Once again, Senate Republican “Leader” Mitch McConnell has demonstrated that he is not the leader of conservatives in the Senate by predicting – indeed almost wishing for – the existing 50-50 Senate to remain in place.
In remarks made while attending a Chamber of Commerce luncheon in Kentucky reported by NBC News McConnell said "I think there's probably a greater likelihood the House flips than the Senate. Senate races are just different — they're statewide, candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome...".
"Right now, we have a 50-50 Senate and a 50-50 country, but I think when all is said and done this fall, we're likely to have an extremely close Senate, either our side up slightly or their side up slightly," McConnell predicted.
"McConnell would rather lose the Senate than win with primary candidates he tried to knife. That's why he's having a temper tantrum right now instead of doing his job," tweeted The Federalist CEO Sean Davis.
"The truth is he wants every GOP nominee to be another Liz Cheney rather than someone responsive to GOP voters," he added according to reporting by our friends at NewsMax.
Our old friend radio and Blaze TV host Steve Deace also panned McConnell's remarks, "McConnell is telling you now what people like me have been telling you for years — the GOP would rather lose to Democrats than lose control of the party to its base," tweeted Steve Deace, an influential conservative talk show host. "That's what 'electable' means — someone they approve of. Ditch would rather have [Sen. Mark] Kelly [D-Ariz.] than [Republican challenger Blake] Masters, for example."
And conservative rockstar Mollie Hemingway also dropped a truth bomb on the Murder Turtle tweeting:
McConnell bizarrely signals he's preparing for failure.
1) Unlike McCarthy, he previously refused to outline an agenda, saying he could flip Senate on sufficiency of Biden's failures alone.
2) He hot mad that voters rejected some of his picks, so he wants them to lose as a lesson
But conservative disillusionment with McConnell isn’t limited to him undermining conservative Republican Senate candidates. McConnell has also failed in his second most important role – stopping the Biden-Schumer-Pelosi agenda.
McConnell's self-created image as a master legislative strategist is in tatters because Schumer has out-maneuvered McConnell on most of the important legislative packages during the 117th Congress.
McConnell looked like a complete buffoon when his Democratic counterpart, Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., announced a deal with Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., on a tax-and-spending binge mere hours after McConnell and 16 other Republicans voted on final passage of a pork-laden spending bill they had previously vowed to stop.
As Christopher Jacobs explained for The Federalist, McConnell's Cave #1 was on the Debt Limit.
McConnell had an enormous amount of leverage — and what did he do with it? First, he and ten other colleagues gave Democrats their votes to pass a short-term increase in the debt limit last October. Two months later, he and Schumer concocted a backroom deal creating an entirely new process for Democrats to raise the debt limit. In this case, Republicans didn’t vote for the debt limit itself — but 14 Republicans voted for the process that allowed the increase to take place.
McConnell's Cave #2 was the Chips Bill. In late June, when word leaked that Schumer and Manchin had resumed serious talks about reviving Build Back Bankrupt, McConnell sent out a very clear warning that any attempt to pass “a partisan reconciliation bill” would lead to the death of a bipartisan bill promoting semiconductor chip production.
However, as Mr. Jacobs reported, both before and after McConnell’s threat, Democrats never stopped pursuing “a partisan reconciliation bill.” They just spent two weeks setting their sights slightly lower than they had in early July, focusing “only” on health care.
McConnell gave up on the red line he laid down on the semiconductor bill and caved on the principle he first laid out on the last day of June: That any attempt to pass “a partisan reconciliation bill” — no matter how large or small — would lead to the death of the chip legislation.
When Democrats publicly shifted towards a health-care-only reconciliation, McConnell gave the green light for passage of the chips legislation, which backfired on him in dramatic fashion.
McConnell's Cave #3 was the Infrastructure and Reconciliation spending package McConnell and other Senate Republicans voted for last summer: That agreeing to a $1 trillion bipartisan spending binge on “infrastructure” would prevent Democrats from ever congealing around a tax-and-spending package via budget reconciliation.
That premise always seemed dubious at best, observed Mr. Jacobs, since Democrats’ differences surrounding the legislation came more in degree than in kind. Even Manchin supports higher taxes and more government spending, albeit not as much as progressives and socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
But that attitude, whereby Republican lawmakers like McConnell generally approve of something slightly smaller than the Democrats’ big-government approach, typifies the Republican “leadership” in Washington. As it happens, the 17 Republicans who voted to pass the chips bill approved legislation stuffed with corporate welfare and pork-barrel spending, just slightly less than the original versions of the legislation that passed the House and Senate.
Former President Donald Trump spoke for most conservatives we know when he said in a post to his Truth Social app, “Why do Republicans(sic) Senators allow a broken down hack politician, Mitch McConnell, to openly disparage hard working Republican candidates for the United States Senate.”
Mitch McConnell is no Republican “leader.” He’s the leader of the Washington DC Uniparty and the only way to get rid of him is to elect real conservatives who will vote for someone truly committed to conservative principles to lead Senate Republicans.
Joe Biden economy
inflation
drug price controls
subsidies
green energy
tax increases
government spending cuts
Inflation Reduction Act
Mitch McConnell
CHIPs Act
Chuck Schumer
Joe Manchin