It appears that Mitch McConnell is so confident not only in his own reelection, but the prospect of Republicans picking up five or more Senate seats this year that he's already measuring he drapes for his assumed new role as majority leader. In the below Politico article, Mitch (“There's Not Enough Money in Politics”) McConnell practically came out and said that if you like the level of obstructionism from Republicans ever since President Obama took office, that's nothing compared to what he has in mind if Republicans are in the Senate majority next year.
McConnell's first order of business would be, of course, to bring the level of Republican obstructionism in Congress to a whole new level, doing whatever he can to handcuff President Obama.
Essentially, what McConnell plans to do is to nullify the will of the electorate over the past two presidential elections, and take away as much, if not all, of President Obama's powers as head of the Executive branch, by dictating how the executive branch is to do its job through riders to budget bills.
His plan is to have the Congress micromanage everything in the federal government using budgetary riders and arcane budgetary procedures to force them onto the president and his administration and would, if it works, essentially make Congress the acting president in all but name.
http://www.politico.com/...
Of course, nothing's certain about November yet, in terms of not only whether Republicans will win a majority of seats in the Senate, but even whether McConnell will be a member of that once "august" body. McConnell did, after all, start measuring the drapes for a Republican president as early as Jan. 20, 2009, the day President Obama took office, vowing to spend the next four years ensuring that Obama would be a one-term president.
That four-year exercise in measuring the drapes for a Republican president come
Jan. 20, 2013 didn't exactly pan out very well for McConnell, so his record as a prognosticator isn't all that good.
With Republicans needing to pick up just five or six Senate seats this November (possibly just five, if Independent Angus King of Maine sticks to his previous threat to switch to the Republican caucus if Republicans do well this November), McConnell and his team could find themselves in the majority come January. In fact, Republicans may only need to pick up four Senate seats on Nov. 4, if the Louisiana Senate race goes to a December runoff (that state requires the winner to have a majority and if no one gets a majority of the votes, a runoff election is required among the top two candidates). If Republicans pick up four seats during the Nov. 4 election and force a runoff in Louisiana in December, then they still have a chance at the majority by both winning the runoff and cajoling King into following up on his threat and caucus with Republicans during the next Congress.
The larger question here is whether McConnell is counting his chickens before they hatch. It seems just a little bit premature to me for him to be telling people what he plans to do next year, when it's still uncertain as to whether he himself will even be there.