ThinkProgress Logo

Stories tagged with “Mitch McConnell

Immigration

Over 100 Economists Call On Congress To Pass Immigration Reform

Douglas Holtz-Eakin

In an open letter released by the American Action Forum (AAF) on Thursday, 111 conservative economists signed a pro-immigration reform letter sent to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). In an effort to garner conservative support to the immigration reform debate, the letter cited the economic benefits of passing an immigration legislation that would help to reduce the deficit.

The letter does not aim to win over Republicans like Sens. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) who staunchly oppose legalization, but it will help Republican leaders on the sideline whose allegiance relies on the signing power of prominent conservative-leaning, pro-immigration supporters like AAF president Douglas Holtz-Eakin and former Republican presidential advisers, R. Glenn Hubbard, Arthur Laffer, Edward Lazear, and Lawrence Lindsey. Additionally, Gov. Jeb Bush (R-FL) released a statement showing his support of an immigration overhaul.

Of one of the many reasons that these conservative economists support the bill, Holtz-Eakin wrote, “according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) an additional 0.1 percent in average economic growth will, over a ten-year period, reduce the federal deficit by over $300 billion.” The CBO is a nonpartisan group that has joined a legion of economic organizations that have concluded that long-term legalization creates positive economic benefits. The CBO findings comes on the heels of a letter written by Stephen Gross, chief actuary of the Social Security Administration who was commissioned by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) to find out the economic impact of the Senate immigration bill. Gross also found that the decade-long legalization process would generate more than $275 billion in revenue for Social Security.

The direct effects of immigration reform would induce a labor-force growth, which in turn would raise the gross domestic product. “A reformed and efficient immigration system” in which a longitudinal study has shown to keep federal benefit systems afloat, would as Holtz-Eakin’s letter puts it, “promote economic growth and ease the challenge of reforming unsustainable federal health and retirement programs.”

Security

Mitch McConnell Backs Away From GOP Claims Of A Benghazi Cover Up

On Sunday, during an appearance on Meet The Press, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) — the GOP leader in the senate — distanced himself from Republican efforts to portray the Obama administration’s response to the attacks on a U.S. diplomatic issue in Benghazi, Libya as a Watergate-level scandal that should result in impeachment. McConnell’s comments come just days after the White House released 100 pages of emails undermining GOP claims that administration officials doctored the public talking points U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice used to discuss the incident on the Sunday morning talk shows.

“You’re talking about others who may have said various things about this, let me tell you what I think about it. It’s clear there was inadequate security out there and it’s very clear that it was inconvenient within six weeks of the election, for the administration to in effect announce, that it was a terrorist attack,” McConnell said. “I think that’s worth examining, it is going to be examined.”

But asked repeatedly if Republicans should tone down their attacks against the administration, McConnell demurred, saying only that Obama should allow for an investigation. He also couldn’t identify specific evidence of an administration cover-up:

DAVID GREGORY (HOST): But you have specific evidence that they made up a tale, or was it based on information they had at the time?

MCCONNELL: Well, the talking points clearly were not accurate. I think getting to the bottom of this is an important investigation.

Watch it:

E-mails between the White House, CIA, State Department, Justice Department, and the FBI show that Rice’s remarks reflect the early view of the intelligence community and were produced with few changes from the White House. On Thursday, CBS’ Major Garrett reported that Republican sources misquoted or significantly embellished the emails officials used to draft Rice’s remarks in order to implicate the administration in a conspiracy to mislead the public about Benghazi.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) have both argued that Obama could be impeached for his handling of the attacks in Benghazi.

Update

During an appearance on Fox News Sunday, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) also admitted that he did not know if the Obama administration engaged in a “cover-up” of the Benghazi attacks.

Justice

Sentencing Commission Nominee Supported Handcuffing Prisoners To Hitching Posts Under Hot Sun

Judge William Pryor

Handcuffing a prisoner to a hitching post for seven hours, denying him water, and then taunting him about his thirst as the summer sun beat down upon him was a “a cost-effective, safe and relatively pain-free way to impel inmates to work,” according to the Alabama Department of Corrections, and a brief filed by former Alabama Attorney General William Pryor (R) in 2002 called upon the Supreme Court to defer to this determination. Thanks to President George W. Bush, Pryor is now a federal appellate judge. And, if Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) gets his way, he will soon have even more control over what kinds of punishments are doled out to federal defendants.

