Sen. Mitch McConnell (Jim Young/Reuters)
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is engaging in some
chicken counting.
It’s a long, hard slog between here and the majority for Senate Republicans. So Democrats were taken aback when Minority Leader Mitch McConnell took to the floor this week and declared how he’d run the place if he were in charge. [...]
Planning for a GOP takeover, McConnell and other top Republicans have begun shaping an early legislative agenda for 2013 aimed initially at repealing Obama’s health care law. [...]
With the economy showing signs of life and the prospect of gas prices coming back to earth, McConnell signaled it may make more sense to focus on health care as a campaign tactic.
“It’s the one issue that you can absolutely predict will be there this fall,” McConnell said in the interview. “People talk about gas prices, we don’t know whether they’ll be high in the fall. People talk about what’s the economy going to be like in the fall?”
He seems to be forgetting who is going to be the Republican nominee for president, and this:
REMINDER: Obamacare and Romneycare are not exactly the same. Romneycare covers abortions and undocumented workers.
— @LOLGOP via TweetDeck
It's also rather a turn-around from McConnell of just three weeks ago; the McConnell who said that Republicans needed to be focused on the economy and gas prices and forget about trying to repeal the health law. That was in the middle of the big birth control flap, however, and the disastrous overreach of the Blunt amendment. McConnell is apparently counting on the voters—or Democrats—having very, very short memories.
All of which sounds like McConnell might just be floundering in his world Senate domination plans.