Heartless Mitch McConnell Calls The Government Shutdown a Two Week Paid Vacation

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Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) how little he cares about regular people by calling the government shutdown that harmed millions of Americans, “a two week paid vacation.”

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Transcript from Face The Nation:

SCHIEFFER: And good morning again. We welcome to the broadcast the Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.

Senator McConnell, Jim Baker, the former secretary of state who led five Republican presidential campaigns, described this recent brawl over trying to tie the defunding of Obamacare to shutting down the U.S. government — he described it by recalling the words of a long-ago candidate who lost a Senate race in Texas who said, “We shot ourselves in the foot and then reloaded.”

Will you ever let something like this happen again?

MCCONNELL: You know, one of my favorite old Kentucky sayings is there’s no education in the second kick of a mule. The first kick of the mule occurred back in 1995 when we were — the Republican House shut down the government.

Look, shutting down the government, in my view, is not conservative policy. I don’t think a two-week paid vacation for federal employees is conservative policy. A number of us were saying back in July that this strategy could not and would not work, and of course it didn’t. So there will not be another government shutdown. You can count on that.

SCHIEFFER: Well, how badly do you think the country was hurt by all of this?

MCCONNELL: Well, it certainly didn’t do the country any good to have, you know, both a government shutdown and a pending fiscal crisis right on top of it. But, look, we’re a big, resilient country. You just pointed out how the stock market bounced back immediately. I was pleased to play a role in keeping us from going to the brink. I think it was important to do the right thing for the country. And we did it.

Mitch McConnell was trying to spin the unpopular government shutdown to the folks back in Kentucky as a liberal policy, because it gave federal employees a two week paid “vacation.” Unlike a paid vacation, federal employees were not allowed to schedule when they were not going to be at work. These same employees were not paid while they were on “vacation,” and they also had no idea when they would be paid again.

McConnell is trying to find a way to spin the debt ceiling deal because his primary opponent Matt Bevin is accusing him of selling out conservatives, “When the stakes are highest, Mitch McConnell can always be counted on to sell out conservatives. McConnell just negotiated the GOP surrender to [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid [D-Nev.], leading the charge to give President Obama a blank check and lifting the debt ceiling once again without any spending reforms. Harry Reid has even praised McConnell for his ‘cooperation.’ ”

Sen. McConnell can’t tell conservatives the truth that raising the debt ceiling avoided a potential economic collapse, so he has to invent the ridiculous excuse that the shutdown wasn’t conservative policy. The shutdown was championed by conservatives, and caused by conservatives. This makes it a conservative policy. Mitch McConnell negotiated the deal that ended the shutdown, which means that what McConnell did wasn’t conservative.

According to McConnell the shutdown didn’t hurt anyone. The federal employees got a paid vacation, and the stock market shot back up as soon as they cut the deal. The Kentucky Senator is ignoring the fact that the shutdown cost the country at least $24 billion, and it threw millions of people out of work. In the world of millionaire Mitch McConnell, he was taking a stand against liberalism by ending the government shutdown

McConnell’s lack of empathy for the people and the nation that his party harmed with their government shutdown is a good reason why in November 2014 Kentucky voters should ditch Mitch.

Jason Easley

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.

Awards and  Professional Memberships

Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association