WASHINGTON (AP) — One of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s guiding principles is: “There’s no education in the second kick of a mule.” Now,…
WASHINGTON (AP) — One of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s guiding principles is: “There’s no education in the second kick of a mule.”
Now, deep into a government shutdown he cautioned President Donald Trump against, McConnell is not about to let himself be kicked again.
The Republican leader has been conspicuously deferential to Trump since the shutdown began. He’s waiting on the president and Democrats to make a deal to end it. The result is an unusually inactive profile for the GOP leader who’s often the behind-the-scenes architect of intricate legislative maneuvers to resolve bitter partisan stalemates.
Democrats complain publicly — and some Republicans grumble privately — that the Senate is not fulfilling its role as a co-equal branch of government, a legislative check on the executive. They worry about ordinary Americans facing hardship waiting for a resolution to the standoff over Trump’s demand for money to build the border wall with Mexico.
But the Kentucky Republican, who is up for re-election in 2020 in a state where Trump tends to be more popular than he is, sees no other choice than to stand back and let the president who took the country into the shutdown decide how he wants to get out of it.
McConnell said the “solution to the problem” is for the president, who he reminds is the only one who can sign a bill into law, to reach an agreement with Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. “There’s no way around that,” he told reporters this week.
Democrats wonder whatever happened to the mastermind of earlier legislative logjams. After all, the 30-year veteran of the Senate devised the way out of a debt ceiling crisis when tea party Republicans challenged then-President Obama; he brokered the deal with then-Vice President Joe Biden to avert the so-called “fiscal cliff.”
“A few years ago, Leader McConnell remarked, ‘Remember me? I’m the guy that gets us out of shutdowns,’” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, unearthing an interview McConnell did some years ago.
