Mike Lee Deconstructs the McConnell Plan

Mike Lee on the Hugh Hewitt show, answering the question of whether he would support the McConnell Plan:

Absolutely not. No, never, under any circumstances would I ever support that. Look, I like Senator McConnell, I respect him as our Senate minority leader. But this was a bad idea. Everybody has a bad idea once in a while, and this one was a doozy.

The idea behind that is to allow the President to raise his own debt limit to the tune of about a trillion dollars, and to require him each time he raises it to make a series of spending cut proposals to Congress, which are not binding and don’t really have any legal effect, and then apparently to give Republicans clearance, it would allow Congress to vote on a resolution of disapproval, saying that we don’t like the fact that the President just exercised the authority that Congress gave him a few months ago. But that would then be subject to a presidential veto. And so the resolution of disapproval would be basically meaningless.

We have said all along as Republicans that we can’t raise the debt limit without attaching serious conditions. And we know that we are messing with our credit rating if we raise the debt limit without serious, permanent, structural spending reform mechanisms being put in place, things that can’t be circumvented.

This accomplishes none of that.

All it accomplishes is it would put in place a mechanism to allow Republicans to shift blame to the other party. But it’s such a thinly-veiled blame-shifting game that it won’t ever serve that cynical, political purpose. And I was elected to solve problems, not shift blame to other parties.

Clarity.

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