Mitch McConnell’s Destructive Partisanship

In an interview with the National Journal published this week, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” In response, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine released the following statement:

Taking bold steps to repair America’s economy, create jobs, reform health care, improve educational opportunities, and support the middle class through tax cuts and other measures, as Democrats have done – that’s an achievement.

Mitch McConnell’s idea of "achievement" illustrates everything that’s wrong with the Republican Party. For Republicans, it’s not about creating jobs; not about economic recovery or security; not about creating better educational opportunities.

For Republicans, it’s about partisanship over solutions -- obstructing progress to do the bidding of moneyed special interests in the hopes of winning electoral victories. That’s not achievement. That’s exactly what Americans hate about Washington. Republicans’ cynical approach isn’t just hurting the political process, it has had a direct impact on families across America, whose jobs, health care, and unemployment benefits were held in limbo by Republican obstructionism.

Now, the Republican Leader in the Senate – the very man who set his Republican colleagues on a course of politically motivated obstruction even before the President was sworn into office – is promising two more years of politics as usual. Republicans continue to put their party’s interests ahead of solving the important issues facing the country and the American people, and that’s just plain wrong. On November 2, let’s tell them so.