“She lied about her emails”, he said. His vice presidential pick, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, was also formally nominated. When McConnell faced the political battle of his life back in 2008, barely squeaking out a victory over Democrat Bruce Lunsford, he quoted Winston Churchill, who once said that “the most exhilarating feeling in life is to be shot at – and missed”.
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We put Obamacare repeal on the president’s desk.
“Fortunately, there’s a clear choice before us, and it’s not Hillary”, he added.
“That’s a rational decision”, he said of most GOP senators who are up for re-election this year and opted not to travel to Cleveland.
“With Donald Trump in the White House, Senate Republicans will build on the work we’ve done and pass more bills into law than any Senate in years”, McConnell said. Obama vetoed it. Donald Trump would sign it.
I know that sentence isn’t likely to entertain or titillate – how often does Mitch McConnell fill that bill? – but we do need to remember that the ’16 election is not just about the White House. In fact, taken as a whole, the remarks from top Congressional leaders in support of Donald Trump last night sounded like the words of men going through the motions – doing what was expected of them, even though their hearts weren’t really in it.
Some, like Rep. Paul Ryan, who is now running to maintain his house seat against a Trump acolyte, steered clear of even mentioning Trump’s name in their morning remarks. Their original draft of Melania Trump’s speech reportedly headed to the shredder, and the new version was that bloodless thing we saw Monday night, including the passage that was clearly lifted from Michelle Obama.
U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta, a Republican from northeastern Pennsylvania and an early Trump supporter, said he thinks Ryan has a “much higher confidence level” in Trump than he did when he first announced his support in early June.
We passed a bill to defund Planned Parenthood.
For McConnell, the attacks were payback for Clinton’s efforts, along with those of her husband, former president Bill Clinton, to unseat him in his Senate reelection campaign two years ago. He announced somewhat ruefully that he’d been the veep candidate last time around, before announcing unconvincingly that he hopes Trump is president. Obama veto it. Donald Trump would sign it.
Then there’s the broader question of what kind of conservative Trump is and how that could shape the Republican Party.
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McConnell was not present during the vote, according to the Hill. “And you know that if Hillary is president, we will continue to slide, distracted by the scandals that follow the Clintons like flies”. He then tore into Clinton’s foreign policy record, leading the audience in a call-and-response routine in which the crowd pronounced the ex-secretary-of-state “guilty” of an array of poor decisions, ranging from the Middle East to Russian Federation to the private email server she set up in her Westchester home.
