Tag: Sen. McConnell

McConnell backs away from warning businesses to stay out of politics

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Wednesday backed off his stern warning that companies such as Major League Baseball, Delta and Coca-Cola should stay out of high-profile political fights after they criticized Georgia’s new election law.

“I didn’t say that very artfully yesterday. They’re certainly entitled to be involved in politics. They are. My principal complaint is they didn’t read the darn bill,” McConnell said Wednesday at a press conference in Paducah, Kentucky.

The GOP leader softened his tough talk from earlier in the week, when he warned that companies would face “serious consequences” if they become “a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country.” Continue reading.

The Memo: Politics upended as top Republicans slam corporate America

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has lashed out at corporations involving themselves in politics this week — a development that makes it seem as if politics has entered an alternative reality.

For his entire career, McConnell has been assiduous in courting big business and has been a staunch defender of corporate interests.

He has been a stalwart opponent of campaign finance reform and, roughly a decade ago, expressed approval of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case. The court’s 2010 ruling bestowed upon corporations many of the rights to free speech enjoyed by individual citizens and loosened restrictions on political donations. Continue reading.

McConnell says companies should stay out of politics — unless they’re donating money

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After the Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that companies could finance election spending, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) celebrated the prospect that corporate America would enter — and influence — the political fray.

“For too long, some in this country have been deprived of full participation in the political process,” he said in a statement at the time. He hailed the decision, Citizens United, as “an important step” in “restoring the First Amendment rights of these groups.”

But just over a decade later, McConnell has a different message for companies: Unless it involves money, they had better stay quiet. Continue reading.

‘Strom Thurmond disagrees’: Historians refute McConnell claim that filibuster has ‘no racial history’

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Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday made the sweeping claim that the legislative filibuster has “no racial history at all” and further insisted that historians don’t dispute his view—an assertion that historians immediately disputed.

“Strom Thurmond disagrees,” tweeted historian Patrick Wyman, referring to the late Republican senator from South Carolina whose 24-hour filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957 remains the longest in U.S. history.

During a press briefing Tuesday, McConnell offered a full-throated defense of the filibuster amid growing calls by Senate Democrats to significantly weaken or abolish the 60-vote rule, which in its current form gives the minority party enormous power to block legislation. Progressive advocacy groups and some Democratic lawmakers have taken to describing the filibuster as a “Jim Crow relic” to denote its past use as a weapon against civil rights legislation. Continue reading.

Russian company ‘suspending its investments’ in Kentucky project pushed by McConnell: report

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) suffered a major economic defeat in Kentucky as a Russian company founded by oligarch Oleg Deripaska pulled its financing.

“According to a Bloomberg report, Rusal, the formerly blacklisted Russian company with a major stake in the 10-figure project, is suspending its investments while it awaits word that its U.S. partners have raised the necessary funds. So far the company has sunk at least $65 million in the proposed mill, to be built by Unity Aluminum, previously known as Braidy Industries,” WUKY-TV reported Thursday. “The news is only the latest twist for the troubled project, which has been plagued by fundraising questions and the ouster of the CEO formerly overseeing the venture. Rusal’s involvement has been controversial from the start, after it was revealed that the company had been subject to sanctions.”

In 2019, The Washington Post reported how McConnell blocked a bill to keep sanctions in place on the company. Continue reading.

‘I’ve got news for Mitch McConnell — he broke the Senate’: Ex-senator kills ’empty threat’ from GOP leader

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) took to the floor Tuesday to claim that if Democrats change the filibuster now that they are in charge, it would be a “scorched Earth” move. The problem with the claim, according to one former senator, is that McConnell is the one who broke the senate to begin with.

Speaking to MSNBC’s Brian Williams, former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) said that McConnell’s threats at this point are empty because there’s nothing worse that he can do whether in or out of power. 

“Well, that’s what he’s trying to do, but I’ve got news for Mitch McConnell: he kind of broke the Senate,” she said. “He’s the one that has used the rules in a way they were never intended to be used. And he has done it with gleeful abandon over and over and over again. The senate has become broken. The regular order is gone. There’s not debate. There are no amendments. It is just a mere shadow of what it used to be. So, the question is, should you have to stand up and own your obstructionism?” Continue reading.

Spooked McConnell Threatens ‘Scorched Earth’ To Protect Filibuster

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As momentum grows to eliminate a tool Republicans have used over the years to kill overwhelmingly popular legislation, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday threatened to make the Senate into an unbearably slow and hostile work environment as retribution.

“Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin, can even begin to imagine what a completely scorched-earth Senate would look like,” the Kentucky senator declared in a speech on the Senate floor, referring to what he’d do if Democrats repealed the filibuster, the extended debating tactic that makes it possible for the chamber’s minority to block legislation. Invocation of cloture, a move to limit the debate, requires a total of 60 votes to be adopted.

McConnell said he’d require a quorum to be present to conduct even mundane business. That would slow down work in the Senate because it would pull lawmakers from committee hearings and take away time senators have to meet with constituents in their offices in Washington, D.C. Continue reading.

McConnell says he’d back Trump as 2024 GOP nominee

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who just weeks ago excoriated former President Trump on the Senate floor, blaming him for the riot at the Capitol, on Thursday said he would back Trump if he wins the party’s 2024 presidential nomination.

“There’s a lot to happen between now and ’24. I’ve got at least four members that I think are planning on running for president. … Should be a wide open race,” McConnell said during an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier.

Asked if he would support Trump if he wins the party’s nomination in 2024, McConnell added: “The nominee of the party? Absolutely.” Continue reading.

Lindsay Graham’s friends worry about how he’s changed as he jockeys for the crown in a pro-Trump GOP

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In a profile of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in the Washington Post, close associates of the GOP lawmaker state that he is going “all in” to continue to support former President Donald Trump and set himself up as the leader of the Trump wing of the party and that has some of them wondering what has happened to him.

While Trump’s influence with the GOP appears to be dissipating — with a battle with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for control of the party about to take center stage according to Politico — Graham is throwing in with the ex-president, speaking with him almost daily and wrangling invites to Mar-a-Lago for weekends of golf.

“Graham’s post-presidential embrace of Trump — which puts him squarely at odds with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — is the latest twist in his on-again, off-again relationship with a man he once called a ‘kook’ and warned could destroy the party,” the Post report states. “It comes after the four-term senator said he reviewed polling in South Carolina and across the country that shows Trump’s enduring strength among Republicans, even after the Jan. 6 insurrection that resulted in five deaths.” Continue reading.

‘I don’t think he cares about winning’: McConnell ally realizes Trump is all ‘about himself’

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and former President Donald Trump exchanged barbs this week as their feud deepened. But some GOP strategists have realized that Trump may just be in it for himself, the Associated Press reported.

The conversation for the last several years from analysts has been about Trump’s selfishness, as the Milwaukee Independent described it, or his constant need for self-promotion, as biographer David Cay Johnston explained. 

Leading GOP strategists described the exploding feud between the former Republican president and the Senate’s most powerful Republican as, at best, a distraction and, at worst, a direct threat to the party’s path to the House and Senate majorities in next year’s midterms. Continue reading.