Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Mitch Turtles Up, Part 2

My own Senator, Mitch The Turtle McConnell apparently has some sort of mild dementia or something, because he just can't remember his own massive obstruction of any of President Obama's agenda over the last three years.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has embraced the argument that President Obama was able to pass every bit of his legislative agenda in his first two years thanks to large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. It’s intended as a counterpoint to the President’s re-election strategy of attacking the congressional GOP as do-nothing obstructionists. But it’s also a revisionist history of the 111th Congress, during which McConnell more than any other Republican in Washington stood athwart Obama’s agenda to great effect.

The White House has “been trying to pretend like the President just showed up yesterday, just got sworn in and started fresh,” McConnell declared Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. “In fact, he’s been in office for three years. He got everything he wanted from a completely compliant Congress for two of those three years… We are living in the Obama economy.”

This isn’t a new claim for McConnell, but it’s audacious even by Washington’s lax standards. It was McConnell, after all, who led Senate Republicans in serial filibusters — a record-setting numbersuccessfully thwarting large chunks of Obama’s agenda.

Mitch pretending like Republicans had nothing to do with Congress for the last three years is insulting and stupid.  Senate Republicans filibustered the DREAM Act, the American Jobs Act, The Paycheck Fairness Act, climate change legislation, immigration reform legislation, they blocked the President's appointments to the bench and to cabinet positions, and they stripped provisions from the stimulus, the budget appropriation bills, held the country hostage over payroll taxes, unemployment benefit extensions and the debt ceiling.  Multiple times.

But President Obama "got everything he wanted"?  Really?  That's ridiculous on a number of levels...just like McConnell is.  McConnell owns a big chunk of Congress's 9% approval rating, and he knows it.

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