In short, it’s a recipe for a confrontational end to the Obama presidency. McConnell's plan to halt Obama

HENDERSON, Ky. — Mitch McConnell has a game plan to confront President Barack Obama with a stark choice next year: Accept bills reining in the administration’s policies or veto them and risk a government shutdown.

In an extensive interview here, the typically reserved McConnell laid out his clearest thinking yet of how he would lead the Senate if Republicans gain control of the chamber. The emerging strategy: Attach riders to spending bills that would limit Obama policies on everything from the environment to health care, consider using an arcane budget tactic to circumvent Democratic filibusters and force the president to “move to the center” if he wants to get any new legislation through Congress.


In short, it’s a recipe for a confrontational end to the Obama presidency.

“We’re going to pass spending bills, and they’re going to have a lot of restrictions on the activities of the bureaucracy,” McConnell said in an interview aboard his campaign bus traveling through Western Kentucky coal country. “That’s something he won’t like, but that will be done. I guarantee it.”

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McConnell is facing one of the toughest reelection battles of his three-decade Senate career. But Republicans are tantalizingly close to winning majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time in nearly a decade, and McConnell is making an aggressive pitch to voters here that they have the chance to pick the Senate’s next majority leader.

But there are clear risks for McConnell. First, he must defeat a spirited Democratic challenger in November, while hoping that the class of Senate candidates he helped recruit doesn’t blow the GOP’s best chance in years to retake the majority. And, perhaps just as challenging, McConnell would need to bring unity to a party that is struggling to overcome divisions between establishment stalwarts like himself and young GOP upstarts pushing for conservative purity.

One of the Senate’s leading GOP firebrands — Ted Cruz of Texas — isn’t committing to supporting McConnell as majority leader, signaling the challenges that could lie ahead.

“That will be a decision for the conference to make,” Cruz said in an interview, after pausing eight seconds, when asked if he’d back McConnell as majority leader. “I’m hopeful come January we have a Republican majority.”

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Meanwhile, McConnell risks overreaching if he follows through with his pledge to attach policy riders to spending bills. If Obama refuses to accept such measures, a government shutdown could ensue. Republicans bore much of the blame for last year’s government shutdown, which was prompted by conservative tactics McConnell opposed, and their fortunes rebounded only when the administration bungled the rollout of Obamacare.

But asked about the potential that his approach could spark another shutdown, McConnell said it would be up to the president to decide whether to veto spending bills that would keep the government open.

Obama “needs to be challenged, and the best way to do that is through the funding process,” McConnell said. “He would have to make a decision on a given bill, whether there’s more in it that he likes than dislikes.”

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A “good example,” McConnell said, is adding restrictions to regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency. Adding riders to spending bills would change the “behavior of the bureaucracy, which I think has been the single biggest reason this recovery has been so tepid,” he said.

“He could,” McConnell said calmly when asked if such a tactic would prompt Obama to veto must-pass appropriations bills. “Yeah, he could.”

If Republicans gain a Senate majority, it will surely be a thin one. If McConnell wants to accomplish much of anything, he’ll have to strike a delicate balance between courting some Democrats while adhering to the demands of his right flank hungry for conservative legislation like gutting Obamacare.

To pass a budget, as McConnell is promising, he would have to hold together a conference that would include conservatives like Cruz and moderates like Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. He’d likely need Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid’s help to pass major legislation, even though he’s been at war with the Nevada Democrat, who blames McConnell for causing historic gridlock.

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There would also be pressure from the handful of Republican senators planning a White House run, not to mention GOP senators running for reelection in blue and purple states like New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Ohio — an election map that gives Democrats a major advantage in winning a majority all over again in 2016.

McConnell is well aware of the difficulties ahead should he finally achieve his political dream.

“Being leader is sort of like being the groundskeeper to a cemetery: Everybody is under you but nobody is listening,” he said with a big laugh, crediting Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander for coming up with the line.

Even as he’s close to reaching the pinnacle of his power, the 72-year-old McConnell is locked in a neck-and-neck struggle with a 35-year-old Democrat and political newcomer, Alison Lundergan Grimes. As occupant of one of two Republican-held seats Democrats have a chance to win this year, McConnell is facing an avalanche of Democratic attacks seizing on his poor approval ratings by painting him as a creature of Washington. When it’s all said and done, McConnell said he expects the total cost of the race to range between “$60 million-$100 million.”

Asked about his low approval ratings — one Democratic poll pegged him at 37 percent last week — McConnell blamed negative media coverage in the state.

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“I don’t want to sound like a whiner here, but if you get beat up all the time, it affects you,” McConnell said in his bus decorated with his logo, “Kentucky Leads America.” “All people hear about is unpleasant things.”

At his campaign events last week with Kentucky’s more popular junior senator, Republican Rand Paul, McConnell made brief remarks slamming the White House as elitist and stoked coal country’s fear about keeping Reid at the helm of the Senate.

As he spoke in a warehouse of an electronics and industrial services shop here before a crowd of several dozen, McConnell bluntly told voters that they are effectively choosing the next majority leader: a Kentuckian or “somebody from Nevada who is completely in the tank with the administration.”

At an earlier event at a trucking company in Greenville, Kentucky, with Paul standing beside him, McConnell cited Reid’s now-infamous line from 2008 that “coal makes us sick,” noting that Grimes’ “first vote” would keep the Nevada Democrat in charge.

“That kind of talk makes me sick and you sick, and this is the year to stick it to him!” McConnell, standing between two Mack trucks, said before cheering supporters.

Reid’s response: Bring it on.

