Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell really doesn't want a government shutdown on his watch. Really, really doesn't want it. But if he manages to get past the end of this month and that hurdle, he's got even more barriers to proving he—and Republicans—can govern: getting a budget agreement, getting a debt ceiling hike, passing a long-term transportation funding bill. He's betting he can get through it by
playing a long game.
To hear the Senate majority leader tell it, Republicans have a real chance to achieve a wish-list of conservative action items—but most of it will have to wait until 2017, when a Republican president takes office.
Until then, the Kentucky Republican is intent on steering the GOP away from a politically disastrous government shutdown this month and to avoid the kinds of headlines that could damage his party’s chances of winning the Oval Office, not to mention his own prospects of remaining majority leader beyond next year. Reversing President Barack Obama's Iran deal, stopping his executive orders on labor and climate policy ... even serious entitlement reform will be within reach if Republicans can hold onto the Senate and take the White House next year, McConnell said.
"This is a critical election, in my view, about whether we want to continue to go down this European path, or whether we want to recapture the growth rates and the greatness we've had most of our history," McConnell told POLITICO during an extensive interview in his Capitol office overlooking the National Mall. Until 2017, Republicans are "going to make what progress we can for the country in spite of this far-left administration with which, frankly, most of my members and myself have very little in common."
That's McConnell's alternate reality in which President Obama is far left (he's not), the country is laboring under a humungous deficit (
it's not) and he can stop Ted Cruz in his megalomaniacal campaign for president from shutting down the government. McConnell might actually be able to stop Cruz in the Senate, but he can't do much about Cruz's control of the group of House Republicans that Speaker John Boehner absolutely cannot control.
That's the group hellbent on defunding Planned Parenthood knowing that it didn't do anything illegal and damn the consequences. It's the group Boehner is going out of his way to appease with two votes this week to push Planned Parenthood defunding and yet another anti-abortion bill. He thinks this will mollify them and they'll happily vote for a short-term funding bill that includes Planned Parenthood. He's wrong.
Of course, McConnell has even less control over House members than Boehner. So when he insists that there won't be a government shutdown on his watch, that the Senate will remain in Republican hands and there will be a Republican president in 2017, his grasp on reality has to be questioned.