Mitch McConnell Reveals How Biden's First Day Was 'Several Big Steps in the Wrong Direction'
Mitch McConnell is coming out swinging.
No longer the top lawmaker in the Senate and under fire from his own side of the political spectrum, the Kentucky senator delivered a speech on Thursday that showed he’s far from out of the fight.
And newly inaugurated President Joe Biden is in for a fight over the leftist agenda that showed itself on Biden’s very first day in office.
McConnell made that clear as he slammed Biden’s decisions to pander to the radical left on environmental and immigration issues in ways that are only going to harm Americans at a grassroots level.
“This is not the Day One American workers deserved,” McConnell said, in one of the all-time understatements on the Senate floor.
Check out the video here. The whole thing is worth watching, as McConnell first discusses power-sharing under the new Senate party breakdown, but McConnell’s discussion of Biden’s first day starts about the 4-minute mark.
McConnell’s speech described the results of the Nov. 3 election in a bracingly realistic way the mainstream media isn’t likely to spend a lot of time focusing on:
Despite the fact that the White House has changed hands (under suspicious circumstances at best), McConnell noted that Republicans gained ground in the House and are tied with Democrats for Senate seats, with Vice President Kamala Harris representing the tie-breaking vote.
In short, Democrats and their media propaganda wing may claim a mandate, but it’s actually non-existent.
“The 2020 election was as far from the sweeping or ideological transformation as any election we’ve seen in modern history,” McConnell said
“The American people stunned the so-called experts with the number of Republicans they sent to the House and to the Senate to make sure common-sense, conservative values have a powerful say in the government.”
And McConnell had a lot to say about Biden’s debut as chief executive.
“On the Biden administration’s very first day, it took several big steps in the wrong direction,” he said, citing the hideous 2015 Paris agreement that former President Donald Trump walked away from because of its harm.
“The president re-entered the failed Paris climate agreement, a terrible bargain that would set us up to self-inflict major economic pain on working American families with no assurance that China or Russia would honor their commitment,” McConnell said.
Biden also canceled the Keystone XL pipeline permit, designed to carry oil produced in Canada into the United States for refining.
For a White House supposedly devoted to “science” and working with allies, there was no good reason to do so.
The project was found by the Obama State Department to have no adverse environmental impact back in 2014, as the Los Angeles Times reported.
It was supported by the government of Canada and supported thousands of jobs in the United States, with the expectation that it would support thousands more, as McConnell said.
“But because canceling a pipeline project feels like the ‘green’ thing to do, the administration killed all these jobs,” McConnell said.
McConnell then lashed out at the new president for presenting an immigration plan that’s a liberal’s fantasy, but would end up harming the country as a whole.
“The new administration has also sketched out massive proposal for blanket amnesty that would gut enforcement of American laws while creating huge new incentives for people to rush here illegally at the same time,” McConnell said.
“This kind of failed approach will ignite another humanitarian crisis on our border and privilege powerful interests ahead of American workers.”
They were fighting words from McConnell, all the more noteworthy because he’s taking heat from the right — such as conservative talk show host Sean Hannity. On Tuesday, Hannity slammed McConnell as a leader of “spineless” Republicans, according to Fox News, and declared that conservatives “deserve better.”
There’s no doubt McConnell infuriates a large segment of the right. He did so during the Obama years, when he was accused of not fighting hard enough against the liberal administration, too. And he’s virtually certain to be criticized more during the Biden administration.
But there’s also no doubt he gets results that conservatives appreciate — as witnessed by the fact that Obama did not get a Supreme Court nomination in his final year in office, while former President Donald Trump was able to reshape the federal judiciary and seat three Supreme Court justices in a single term.
What’s absolutely certain, though, is that McConnell is going to infuriate the left even more with his stance — thoroughly supported by the November election results — that the Biden administration lacks a mandate for an extremist agenda, and has no real obligation to pursue one.
“There’s still plenty of time for President Biden to remember that he does not owe his election to the far left,” McConnell said.
“The president can and should refocus his administration on creating good-paying American jobs, not sacrificing our people’s livelihoods to liberal symbolism.”
Those are words the American people understand, but no one who’s watched the behavior of Democrats during the Trump years, during the 2020 campaign, or in its aftermath, can think Biden is going to listen.
And when he doesn’t, he’s going to have a fight on his hands, even holding power in both houses of Congress.
McConnell’s speech on Thursday proved that.
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