Have you heard the fable about the hare and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)?
It goes like this: The hare was Usain Bolt fast. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was not only slow, he was a whole bitch. The two were set to race and Vegas couldn’t figure out why the Republican money was leaning heavily on McConnell. The two set up at the starting line and right before the gun was about to go off, McConnell pulls out a crowbar and whacks the hare on his knee, tearing his ACL.
The moral of the story? Well, let’s get back to that.
What’s more important is that McConnell just took care of Kentucky, the state in which he governs, by gifting them more than $1 billion worth of federal spending and tax breaks. And if you’re wondering if this has anything to do with his reelection efforts, the answer is “Fuck Ya!”
According to the Hill, McConnell, who is running for a seventh term next year, made sure that he tucked “$914.2 million in direct spending for Kentucky in the two year-end omnibus spending bills. The windfall will likely boost his political standing at home in the face of a well-financed Democratic opponent and his perennially low approval ratings.”
Not only did McConnell secure the funding for his Kentucky folks but he bragged about it a press conference in Louisville, noting that his likely opponent, retired Marine Corps fighter pilot Amy McGrath, couldn’t pull off what he just did.
“I saw a commercial from my likely opponent indicating that I was all that was wrong with Washington,” McConnell said, the Hill reports. “So I have a question for her here as we go into the new year: In what way would Kentucky have been better off without any of these items that I put in the year-end spending bill?”
McConnell is going to need all the help and gifts he can get, as McGrath is trending upward and just raised some $11 million in the third quarter alone for the 2020 race. McConnell is currently embroiled in a Mexican standoff with Speaker of the House and slayer of fuccbois Nancy Pelosi, who is demanding that McConnell be searched for crowbars before proceeding with the president’s impeachment trial in the Senate. The impeachment proceedings and his overall shitty face have gained McConnell a dismal 37 percent approval rating at home, according to a Morning Consult poll from the third quarter, the Hill reports.
“He’s never had a great level of personal popularity so it’s been important for him to deliver for the state, and he does a good job of doing that,” said Al Cross, a journalism professor at the University of Kentucky.
From the Hill:
McConnell’s wins in the spending legislation included coal miners’ pension benefits; $410 million for the construction of the new Robley Rex Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Louisville; $314 million for cleanup of Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a $40 million increase over last year’s funding level; a tax break for spirits distillers worth an estimated $426 million in 2020 alone; and $65 million for the construction of the Forage Animal Production Lab at the University of Kentucky.
“I was directly responsible — directly responsible — for these items,” McConnell declared at the press conference.
He also secured a tax break for Kentucky’s thoroughbred horse racing industry, $16.5 million for the Department of Agriculture to implement the pro-hemp provisions McConnell got into the 2018 farm bill and $61.3 million for new military construction projects at Fort Campbell.
“It is something that he clearly wanted because it was not in the House package and then got added in and is something that has been his pet initiative,” Steve Ellis, who tracks federal spending bills as executive vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, told the Hill.
Ellis added that the spending will exceed $1 billion once other line items that benefit the state are added in.
“It’s clear Sen. McConnell took advantage of the push to get the bill through to grab all the cash he possibly can for the Commonwealth of Kentucky,” Ellis added. “It’s Santa Mitch delivering the baubles for Kentuckians.”
Oh, and the moral of the story is, Mitch McConnell has always been a whole bitch.