Let’s just call him Mitch the Obstructor, the guy who never — not ever! — seems to back a Democratically inspired notion that well could produce astonishing results for the nation.
But there’s Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell saying that a Democratic deal hammered out by maverick Democrat Joe Manchin and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer is a job killer. It’s a “socialist” program. It’s just going to sink the nation faster than that iceberg did to the Titanic.
He cannot back it under any circumstance.
It’s a $430 billion bill that would produce cleaner air, would reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, would be paid for with modest tax increases on the richest Americans. Yet to hear McConnell bellow about his opposition, it’s the worst thing to come down the pike since President Nixon’s wage and price controls of the 1970s. Oh, wait, Nixon was a Republican, so I guess that made it OK.
Manchin has performed a fairly stunning reversal on this matter. He recently declared his opposition to President Biden’s Build Back Better idea, which everyone at the time thought doomed the notion for good.
Now he comes around. Again! I cannot keep up with the West Virginian who seems to enjoy the role of senator with outsized influence.
He and Schumer and the POTUS, though, now must deal with Mitch the Obstructor. I am hoping they can put Mitch in his place … presumably under something from he cannot re-emerge.