Legislative Logjam

Floor Speech

Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, last summer I said it felt as though the White House had hung a ``Gone Campaignin' '' sign outside the Oval Office. President Obama didn't seem the least bit interested in passing serious, bipartisan solutions for the middle class. It was all campaigning, all the time.

On the rarest of occasions when he did come to Congress, it was for internal campaign rallies with his party. Well, it has actually only gotten worse.

Since last summer he has barely picked up the phone and his bill-signing pen is literally starting to rust. Here is the reason: This summer the Democratic-controlled Senate seems to have put out a "Gone Campaignin''' sign of its own. That is why the Democratic Senate has become a veritable graveyard of good ideas.

Most people assume the purpose of the Senate is to pass legislation to help the American people, but these days the Democrats who run the Senate seem to think their role is actually to just bury good legislation. They are more interested in pleasing their far left political patrons--patrons who appear to oppose everything that could actually help the American middle class.

Case in point: The Republican-led House of Representatives has already passed hundreds of pieces of legislation this Congress--legislation introduced by Members of both parties, including dozens of jobs bills, that remain stuck here in the Senate. That means President Obama has not had to sign or veto them, and the Senate majority leader has been all too happy to protect him from choosing between helping the far-left fringe and the vast American middle. In other words, Senate Democrats are on a mission this summer to obstruct solutions for the middle class at every turn and to prevent almost any serious legislating from occurring at all--at all.

Over in the House the minority party has been offered more than 160 votes on their amendments since last July. Here in the Senate the Democratic leadership has blocked all but nine Republican rollcall votes.

And it is not just Republican amendments getting squashed either. The Democrats who run the Senate are so scared of legislating these days they are blocking virtually every amendment on both sides. It has gotten to the point where one House Democrat, a Congresswoman from Texas, has now had twice as many rollcall votes on amendments since last July--15--as the entire Senate Democratic caucus combined. One Member of the House in the minority party has had more votes than all of the Democratic Senators combined over the last year. Between the 55 Senate Democrats, they have had seven amendments in a year.

In other words, the majority leader is treating his one caucus even worse than he is treating us.

Even committee work can no longer escape the Democratic majority's political obsession. The majority shut down the committee process on important legislation that should have been and would have been bipartisan--bills about patents and appropriations.

This is the kind of stuff that makes Americans so very mad at Washington. I mean, how do we justify stifling the voices of so many Senators and the tens of millions of Americans they were sent here to represent? It is indefensible. It has gotten worse and worse under current Democratic leaders.

Of course, every now and then, when we push hard enough, we are able to force our Democratic friends to allow a few--a few--bipartisan ideas to go through, such as the job training and workforce development bill we expect to pass tomorrow. But, boy, that is the rare exception around here--a very rare exception. Instead, we usually just see the game playing on important issues.

On energy, Democratic leadership blocked every attempt to provide relief to blue collar families who have been bulldozed by the administration's elitist war on coal jobs. They will not help the millions of Americans who struggle every single day with high utility bills, and they will not allow a serious vote on shovel-ready projects such as the Keystone Pipeline, either. Senate Democrats have blocked just about every effort to move forward on these issues. In so doing the Democratic leadership actually embarrasses the handful of Democratic Senators who still call for action on energy and Keystone--even veteran Members who chair committees. It just shows what little influence those Members actually have under the current Democratic leadership.

It all lays bare a very simple truth about today's Democratic Senate: If the far left hates it, it ain't happening.

That is true with health care too. The middle class is being plummeted by ObamaCare. A recent study showed that an average 27-year-old Kentuckian from Taylor County saw his premiums skyrocket by almost 60 percent this year. Constituents such as he are looking to Washington for leadership and for solutions, but Senate Democrats will not even allow sensible bipartisan health care solutions to come to a vote.

Instead, we just get more politics, such as the legislation we hear may be coming up later this week--a tactic designed by the Democratic campaign committee to make Americans forget--forget--that Democrats voted to raid Medicare--voted to raid Medicare--by $700 billion to fund new ObamaCare spending. Every Democrat in the Senate, on Christmas Eve, 2009, without exception, voted to take $700 billion out of Medicare to help fund ObamaCare.

Senate Democrats are actually trying to distract from their votes to raid Medicare by making it even harder to save and strengthen Medicare. But Americans will not forget that the sponsors of the proposal were the very same people who voted to raid Medicare in the first place, through ObamaCare.

And they will not forget what happened last week either when Republicans advanced a series of bills aimed at increasing flexibility in the workplace and boosting upward mobility. We thought Democrats might want to work with us in a bipartisan manner to move these bills forward, but apparently the far left will not let them. Democratic leadership will not even consider legislation I have introduced that would help more moms and dads work from home while caring for young children. My bill aims to bring tax policy in line with what life is really like for working parents, and it would help young families save on child care costs too. But as I said, Senate Democrats have just gone campaigning.

For the Democratic leadership, helping the middle class seems to be far from priority one. But the middle class needs help right now, and the only way to offer working moms and struggling college graduates real solutions is to break through the Senate Democratic logjam.

There are two ways to accomplish that. Either our friends on the other side can get serious about working for the people who elected them or the people who elected them can make the decision for them.

Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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