McConnell Kneecaps Himself

by Deacon Blues

You gotta love the GOP dereliction of duty. CBS News releases advance clips of Obama making it clear that government checks would not go out August 3rd if the GOP allows a default. Then Mitch McConnell goes on the Senate floor to smear Obama for only offering “smoke and mirrors”, tax increases, or a default, and states that there can be no real solution to the debt problem until Obama is forced from office.

Then McConnell goes to the White House for the latest meeting with Obama, and offers a half-baked solution that calls for three debt limit increases between now and the election without the GOP getting any actual debt reduction. How? Because McConnell would expect Congress to pass a resolution each time against the debt limit increase (really, the Democratic Senate would do that?) and expect the president to veto the resolution, thereby letting the debt ceiling increase take effect when the Congress fails to override the veto. To McConnell, this would absolve the GOP of any blame for the increased debt, and let the GOP blame the Democrats for it.

Apparently it never entered McConnell’s mind that Obama and the Democrats would simply blast the GOP repeatedly between now and the election for their dereliction of duty and showing the country what GOP control really means: Republicans punt on making the tough decisions when they can’t get their way on taxes. McConnell also thinks there will be no price to pay from his own base when he and Boehner go AWOL on debt reduction, and see Obama simply let the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of 2012, thereby solving a large part of the problem out of the hides of the wealthy and corporations. McConnell also assumes Obama wouldn't simply offer his own package with Democratic support, one that makes real cuts with real revenue increases from loophole closures, and then force the GOP to reject it in the midst of the campaign season to set the narrative.

And then the cigar goes off in McConnell’s face when the reaction amongst conservatives is mixed at best, and the House GOP says his plan is DOA. On a day when McConnell started by smearing Obama, he’s now made himself irrelevant and one of the wacky people on the fringe.

When the pressure is on, McConnell has shown himself to be a flake.