Caught on Tape: What Mitch McConnell Complained About to a Roomful of
Billionaires (Exclusive)
http://www.thenation.com/article/181363/caught-tape-what-mitch-mcconnell-complained-about-roomful-billionaires-exclusive#
[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of
interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the
articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ]
At a secret
meeting of elite donors convened by the Koch brothers, McConnell laid out his
plan for shrinking the federal government and whined about having to vote on
minimum wage bills.
August 26, 2014
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. June 19, 2014.
(Reuters/Yuri Gripas)
Last week, in
an interview with Politico,
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) outlined his plan to shut down
President Obama’s legislative agenda by placing riders on appropriations bills.
Should Republicans take control of the Senate in the 2014 elections, McConnell
intends to pass spending bills that “have a lot of restrictions on the
activities of the bureaucracy.”
What McConnell
didn’t tell Politico was that two
months ago, he made the same promise to a secret strategy conference of conservative
millionaire and billionaire donors hosted by the Koch brothers. The Nation and The Undercurrent obtained an audio
recording of McConnell’s remarks to the gathering, called “American Courage:
Our Commitment to a Free Society.” In the question-and-answer period following
his June 15 session titled “Free Speech: Defending First Amendment Rights,”
McConnell says:
“So in the
House and Senate, we own the budget. So what does that mean? That means that we
can pass the spending bill. And I assure you that in the spending bill, we will
be pushing back against this bureaucracy by doing what’s called placing riders
in the bill. No money can be spent to do this or to do that. We’re going to go
after them on healthcare, on financial services, on the Environmental
Protection Agency, across the board (inaudible). All across the federal
government, we’re going to go after it.”
McConnell’s
pledge to “go after” Democrats on financial services—a reference to declawing
Dodd-Frank regulation—is a key omission from his Politico interview. He has been a vocal opponent of the Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau in particular, and presumably under his Senate
leadership funding for the CFPB would be high on the list of riders for the
appropriations chopping block. According to the Center for Responsive Politics,
Wall Street was the number-one contributor to McConnell’s campaign committee
from 2009 to 2014.
McConnell is
running against Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes in a close contest that could
determine which party controls the Senate. Total spending in the race is
expected to exceed $100 million, which would make it the most expensive Senate
election in history. As of July 21, PACs and individuals affiliated with Koch
Industries have given at least $41,800 to McConnell’s campaign committee
in this election cycle—a figure that does not include any funding to outside
groups that could spend heavily in the race’s closing weeks.
Recently,
Grimes has begun airing ads that criticize McConnell for
“voting seventeen times against raising the minimum wage” and “twelve times
against extending unemployment benefits for laid-off workers.” Perhaps
unsurprisingly, McConnell himself seems quite proud of this legislative record,
at least in front of an audience comprised of wealthy donors. After he lays out
his agenda to shrink the federal government “across the board,” McConnell says:
“And we’re not
going to be debating all these gosh darn proposals. That’s all we do in the
Senate is vote on things like raising the minimum wage (inaudible)—cost the
country 500,000 new jobs; extending unemployment—that’s a great message for retirees;
uh, the student loan package the other day, that’s just going to make things
worse, uh. These people believe in all the wrong things.”
In late April,
Senate Republicans, led by McConnell, successfully filibustered a bill to
increase the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, a widely popular measure that
would increase wages for at least 16.5 million Americans. Earlier in the year,
McConnell also led a filibuster of a three-month
extension of unemployment insurance to some 1.7 million Americans. At one point
in the negotiations, he offered a deal to extend unemployment only if Democrats
agreed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, even though the ACA does not add to
the federal deficit.
Just days
before he addressed the Koch brothers’ billionaire donor summit, McConnell was
instrumental in blocking Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to help Americans
refinance their growing student loan debt. Warren’s plan would have been funded
by a new minimum tax on America’s wealthiest. After McConnell’s filibuster,
Warren began campaigning for Grimes in Kentucky saying, “Mitch McConnell is there for
millionaires and billionaires. He is not there for people who are working hard
playing by the rules and trying to build a future for themselves.” On the campaign stump, McConnell has said
that “not everybody needs to go to Yale” and that cash-strapped students should
look into for-profit colleges.
The main
thrust of McConnell’s remarks to the Koch conference were about his pet issue, campaign finance,
which he regards as a matter of free speech. (A full transcript of McConnell’s
remarks is available here). The senator
recounted the history of campaign finance reform in America from the twentieth
century through today, sharing opinions and personal anecdotes along the way.
On Democrats:
“They, they are frightened of, of their critics. They don’t want to join the
tradition in open discourse. They want to use the power of the government to
quiet the voices of their critics.” (According to a 2013 report from Public Campaign Action
Fund, McConnell led sixty-seven filibusters in 2012, more than the total number
of filibusters (fifty-eight) in the fifty-four years between 1917 and 1970).
On Citizens United
and money in politics: “So all
Citizens United did was to level the playing field for corporate speech…. We
now have, I think, the most free and open system we’ve had in modern times. The
Supreme Court
allowed all of you to participate in the process in a variety of different
ways. You can give to the candidate of your choice. You can give to Americans
for Prosperity, or something else, a variety of different ways to push back
against the party of government.”
On McCain-Feingold:
“The worst day of my political life was when President George W. Bush signed
McCain-Feingold into law in the early part of his first Administration.”
To put that in
perspective, Mitch McConnell’s thirty-five-year career in the Senate saw the
9/11 terrorist attacks that killed thousands of Americans, the 2008 housing
meltdown that threatened the entire economy and Barack Obama’s election, to
cite a conservative bĂȘte noire. But it was McCain-Feingold, the bill that
banned soft money and unlimited donations to party committees, that constitutes
the worst day of his political life.
August 26, 2014
Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan
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