Mitch McConnell Runs Away From Paul Ryan

Three years ago, the Senate minority leader was a champion of Ryan’s squeeze-the-poor budget plan. Now, as he fights for reelection, he’s trying to distance himself from it.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Three years ago, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was a huge cheerleader for the controversial budget plan proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) that would have partially privatized Medicare and slashed social spending programs. Now McConnell, who’s in a tough reelection fight, is backing away from his support and trying to suggest he was not an outright champion of this draconian budget measure.

In an ad released this week, McConnell’s Democratic opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes, attacks the GOP senator for backing Ryan’s 2011 budget proposal, which would have essentially ended Medicare as a guaranteed federal program, slashed Medicaid, and repealed Obamacare. In the ad, an elderly Kentucky man named Don Disney asks why McConnell voted to raise his medical costs by thousands of dollars a year—referring to a provision in the Ryan budget that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would hike out-of-pocket costs for Medicare beneficiaries by $6,000.

McConnell’s campaign fired back, pointing out that the senator did not vote for the proposal itself, but rather only voted in favor of bringing the measure to the Senate floor for a vote. “There is no way to speculate” what McConnell would have done regarding a final vote on the Ryan budget, his campaign insists.

But that’s cutting the legislative sausage rather thin. The vote on whether to bring the Ryan plan to the Senate floor for an up-or-down vote was the key vote—and McConnell voted in favor of the proposal. It was only because the majority Democrats blocked the bill from reaching a final vote that McConnell did not have a chance to officially vote for passage of the budget proposal. But McConnell himself bragged about having “voted” for the Ryan budget. And he repeatedly praised the Ryan plan and expressed support for the measure.

In a speech on the Senate floor in April 2011, McConnell called Ryan’s budget a “serious and detailed plan for getting our nation’s fiscal house in order.” He maintained that it would “strengthen the social safety net.”

That month, he also called Ryan’s budget “a serious, good-faith effort to do something good and necessary for the future of our nation and…for the good of the nation,” according to Congressional Quarterly.

In May 2011, McConnell, appearing on Fox News, vowed to vote for Ryan’s proposal. He said Ryan’s plan was “a very sensible way to go to try to save Medicare.”

Even though the Senate never held a final vote on the Ryan budget, McConnell’s backing for the plan—which included large tax cuts for the wealthy—was full-throated and unambiguous. “He’s probably relieved that it never came to a final vote,” says Ross Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University.

In responding to the Grimes ad, McConnell’s campaign also took issue with the charge that he voted to raise medical costs for Kentucky seniors by $6,000 each. The campaign claimed that this figure is out of date because Ryan’s subsequent budget plans—which also were not passed by Congress—would raise Medicare beneficiaries’ out-of-pocket costs by much less. Yet Paul Van De Water, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, says that the Grimes campaign “accurately” cited what the 2011 plan would have done.

Ryan’s 2011 budget would have slashed Medicare by $389 billion by raising the eligibility age and partly privatizing the program, dramatically increasing costs for new retirees. Under the same plan, funding for Medicaid would have been slashed by 35 percent over 10 years. The proposal additionally would have ended Obamacare, preventing millions from obtaining affordable health insurance. At the time, Senate majority leader Harry Reid warned the Ryan budget “would be one of the worst things that could happen in this country if it went into effect.”

As the McConnell-Grimes race—one of the most closely watched Senate contests of the year—heats up, Grimes is attempting to tar McConnell with the extreme budget plan that he once embraced. McConnell, the veteran Capitol Hill wheeler-and-dealer, is trying to wiggle out of the trap through a legislative loophole—creating a false impression and distancing himself from his party’s policymaker-in-chief.

His campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate