The Washington Times has a piece out showing that Mitch McConnell is catching hell from his base for his stance on the immigration reform bill that we, the people, soundly trounced by making our voices heard loud and clear.
Sen. Mitch McConnell's close backing of President Bush on immigration and the Iraq war is costing him support among Kentucky Republicans, and, according to some party members, hurting his chances for re-election next year.
He even could face a primary challenge from former Republican gubernatorial candidate Larry Forgy, who contends that Mr. McConnell's in-state problems are compounded by job losses to producers beyond America's borders.
“The average Kentuckian feels we are giving away this country with both hands — jobs are going, essentially the primacy of the people who made this country great is going, and Mitch McConnell is lumped with the Washington types on this,” Mr. Forgy said.
“And the war in Iraq is less troublesome in Kentucky than in many other places, but it is not popular here, and Republican voters see Mitch's views as too close to the president's on the war,” said Mr. Forgy, a Lexington lawyer.
Read the whole thing...
On one hand, I understand the frustration in Kentucky over McConnell's position when he defended the policy of the bill, although ultimately voted against it. (Correction made) The bill was rejected, in large part, because the American people stood up and cried out and made their position known.
So, we disagreed with Mitch McConnell on that issue but the good people of Kentucky should not let that one issue negate the good McConnell has done.
Although I disagreed strongly with that bill, I still respected McConnell's standing on his own principles, it was defeated....nuff said.
The expression, cutting off your nose to spite your face, does apply here.
Remember that Mitch McConnell has shown himself to be a good leader in the Senate, making mincemeat out of the Democratic leadership time and time again, in some instances, he even (as dubbed by Hugh Hewitt) MitchSlapped them silly.
Once instance of this was when he managed to get the senate to vote overwhelmingly to NOT allow Gitmo detainees to be brought on to American soil.
The example of this is in the excerpt I am now going to show you from Hugh Hewitt's piece today:
After a couple of Republican amendments failed, Mitch McConnell took to the floor and offered his own amendment, which was a Sense of the Senate that Guantanamo detainees not be allowed released or moved to U.S. soil. To conservatives, this obviously makes sense. To liberals, especially California’s Dianne Feinstein, one of the chief proponents of the effort to close the detention center at Gitmo and relocate these detainees into the American justice system, especially when tagged onto a student loan and grant bill, you’d think this measure would go down in flames. Except a funny thing happened. The bill was titled in a way that you had to vote yes to vote no, and no to vote yes. The final vote was 94-3, officially putting the Senate on record as saying terrorist detainees shouldn’t be moved to the U.S. Before the Democrats, who clearly hadn’t read the amendment, realized they screwed up, the vote was recorded.
Jim DeMint of South Carolina was the author of the next amendment in line, had just gotten the consent of Bernie Sanders, the presiding officer, to order the yeas and nays. Up stepped Massachusetts senior Senator Ted Kennedy, now obviously aware that he and his colleagues just got bamboozled, and went on a full-throated rant, with reckless disregard to obvious hypocrisy, and blasted DeMint and the Republicans for slowing down the works in the Senate. The rant is worth hearing, so here it is.
Once the rant was over, Kennedy threw the Senate into a quorum call so that the Democrats could regroup. The session progressed well into the night, and McConnell could easily have rested on his laurels, but he wasn’t finished. Colorado Democrat Ken Salazar offered his own irrelevant amendment, asking for a sense of the Senate that President Bush not pardon Scooter Libby. McConnell, with that wry smile he offers when he’s up to something, countered with a secondary amendment to Salazar’s, saying that if it’s fair to bring up the Senate’s view of potential future inappropriate pardons, maybe we should also have a sense of the Senate of past inappropriate pardons, and proceeded to maneuver the Senate clerk into reading off the laundry list of Clinton administration pardons, including those of Marc Rich and others, which again set the Democrats off in a tailspin. After throwing the Senate back into a quorum call for half an hour, the beleaguered Harry Reid came out and pulled the Salazar amendment off the floor. He’d been Mitchslapped twice in one night.
Hewitt titled his piece "The night Mitch McConnell became the leader of the Republican Party." It is worth it to head over and read the whole thing.
He outsmarted the Democrats in the senate, pure and simple and this is the type of man we NEED in the senate.
The good people of Kentucky have made their displeasure known, let that be enough, please.
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