Time to answer some misleading attacks on Republicans in Congress

U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the Senate Republican Leader, responds to a prior editorial in the AC-T. This article was provided to ARRA News Service by Sen. McConnell's office.
by Sen. Mitch McConnell, Ashville Citizens Times (AC-T) (1/9/08): While I appreciate the claim in the recent editorial, “Obstructionist Congress is bad government,” (AC-T, Dec. 26), that Republicans in Congress “succeeded spectacularly” at being an effective minority this past year, I must take issue with a statistic used in discussing the practice of filibusters. The claim that “62 pieces of legislation have been blocked by GOP filibusters in the Senate” is inaccurate. This figure seems to have originated in the spin rooms of a certain New York senator and his liberal Washington allies. But just because a political group in Washington said it doesn’t make it so.

A quick review of the facts will help readers see what really happened in the Senate last year. Of the 62 votes on cloture motions in the session that just ended (cloture is used to end debate and move forward on a bill), half were votes where Republicans and Democrats joined together to move the process forward. Four were party-line votes where Democrats voted to block action on a bill. Four were unanimous, bipartisan votes. And two, from early last month, were Democrat filibusters of vital national security law, including a law that lets us monitor terrorists overseas and a bill to deliver funding to our forces in the field. In other words, what liberal interest groups in Washington call Republican obstruction was in many cases a bipartisan effort to move vital legislation; in others, it was Democrats blocking vitally important law.

Voters expect results: Our preference in the minority is always to accomplish things for the American people. The voters who put us in office expect us to do something, to meet in the middle and to solve problems. In the final month of 2006, we actually did a fair bit of it when Democrats finally decided it was time not just to make a point but to make law. After months and months of posturing, they joined us in finding solutions together. And we succeeded on issues ranging from energy to defense.

As Senate Associate Historian Don Ritchie recently told the newspaper Roll Call: “It’s not so much that there’s been more filibusters, there’ve been more cloture motions.” In other words, there have been more attempts by the majority to fast-track legislation — often before it has even been debated before the full Senate. To be fair, some of this year’s cloture votes did involve Republicans “blocking action.” For example, when liberals in Washington tried to raise taxes, my fellow Republicans and I blocked action. When they tried to pull the rug out from under our troops in Iraq, a bipartisan group of us stopped that, too.

Taking on special interests: We also took action when liberals in Washington tried to use an energy bill to raise the price of gasoline and utility rates across the Southeast. And when the Democrat majority in Congress tried to create a permanent, multibillion-dollar tax hike in exchange for a one-year delay in the middle-class tax increase known as the AMT, Republicans said “no.” It is easy to understand the frustration of special-interest groups when they are unable to raise taxes, cut funding for our troops, increase utility rates and make it easier for terrorists to communicate. But that frustration does not excuse misleading and inaccurate attacks by those same groups. As former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts.”

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