Mitch McConnell Quotes - Page 3

We [Democrats] are looking for things that we think would make a difference, improve the country, and enjoy some bipartisan support.

I think it is to the advantage of my state to have the opportunity to come to meetings occasionally and to vote in person, rather than just by proxy.

We hear the stories every day now: the father who puts on a suit every morning and leaves the house so his daughter doesn't know he lost his job, the recent college grad facing up to the painful reality that the only door that's open to her after four years of study and a pile of debt is her parents'. These are the faces of the Obama economy.

Where we are now is we have resolved the revenue issue and the question is what are we going to do about spending. I wish the president would lead us in this discussion rather than putting himself in a position of having to be dragged kicking and screaming to the table to discuss the single biggest issue confronting our future.

What I said to the members [of Congress] who hoped they would be chairmen: let's don't have that problem. Be thinking now about legislation that you have, preferably that enjoys some Democratic support because we certainly didn't think we were going to have 60 and we don't.

Sometime in the near future we'll have a vote on repealing Obamacare, essentially the same vote that we had in 2015. I would remind everyone that in that proposal there's a two-year delay, a two-year delay which would give us the opportunity to work out a complete replacement on a bipartisan basis with our Democratic friends.

What we do know is that the American people, regardless of how they feel about the abortion issue, don't think that taxpayer money ought to be used to pay for abortions.

I think there were two messages in last year's election. One is pretty obvious. People were mad as hell at the president [Barack Obama] - and wanted to send a message. We all got that. Our new members were also hearing, and I was hearing as well, that people didn't like the fact that the Congress was dysfunctional. Now they may have been confused about where the dysfunctionality was cause the president kept pointing to the House. Factually, that's not accurate. The dysfunction was in the Senate.

The classic example I've used - I'm sure you've heard me say it before - was Mark Begich in Alaska who was here for a full six years and never had a roll call vote on an amendment on the floor of the Senate, which Dan Sullivan tells me he used on virtually a daily basis. So the notion that protecting all of your members from votes is a good idea politically, I think, has been pretty much disproved by the recent [Barack Obama] election.

We certainly will have a vote on proceeding to a bill to repeal Obamacare... it was a very large issue in the campaign. And, the reconciliation process does present an opportunity and we're reviewing that to see what's possible through reconciliation.

The debt they ran up in the first year of the Obama administration is bigger than the last four years of the Bush combined.

It seems with every new day, we have a new veto threat from the president.

Americans don't think we should be raising taxes on anybody, especially in the middle of a recession.

Tiger Woods and John Edwards had a better year than the stimulus bill.

It just doesn't occur to an American that someone else will solve their problems. Americans take pride in solving problems for themselves. And if we fail, we get back up and try again. It's what we do. It's who we are.

By their own admission, leaders of the Republican Revolution of 1994 think their greatest mistake was overlooking the power of the veto. They gave the impression they were somehow in charge when they weren't.

79 senators, including that great conservative Elizabeth Warren, said they didn't like the medical device tax, so we will go at that law - which in my view is the single worst piece of legislation passed in the last half century - in every way that we can.

Syria and Iran have always had a pretty tight relationship, and it looks to me like they just cooked up a press release to put out to sort of restate the obvious. They're both problem countries; we know that. And this doesn't change anything.

It took us in this country 11 years to get from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution.

I know how it feels when you're coming into a new situation, that the other guys won the election.

It's a shame that the president doesn't embrace the effort to reduce spending. None of us like using situations like the sequester or the debt ceiling or the operation of government to try to engage the president to deal with this.

On the issue of Iraq, it is my hope, and my challenge to my colleagues, that our debate will be based on what is best for the future of our nation and for Iraq, not what's best for a political party or presidential campaign.

What happens in committee if the committee functions, more often than not, not every time but more often than not, a bill comes out with bipartisan support.

The new troops in Iraq need to be Iraqi troops.

This heinous crime should be of particular concern to all of us. . . . I know my colleagues will agree that the murder of Americans overseas cannot go unpunished. I will continue to closely follow developments in this case[.]