(Jim Young/Reuters)
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's debt ceiling plan is getting a cool response from his
conservative colleagues in the Senate.
Senate conservatives are withholding their support for Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell's (Ky.) fallback plan to raise the debt limit....
"My focus is to take a different approach," said Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), who offered a budget plan earlier this year cutting hundreds of billions of dollars in spending.
"I really need to get on a path to a balanced budget. That's what the cut, cap and balance plan would do. It would balance the budget," he said....
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who said that's also his concern, declined to endorse the McConnell plan.
But McConnell is fighting back, putting the fight into the baldest political terms, defaulting to his number one goal for this legislative session, making sure President Obama is not re-elected in 2012.
The Kentucky Republican, appearing on Laura Ingraham's program, repeatedly pointed to the political toil that congressional Republicans endured during the mid-'90s when they squared off against then-President Bill Clinton over government spending.
"[W]e knew shutting down the government in 1995 was not going to work for us. It helped Bill Clinton get reelected. I refuse to help Barack Obama get reelected by marching Republicans into a position where we have co-ownership of a bad economy," McConnell said. "It didn't work in 1995. What will happen is the administration will send out to 80 million Social Security recipients and to military families and they will all start attacking members of Congress. That is not a useful place to take us. And the president will have the bully pulpit to blame Republicans for all this disruption."
"If we go into default he will say Republicans are making the economy worse," he concluded. "And all of a sudden we have co-ownership of a bad economy. That is a very bad position going into an election. My first choice was to do something important for the country. But my second obligation is to my party and my conference to prevent them from being sucked into a horrible position politically that would allow the president, probably, to get reelected because we didn't handle this difficult situation correctly."
These are not statesmen Obama is trying to negotiate with. They're nihilists who will sacrifice anything and destroy anything to get and keep power. In this case, they can't do so without raising the debt limit. Wall Street and corporate America haven't given them any choice, hence McConnell's bizarre capitulation. Make no mistake, goal number one for him and the rest of the GOP remains defeating Obama at all costs, whatever the consequences, as long as the overlords allow it.