Tagged: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell

Urging federal assistance, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., met U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack on Friday to discuss the impact severe drought conditions are having on Kentucky farmers.

The U.S. Drought Monitor released a new report this week showing the severity of the heat wave and lack of rainfall is worsening across the country, and that the amount of land classified as having "extreme" or "exceptional" drought is over 20 percent.

In a surprise move, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., challenged Democrats to vote on a bill to end the Bush era tax cuts for wealthier Americans.

For the past week Senate Democrats have been pushing a bill similar to President Obama's plan to extend the tax relief for income only up to $250,000 annually. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid promised he had enough votes to pass the 50-vote threshold if not for McConnell blocking a procedural vote with a filibuster.

Speaking on the Senate floor, McConnell says the tax hike will hurt job creators, but that he is lifting the filibuster so the American people can see where lawmakers stand.

"The only way to force people to take a stand is to make sure that today’s votes truly count. By setting these votes at a 50-vote threshold, nobody on the other side can hide behind a procedural vote while leaving their views on the actual bill itself a mystery to the people who sent them here," he says.

A bill that would require Super PACs to release their donor list was defeated due to a Republican filibuster led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who has been a vocal opponent of the legislation.

The DISCLOSE (Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light On Spending in Elections) Act failed by a 51-to-44 vote, falling short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster. Since last month, McConnell has ripped the legislation as a form of intimidation being led by the Obama administration.

Local and national critics, including U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky., have pounced on McConnell's opposition, pointing out that he once supported the idea of full transparency.

From The Daily Beast:

Originally, conservatives like Mitch McConnell who backed the money-is-speech position offered the consolation prize of radical transparency and instant disclosure for all election-related spending, including independent expenditures.

But now such a proposal represents, in McConnell’s words, an attempt to “protect unpopular Democrat politicians by silencing their critics and exempting their campaign supporters from an all-out attack on the First Amendment.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., quickly came out against President Obama's push for Congress to end the Bush-era tax cuts for those who making over $250,000 annually.

The president spoke from the White House on Monday, arguing that he has cut taxes for the middle-class Americans and that 97 percent of all businesses would not see their taxes increase. It renews a previous fight between Mr. Obama and Republican lawmakers, but the proposal also puts the administration at odds with congressional Democrats who have called for extending the the cuts for everyone except people earning more than $1 million a year.

McConnell says the proposal is a tax hike that will hurt job creators.

From McConnell's office:

"It’s not an accident that the President didn’t explain how his plan to raise taxes on small businesses will create jobs—he can’t say that with a straight face, it simply isn’t true. In fact, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, nearly a million small businesses would feel this tax hike right away, and up to a quarter of the entire American workforce depends on these employers for a paycheck.