think that in the end, Alison Lundergan Grimes will not beat Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. Her strategy, they say, is to keep it close, keep her distance from Obama, hold her own in debates, try to match him attack ad for attack ad, and just hope McConnell makes a mistake. And the super-smart people agree: You may admire or loathe McConnell, but if he’s proven one thing in umpteen elections, it’s that he doesn’t make mistakes.
That’s what the insiders say. There’s just one problem with it. McConnell has made about a mistake a week so far! He’s run an awful campaign. And he’s given anybody no reason at all to think he won’t just keep making them.
The latest is maybe the biggest howler yet, bigger than even the ad that mistook Duke basketball players for UK Wildcats. He said last week that while he will certainly still pursue repeal of Obamacare, he thinks Kentucky should be able to and will keep its celebrated Kynect health-care exchange, set up by Democratic Governor Steve Beshear under the Affordable Care Act. Here’s how LEO Weekly, out of Louisville, reported the moment:
McConnell took three questions on the Affordable Care Act and how its repeal would affect the 413,000 Kentuckians who now have insurance through the state exchange, Kynect. The first question asked how he would respond to those who say repeal would take away the health care of 413,000 Kentuckians, to which McConnell launched into his standard answer that Obamacare was raising premiums, raising deductibles, and killing jobs, concluding, “It was a big mistake, we ought to pull it out root and branch and start over.”
WHAS’ Joe Arnold followed up that answer by asking, “But if you repeal it, won’t all of the state exchanges be dismantled? How does that work?” McConnell then launched into his standard “solution” of sorts, calling for an “international market” of insurance companies that aren’t limited by state lines, in addition to “malpractice reform.”
The LEO writer, Joe Sonka, whom McConnell’s muscle men once threw out of a press conference because he has the temerity to write, like, facts and stuff, went on to slice and dice McConnell’s argument: “Kynect could not have existed without the Affordable Care Act, and it would cease to exist if the Affordable Care Act ceased to exist. There would be no people eligible for the expanded Medicaid—the large majority of those who signed up through Kynect—and there would be no exchange for people to sign up for affordable private insurance with federal subsidies. Saying that Kynect is unconnected with the ACA or its repeal is just mind-numbingly false. The ACA and Kynect are one in the same.”
This is obvious to anyone with a brain. The category of humans with a brain includes McConnell. He’s not that stupid. That leaves only one other choice: hypocritical. Well, two other choices: hypocritical and lying. That is, he knows Kynect can’t exist without the ACA, but he just said it anyway, without any concern for the truth. And the hypocrisy part comes in, of course, because, well, how can he have stood up there for years saying that, no, Americans should not be permitted to get health care the Obama way, and he’s going to strike it down the second he can—but Kentuckians, they’re different?
This gives Grimes an opening she didn’t have. More than 430,000 Kentuckians have health care now through Kynect. Mitch wants to take it away. No, wait, he doesn’t! Well, he wants to take Obamacare away, and Kynect came through Obamacare, but somehow he’s going to keep Kynect. And he’s going to go buy a new Oldsmobile, even though Olds is out of business, and he’s gonna campaign with Colonel Sanders, even though he’s been dead since 1980, and once he’s reelected he’s going to privatize Medicare—except in Kentucky, because Kentucky is different. Grimes’s media team, a talented bunch in my experience, should be able to have quite a lot of fun with this.
The Lexington Herald-Leader sure did, raking McConnell over the coals Wednesday. It wrote:
Asked specifically if Kynect should be dismantled, McConnell said: “I think that’s unconnected to my comments about the overall question.”
Huh?
That’s a quote that should live forever, or at least until Election Day. The super-smart insiders may be right, though, about one thing. McConnell won’t make “a mistake.” He’ll make several.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 29, 2014
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