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“That shows they’ve lost all the issues — that they have to focus on somebody that nobody knows,” Reid said in an interview, referring to himself. “Let them do it.”

Asked about McConnell’s comments, Reid spokesman Adam Jentleson added: “In no uncertain terms, Sen. McConnell is saying ‘elect me so I can shut down the government again.’ That’s shocking to middle-class Americans … but business as usual for Sen. McConnell, the self-declared ‘proud guardian of gridlock.’”

Leaders from both parties tend to avoid direct attacks on one another on the campaign trail, but this year is different, McConnell said in the interview. He says Reid has made himself an issue in the race by his anti-coal comments and efforts to elect Grimes — and voters, he said, are well aware of what that means for their livelihood.

“He’s probably not that big of an issue in most states, but he is here,” McConnell said. “He injected himself into the Kentucky Senate race, so obviously I would be foolish not to point out the differences.”

Indeed, many of McConnell’s promises seem to be rooted in the pledge that he’ll be a much different leader than Reid. After years of inaction, McConnell insists he would loosen up the Senate. He said he would let the committee chairmen develop legislation, bring bills produced by the panels to the floor and let senators vote on scores of amendments until they wear themselves out.

McConnell thinks this would build consensus in the body, even if it could force his members to vote on politically toxic issues.

But the strategy is easier said than done. After watching House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) struggle to pass legislation time and again, even some of McConnell’s closest allies expect a Senate GOP majority to be a difficult slog.

“I do think that passing a budget will be hard,” said South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the No. 3 Republican, who in 2004 was the first senator to defeat a sitting Senate leader in a general election in 52 years. “There will be people who will say it maybe spends too much, or maybe it doesn’t spend enough. I think there’s a constant tug and pull of any group of people who have a diversity of views.”

In a private meeting before the summer recess, Republicans discussed using the procedural tool known as budget “reconciliation” to make it easier to pass legislation by avoiding filibusters. Some on the right say that could be the way to go.

“That’s how we got Obamacare; we’ll see if we can undo any of it that way,” Paul said in an interview. “It makes more sense to try to do it with 60, but I think you do what you have to do.”

But McConnell was coy on whether he’d pursue this tactic. And even if he tried to gut Obamacare, he knows full well he’d lack the support to override a presidential veto.

“We’ll see,” McConnell said when asked about reconciliation.

Similarly, as Grimes has attacked McConnell for voting to advance Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) controversial budget — and its proposal to overhaul Medicare — the GOP leader was mum on whether he’d seek to move that plan in a Republican Senate majority. He also refused to say if he still supports the Ryan proposal.

“We will succeed in passing a budget,” McConnell would only say when asked about the Ryan plan.

Doing anything major would require warring GOP factions to work closely together, and this campaign season has showcased repeated divides. Even McConnell and Paul are showing signs of division on foreign policy as violence in Iraq flares up.

Paul said in the interview that Obama should come to Congress to seek authorization to continue the U.S. military’s action in Iraq.

“The president should always come to Congress to vote on war,” Paul said.

But McConnell said Obama erred by pulling troops out of Iraq, and he has been pressing the White House to keep a residual force of 10,000 to 12,000 troops in Afghanistan.

Asked if he thought Paul’s foreign policy views would be a liability for him in a potential presidential bid, McConnell shook his head, declining to comment.

As he faced a primary challenge from businessman Matt Bevin and skepticism over his record on spending, McConnell was quick to showcase his conservative credentials, something he still is counting on in a state where Obama lost virtually every county to Mitt Romney in 2012.

Indeed, McConnell said he would vote against a bill to reauthorize the U.S. Export-Import Bank, a punching bag of conservatives but backed by the business community. And he refused to say whether he believes humans are causing global warming, instead bashing the Obama policies to control carbon pollution from power plants.

“Each side has their scientists, and they can all go in and argue,” he said.

Still, even as he continues to shore up his right flank, McConnell said what he won’t do is employ the Cruz strategy to defund Obamacare as part of a must-pass spending bill.

“It has no impact on Obamacare,” McConnell said. “I do think it’s important to be honest with people about finally achieving that with Barack Obama of Obamacare fame as president of the United States.”

To help build party unity, McConnell is maintaining a healthy outreach to the crop of Senate GOP candidates this cycle. Rep. Tom Cotton, for instance, said he speaks “regularly” with McConnell, who was the first person to urge him to run in Arkansas. And even Ben Sasse in Nebraska, who angered McConnell by his alliance with the Senate Conservatives Fund, has since made amends with the leader.

He may need to keep those conservatives at bay if he returns to deal-making mode, as he’s done several times during fiscal crises in the Obama years. McConnell said he would be prepared to cut deals again with the White House — but this time, only if the president begins to moderate.

McConnell said there’s room to deal on entitlement programs — such as means testing to limit Medicare benefits for wealthier families and overhauling how inflation is calculated to reduce cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security recipients, proposals the White House has been open to in the past. He said tax reform is a possibility, but only if it’s “revenue-neutral” — meaning no tax increases.

“My point in bringing that up is that we’re prepared to do business with the president rather than just argue for two years,” McConnell said.

Still, it’s not clear how much they can agree on. McConnell, who opposed the immigration bill last year, threw cold water on doing it again in 2015, saying the whole issue suffered “an immense setback” with the influx of migrant children from Central America arriving at the border.

But, how he handles that and other issues would only get more complicated if he wins at the ballot box.

“I am for the most conservative outcome that we can get,” McConnell said. “If the functioning of the country is on the line, then you do the best you can.”