The powerful United States Sentencing Commission sets the federal sentencing guidelines which form the basis of most criminal sentencing handed down by federal judges. Although there are some constitutional limits on the extent to which the Commission can increase federal sentences by altering the Guidelines, they remain one of the most potent vehicles for shaping federal sentences. Because no more than four of the Commission’s seven voting members may belong to the same party, the President traditionally names three members selected by leaders of his opposition party. According to the White House, McConnell selected Pryor to hold one of the Republican Party’s three seats.

There are many reasons why Judge Pryor is a bad choice for any position that requires him to show mercy and compassion, but his conduct in the hitching post case it one of the most blatant. Alabama’s practice of handcuffing prisoners to hitching posts reached the Supreme Court in 2002, and the Court’s description of the practice alleged in that case little doubt that it amounts to torture:

On May 11, 1995, while Hope was working in a chain gang near an interstate highway, he got into an argument with another inmate. Both men were taken back to the Limestone prison and handcuffed to a hitching post. Hope was released two hours later, after the guard captain determined that the altercation had been caused by the other inmate. During his two hours on the post, Hope was offered drinking water and a bathroom break every 15 minutes, and his responses to these offers were recorded on an activity log. Because he was only slightly taller than the hitching post, his arms were above shoulder height and grew tired from being handcuffed so high. Whenever he tried moving his arms to improve his circulation, the handcuffs cut into his wrists, causing pain and discomfort.

On June 7, 1995, Hope was punished more severely. He took a nap during the morning bus ride to the chaingang’s worksite, and when it arrived he was less than prompt in responding to an order to get off the bus. An exchange of vulgar remarks led to a wrestling match with a guard. Four other guards intervened, subdued Hope, handcuffed him, placed him in leg irons and transported him back to the prison where he was put on the hitching post. The guards made him take off his shirt, and he remained shirtless all day while the sun burned his skin. He remained attached to the post for approximately seven hours. During this 7 hour period, he was given water only once or twice and was given no bathroom breaks. At one point, a guard taunted Hope about his thirst. According to Hope’s affidavit: “[The guard] first gave water to some dogs, then brought the water cooler closer to me, removed its lid, and kicked the cooler over, spilling the water onto the ground.”

This is what Judge Pryor’s brief asked the Court to wave off as a “a cost-effective, safe and relatively pain-free way to impel inmates to work.” And Mitch McConnell believes that such a man should be allowed to decide which punishments are appropriate for all federal defendants.

Pryor is also a staunch defender of the death penalty, who even once argued that states should be free to execute the intellectually disabled. And he lobbied against a bill changing Alabama’s primary method of carrying out executions from electrocution to lethal injections, arguing that Alabama should not be “bullied by the fear that the Supreme Court” would declare the electric chair unconstitutional.

Security

Mitch McConnell On Boston Bombings: Americans Have Become Complacent About Terrorism

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in a speech on the Senate floor on Tuesday commemorating the Boston Marathon attacks said that some Americans have become complacent about terrorism in such a way that is reminiscent to the time before the 9/11 attacks:

MCCONNELL: On 9/11 we forever disabused of the notion that attacks, like the one that rocked Boston yesterday ,only happen on the field of battle or in distant countries. With the passage of time, however, and the vigilant efforts of our military, intelligence and law enforcement professionals, I think it’s safe to say that for many, the complacency that prevailed prior to September 11th has actually returned. And so we are newly reminded that serious threats to our way of life remain. And today again we recommit ourselves to the fight against terrorism at home and abroad.

Watch the clip:

It’s unclear exactly who McConnell is saying has become complacent regarding terrorism. If he’s referring to the U.S. government, intelligence and military officials have thwarted a number of attacks on the United States since 9/11. And the Los Angeles Times reported on Monday that U.S. counterterrorism efforts have all but wiped out the al-Qaed network founded by Osama bin Laden. Alternatively, is McConnell suggesting that “complacency” by ordinary Americans somehow contributed to the attack?

