WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) joined Dana Perino and Bill Hemmer on Fox News Channel's 'America's Newsroom' Wednesday morning.
See below for highlights
On H.R. 1:
"First of all, it's a federal takeover of the way we conduct elections – every election in America. The first outrage is it takes the Federal Election Commission, which has historically been 3-3 so neither party could take advantage of the other, and turn it into a 3-2 agency to police the speech and political activity of America in a partisan way, and of course, the President would get the tiebreaking vote to appoint number 3. It turns the Federal Election Commission from a judge into a prosecutor.
"Secondly, it provides public money for political campaigns. Americans hate the idea that their money, given to the government, is going to be spent on balloons and buttons and attack ads in campaigns. They prefer to see campaigns financed by people who support the two candidates and not the federal government.
"Number three, it makes mandatory what is called ballot harvesting. That is, somebody can go around – a paid operative of a campaign – and pick up a bunch of other people's ballots and turn them in for them. Rampant fraud potential.
"Fourth, it makes it very difficult for states to clean dead people off the rolls. This bill, obviously, is designed to make it easier to cheat, to subsidize campaigns by the federal government and to have one party take over the enforcement of American elections. It is an atrocity, every Republican opposes it, and we're going to do everything we can to defeat it."
On the Importance of Preserving the Legislative Filibuster:
"It is the essence of the Senate: the fact that you can't pass most legislation with a simple majority in the Senate. You have to have some kind of bipartisan buy-in or the bill doesn't pass. Senator Manchin and Senator Sinema have been rock solid that they are opposed to getting rid of the legislative filibuster. That's the essence of the Senate.
"We could have done that when my party was in the majority. President Trump actually asked us to. I said no, we were not interested in changing the fundamental nature of the United States Senate, which is designed on purpose to kill bad ideas or to reach a compromise so you can reach that supermajority threshold. It keeps America in the political center.
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"The filibuster pre-dates the debates over civil rights. It goes back to the beginning of the country. The filibuster started well before we got into the civil rights debates that have occurred off and on over the history of the country. So the derivation of the filibuster was not related to race or civil rights."
On the Biden Administration's Far-Left Agenda:
"I haven't been invited to the White House. So far this administration is not interested in doing anything on a bipartisan basis in the political center. They would be more than happy to pick off a few of our members and do what they would like to do but there has been no effort whatsoever by the President or the administration to do anything in the political center.
"They try to jam through everything on the hard left. You saw that on the $1.9 trillion dollar COVID package, only 1% of which had to do with vaccines and only 9% of which had to do with healthcare. The rest of it was a left-wing wish list.
"They are now cooking up yet another package they're going to call infrastructure. It will be a Trojan horse that includes massive tax increases on Americans. They are going hard-left. They misread the election. It is a 50/50 Senate and a very narrow Democratic majority in the House, not a mandate to turn America into Bernie Sanders' view of what America ought to be."
Click here to watch the full interview.
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