Mitch McConnell, who was accused of destroying bipartisan cooperation in the Senate when he blocked a Supreme Court choice by Barack Obama, changed the rules to rush three choices for Donald Trump, said that if Democrats end the obstruction, they will “ transform the Senate into a kind of nuclear winter ”.
The leader of the Republican minority, who invoked the “nuclear option” to change the rule for Supreme Court justices in 2017, was speaking to the podcast Ruthless in an episode released on Tuesday.
With an eye on big legislation on voting rights, arms control, infrastructure and more, the Democrats who control the White House and Congress are pressuring leaders to reform or abolish the Senate obstruction rule, whereby a minority of just 41 out of 100 senators manage to block most legislation.
Joe Biden saw his $ 1.9 trillion coronavirus aid package approved earlier this month by budget reconciliation, a strictly applied process that bypasses the obstruction rule and allows for approval by a simple majority. He is considering other important steps along this path, although top priorities, such as voting rights, cannot move forward through reconciliation.
But Biden indicated that he may be open to some change in the obstruction.
McConnell is not.
“I think if they destroy the essence of the Senate, the legislative obstructionist, they will find a Senate that will not work,” said the Kentucky Republican, who took his own nuclear option six years after the then Democratic majority leader Harry Reid moved in. appointments to lower courts and appointed to the executive branch, to circumvent the Republican obstruction.
“It takes unanimous consent to turn on the lights here,” said McConnell. “And I think they would make 50 senators furious, not interested in cooperating even in the simplest of things.”
In 2010, McConnell said his main goal was to ensure that Obama was a president for a single term. Under Trump, he resisted calls from the White House to end the obstruction.
Democrats in the 50-50 Senate, which is controlled by the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris, may well reply to McConnell that Republicans have shown very little interest in cooperation in anything for many years. Covid’s relief project did not attract a single Republican vote.
On Tuesday, just after a shooting at a Colorado supermarket that killed 10 and a week after shootings at spas near Atlanta killed eight, the Senate will hold a hearing on “Constitutional and common sense steps to reduce armed violence” . The House passed gun control measures, but without an obstruction reform, such measures seem impossible in the Senate.
Republicans – and some Democrats, including West Virginia conservative Joe Manchin, who has indicated he is open to some form of reform – insist that the obstruction protects the rights of the minority.
McConnell said obstruction reform “may not be the panacea they anticipate. It can turn the Senate into a kind of nuclear winter, nor is the aftermath of the so-called nuclear option a sustainable place. ”