Justice

Senate GOP Leader Delays Confirmation Vote So He Can Go To A Basketball Game


Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) does not much like it when the Senate is getting things done. Indeed, the frequency of filibusters more than doubled after McConnell became his party’s leader in the Senate. But, as Bloomberg reports, the Minority Leader has now outdone his own ability to come up with reasons for the Senate to avoid doing its job:

The Senate was supposed to vote this afternoon on the nomination of Patty Shwartz as a judge on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That vote has been postponed until tomorrow because Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has other plans: Kentucky’s senior senator will be in the sea of red at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta as his University of Louisville Cardinals take on the University of Michigan Wolverines for the men’s NCAA basketball championship. . . .

Why the schedule foul-up? On March 31, Louisville knocked off Duke University to qualify for the Final Four, setting up a potential conflict for McConnell between the Senate vote and the championship game. He has been a frequent face in the crowd at the team’s NCAA tournament games this year.

A senior Democratic aide said the schedule was adjusted in the expectation that if Louisville made it to the final round, McConnell would want to go to the game. McConnell spokesman Don Stewart pointed out that the schedule change was made before Louisville won its Final Four game against Wichita State University on Saturday and the finals match-up was known.

For the record, it takes 51 votes to confirm a judge, and only 60 to break the filibusters that are now ubiquitous under McConnell’s leadership — and the Senate contains 99 other senators who don’t think that attending a basketball game is more important than their day job. Even excusing McConnell’s decision to place his personal needs ahead of the country, there is no good reason why the Senate cannot simply confirm Shwartz in McConnell’s absence.

Health

Top GOP Senator: We Lost On Obamacare, But We’re Going to Keep Trying To Repeal It Anyway

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell repeated the siren call that Republicans are not going to give up on repealing Obamacare.

But in the same speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, McConnell admitted there is little plausibility to the idea, since Republicans have already lost. “When it came to Obamacare, we gave it everything we have, everything we have, and we just lost.”

McConnell explained that won’t stop Republicans, in a speech where he assured his audience that the GOP is not stuck in the past:

This law is a disaster. Anyone who thinks we’ve moved beyond it is dead wrong. Obamacare should be repealed root and branch. We’re not backing down from this fight.

“It may not seem like it now,” McConnell concluded, “but we’re actually winning.”

Republicans are not, in fact, winning. After more than 30 votes in Congress, a Supreme Court challenge, and a presidential campaign failed to repeal the health reform law, even House Speaker John Boehner admitted “Obamacare is the law of the land.

But many Republicans haven’t accepted that reality. Boehner’s admission earned backlash from his party, while Paul Ryan’s latest House Republican budget still assumes repeal of the law. And Tea Party favorites in the Senate still occasionally threaten to shut down the government unless Obamacare is defunded.

Economy

McConnell: GOP Will Likely Take Debt Ceiling Hostage For Spending Cuts — Again

Republicans and Democrats agreed to increase the debt ceiling for three months at the end of January, but with another deadline approaching in May, the top Senate Republican is hinting that the GOP will again demand spending cuts in exchange for any increase.

That is par for the course for Republicans, who have repeatedly threatened to let the nation default on its obligations if President Obama and Senate Democrats don’t agree to cut spending, but this time, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said the GOP will likely demand cuts to America’s entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security — to agree to an increase in the borrowing limit, The Hill reports:

“Until we make our entitlement programs fit the demographics of our country, you can’t save America, you can’t save the healthcare system,” McConnell said. “There is no revenue solution, I would say to you.”

“We all anticipate that the president’s request of us to raise the debt ceiling, which we’ll probably do sometime this will generate another, hopefully, another discussion about solving the real problem,” he said.

Republicans continue to crow about entitlement reform, ignoring that Social Security is fully solvent for at least two decades, that Obama extended Medicare’s solvency by nine years as part of his sweeping healthcare law, and that at least one of the major reforms Republicans favor — raising the retirement age for Medicare enrollees — would do nothing to improve the program’s health. Meanwhile, the GOP refuses to actually put forth specific entitlement reform plans that would do anything other than end the programs as they exist today.

