Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, recently penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal titled, How the Senate is Supposed to Work.
In the op-ed, McConnell identifies his philosophy of running the Senate – finding areas of agreement between the two parties, and working to “get things done” in those areas.
McConnell lists a number of areas where he has worked with Democrats and President Obama: curbing human trafficking, a free-trade bill, a five-year highway spending bill, and a rewrite of the education law known as “No Child Left Behind.”
One of the reasons why Mitch McConnell’s leadership has been a failure is because he has not rolled out an agenda that shows the stark differences between the big government ideas of the left and the small government ideas of conservatives. The few policy areas where he has done so, like the budget, have merely been faux campaign documents full of fake promises, phony numbers, and budget gimmicks.
Merely taking McConnell’s supposed accomplishments at face value is evidence of a lack of leadership on the part of Senate Republicans in this Congress.
I suppose one could argue that the stated accomplishments are “good,” and maybe they are, when considered in isolation. But McConnell’s tenure has not taken place in a vacuum. And for each one of his self-declared accomplishments, McConnell has had to trade something away.
So here is a more accurate list of what McConnell has accomplished as Senate Majority Leader.
$500 billion in new Medicare spending, financed by the taxpayers. In 1997, Congress created a budget agreement that was supposed to control the amount Medicare paid to doctors. Future Congress’s decided not to live by those spending restraints, and Congress has been voting every year to avoid those spending cuts. Amazingly, 98 percent of those spending increases were responsibly paid for with offsets.
However, that was not the case last year in Mitch McConnell’s Senate. Instead, McConnell decided to get rid of these spending restraints permanently, in a way that was completely financed by taxpayer debt, with a price tag of more than $500 billion over the next 20 years.
A $305 billion highway bill that gave Obama everything he wanted. McConnell claims the passage of a five-year highway spending bill as one of his accomplishments. He must solely be thinking about passage, however, because the substance of the bill is nothing to be proud of.
The bill increased spending above the historical norm in each year, eventually by more than $6 billion. In total, this Republican “victory” will spend $305 billion on programs desperately in need of reform, and on wasteful programs like highway beautification and turtle tunnels.
This bill does nothing to fix the Highway Trust Fund, which is supposed to pay for highway construction with gas taxes. Furthermore, the bill makes no spending cuts, nor does it offer a reasonable compromise in simply freezing spending. Instead, this hands Obama a bigger government, higher spending highway bill.
Doing nothing about Obama’s executive amnesty. Of all of McConnell’s so-called accomplishments, this one might be the ringer. As you may recall, President Obama issued an executive order in 2014 to give illegal immigrants who have been in the US for at least five years, and who are parents of US citizens or legal residents, a three-year work permit. A Social Security number and a driver’s license come with it. At the time, the Pew Research Center estimated that 3.5 million current illegal immigrants would qualify for the program.
This so outraged Republicans that they turned to the one power they had – the power of the purse. In 2014, Republicans refused to pass the Department of Homeland Security funding bill, in the hopes that the new Republican Senate would de-fund Obama’s executive order in 2015.
Apparently, no one got the memo to Senator McConnell. In one of his first acts as majority leader, McConnell let the bill pass without so much as a fight.
Don’t like Obama’s executive amnesty? Thank Mitch McConnell.
Negotiating away $2 trillion in spending cuts. In a move that continues to outrage conservatives, McConnell and former House Speaker John Boehner struck a deal with President Obama last year that eliminated $2 trillion in spending cuts.
https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/06/sorry-mitch-your-list-of-accomplishments-sucks#sthash.W7mSXYYQ.dpuf
