Reprinted from Campaign For America's Future
If Republicans take the Senate next month (and if he wins his own reelection race), Sen. Mitch McConnell will be that body's next majority leader. Then what happens?
McConnell's been frank about what the GOP would do with the Senate -- at least when he thinks nobody's listening. This quote comes from audio, obtained by Undercurrent's Lauren Windsor, of a talk McConnell gave to a Koch Brothers group in August:
"Most things in the Senate require 60 (votes) ... but not the budget. So in the House and Senate, we own the budget. What does that mean?
"...No money can be spent to do this or do that. We're going to go after them on healthcare, on financial services, on the Environmental Protection Agency, across the board ..."
McConnell attacked the Dodd/Frank financial reform bill in further audio obtained by this week by Windsor, calling it "Obamacare for banks."
McConnell said he would "definitely" defund the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, calling it "the biggest part of the Dodd/Frank bill."
But then, that's been his position all along. Senate Republicans refused to accept anyone's nomination to lead the CFPB when it was formed. Said McConnell at the time: "We're simply not going to ... confirm him or anybody else to this agency that shouldn't exist in its current form."
Last year McConnell remarked, "If I had my way, we wouldn't have the [CFPB] at all."
The course of action McConnell lays out in these audio clips would:
1. Expose Americans to toxic threats, and make additional disasters like the BP oil spill more likely.
Cuts in Environmental Protection Agency funding are intended to meet the GOP's stated goal of deregulating high-polluting industries like those of the Koch brothers themselves. That would lead to more fracking, more poisons in the groundwater, a higher risk of water-supply crises like the one recently experienced in West Virginia, increased air pollution. ...
The result? A sicker population which is at greater risk of environmental disaster.
2. Deprive millions of Americans of health insurance.
The Affordable Care Act isn't perfect. But it has extended health insurance to millions of Americans, both through the exchanges and through Medicaid extensions at the state level (excepting those states where Republican governors have refused to accept Federal funds for that purpose).
Denying funding for the law would, in all likelihood, close down the exchanges and end the Medicaid program. That would lead to thousands of additional deaths like that of Charlene Dill, a young working mother in Florida. (We discussed her death and related topics with Rep. Alan Grayson here).
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