Using the debt ceiling to extract such cuts is an even less reasonable position, given the pain the GOP’s debt intransigence has already inflicted on the economy. The 2011 debt fight led to increased borrowing costs, hampered job growth for months, and created the automatic budget cuts that went into effect at the beginning of March — all of which burdened an economy that is still struggling to fully recover from the Great Recession. That brinksmanship has led leading policymakers like Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, as well as a vast majority of economists, to call for the abolition of the statutory debt limit.

Alyssa

Theatrical Slut Shaming: Daily Caller Attacks Ashley Judd For Nude Scenes

It’s a sign of how anxious the right wing is about the possibility that Ashley Judd might run for Senate against Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that the attacks on her have geared up before she’s even formally entered the race. There’s the American Crossroads ad trying to frame her as out of touch with a series of relatively anodyne and contextless quotations. And now, the Daily Caller, which has been trying to frame Judd’s feminist beliefs as fringe, has launched the stupidest salvo against her at all: arguing that Judd, because she has done nude scenes for her work as an actress, “has—literally—nothing left to show us.” In an exceptionally gross piece, Taylor Bigler, the Caller’s Entertainment Editor (Entertainment, in Caller parlance, apparently means surfing Mr. Skin and publishing clickbait trash gossip) writes:

We are used to knowing just about everything there is to know about serious political candidates. But will Judd be the first potential senator who has — literally — nothing left to show us? The actress has bared her breasts in several films and has had some raunchy sex scenes in others. According to MrSkin.com, which bills itself as “the largest free nude celebrity movie archive,” Judd has flashed just about everything on-screen. It seems like she was particularly liberal with nudity early on in her career…Judd did a lesbian sex scene in 2002′s Oscar-nominated “Frida” and has nine other films categorized as “sexy” by Mr. Skin, meaning that there is at least one racy scene in those films.

It may come as a surprise to the Daily Caller, but actresses don’t generally take their clothes off on-screen as an expression of some sort of groovy seventies lifestyle, or as a way to have sex with people who are not their spouses or partners. Rather, getting asked to take off some or all of your clothes is, for a lot of actors, a frequent requirement of the job, and something that until recently, tended to be asked of women more frequently than men. When men do get fully naked on-screen, they’re often protected to a certain extent by the comedic framing of the scene, whether it’s Jason Segel stripping down in Forgetting Sarah Marshall for a scene in which his character expects to surprise his girlfriend and ends up getting dumped by her after he refuses to get dressed, or Will Ferrell going streaking in Old School. There’s a separation between actors and their bodies—no one considers men who get naked the sum of junk, the kind of person who, in real life, would pound a lot of beers at a frat party and take off, flapping in the breeze, down a suburban street. Ferrell can get down to his BVDs and still be happily married, raise money for cancer charities, and play the straight man in movies like Stranger Than Fiction. We know that Michael Fassbender is not actually the sex addict he portrayed in Shame in the same way that we know that he doesn’t actually have the capability to manipulate metal with his mind possessed by another one of his characters, X-Men‘s Magneto.

But with actresses, that division appears to be less certain. If a woman takes off her top in a movie, much less baring it all, Mr. Skin and his ilk will be there to catalogue it to make sure people who only want to see her as, in the parlance of that site, “breasts, butt, bush, underwear, sexy,” can skip the parts of her performance that would give her character humanity and context, and would remind us that she’s a woman playing a part. The movies Ashley Judd’s taken her clothes off in tend to have that kind of context, whether she’s playing a woman in love with a mentally ill man who claims to be a veteran in Bug or in Norma Jean and Marilyn, a biopic of Marilyn Monroe, a woman who, in real life, was devoured by audiences’ inability to see both her body and her mind simultaneously. If an actress goes nude for roles frequently, as, say, Lena Dunham has, she’s likely to be the subject of speculation about whether she’s some sort of exhibitionist, rather than whether her nudity enhances her roles, as if there’s no possible creative reason she could have for taking off her clothes or doing sex scenes. It’s a bizarre suspension of logic that applies to all other on-screen actions: no one thinks that Judd’s been married to a southern lawyer pulled into a racially-tinged trial, as she was in Time To Kill, or that she’s killed the ex-husband who framed her for murder as she did in Double Jeopardy, or gives her credit for knowing how Washington and politics work because she’s playing the First Lady in the forthcoming Olympus Has Fallen.
Read more

Economy

McConnell: Debt Makes America Look Like Western Europe, Where Spending Cuts Sparked Recessions

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) reiterated Sunday that the automatic budget cuts that began taking effect March 1 were “modest” cuts that would keep the United States from turning into the Western European countries that have spent the last four years battling high unemployment and repeat recessions.

“We have a $16 trillion national debt,” McConnell said. “Our debt is as big as our economy. That alone makes us look like a Western European country.”

European unemployment hit a new record last week, and the Eurozone re-entered recession in November. Spain and Greece both have unemployment rates above 25 percent, and even Germany, the continent’s stalwart economy, is now contracting. Those struggles have largely occurred because Europe has attempted to reduce debt and deficit levels too quickly instead of focusing on growing the economy.

The United States took a different path after the Great Recession, choosing stimulus instead, and it has so far fared better than Europe. But it is now pursuing the same austere path Europe chose, with sequestration’s automatic budget cuts threatening to damage the recovery the U.S. has already made. McConnell claimed that “spending has exploded,” but while government spending has helped lead past economic recoveries, it has plateaued in the last four years and largely failed to help this recovery.

The cuts McConnell called “modest” will likely only make that worse. The Congressional Budget Office projects that it will lead to reduced economic growth and 750,000 lost jobs, and other projections show that it may hinder growth enough to prevent actual deficit reduction. But when Crowley asked McConnell to address those projections, he refused, saying only, “We promised the American people we’d do this a year and a half ago.”

Justice

Liberal Super PAC Sends Racist Tweet About Mitch McConnell’s Chinese Wife

A liberal super PAC in Kentucky is on the defensive after recently sending a racist tweet attacking Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) wife for being Chinese.

McConnell, running for reelection in 2014, is married to former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, who was born in Taiwan after her family fled mainland China during the Chinese Civil War. One super PAC dedicated to defeating McConnell, Progress Kentucky, has spent months relentlessly hammering the Republican on outsourcing.

However, on February 14, they took the matter a step further and sent the following tweet impugning McConnell’s wife’s heritage as an explanation for why Kentucky jobs have been outsourced:


Progress Kentucky spokesman Curtis Morrison issued the following statement to WFPL on the matter: “It’s not an official statement. It’s a Tweet. And we will remove it if it’s wrong.” Nearly two weeks later, though, the offending tweet has not been deleted.

There are a number of reasons why jobs in the United States have been outsourced, from inevitable globalization forces to corporate tax breaks that reward shipping jobs overseas. McConnell’s wife’s ancestry is not one of them. There are also legitimate reasons to criticize Chao’s tenure as Labor Secretary; her heritage has nothing to do with them.

Unfortunately, xenophobic anti-Chinese messages have become a staple in modern campaigns. The last two election cycles alone have featured racist ads from Republicans, Democrats, and anti-spending front groups. Perhaps the most egregious was an ad from Rep. Mark Amodei (R-NV) in a 2011 special election depicting a heavily-accented Chinese news anchor in the near-future reporting on how American debt led to Chinese army marching in front of the U.S. Capitol as it flies the Chinese flag.

Update

Ignoring the maxim of holes and digging, Progress Kentucky just released a second statement standing by its tweet and denying that it was racist in nature: “Senator Mitch McConnell has a conflict of interest that many are afraid to talk about, and Progress Kentucky is not,” the group said.

Update

Progress Kentucky finally apologizes. The offending tweet has also been deleted.

Older

Switch to Mobile
ThinkProgress Signup Overlay Skip and Continue to ThinkProgress Skip and Continue to ThinkProgress

Sign Up