Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, speaking Thursday to a group in Hopkinsville, avoided any direct comment on President Donald Trump’s criticism of him.
Instead, he suggested the former president is irrelevant to his current emphasis — blocking President Joe Biden’s push for a $4 trillion infrastructure package.
“I’m focused entirely on the present and the future. Not the past,” McConnell said when asked if Trump’s harsh comments about him and other Republicans were a distraction for his party.
“My view at the moment is we need to turn this administration into a moderate administration,” he said.
Trump issued a statement Wednesday in which he called McConnell “gutless and clueless” for not backing his false claims that the election was stolen from him through fraud.
Although he’s no longer the majority leader in the Senate, McConnell stressed the slim advantage Democrats have in Congress.
I’m not the majority leader, but I’m barely not the majority leader. We’ve got a 50-50 Senate, and I’m still hoping the administration will pivot to a more centrist position, and that’s where I’m spending my time and focus.”
McConnell said Biden’s plan contains too much spending for projects that don’t meet the traditional definition of infrastructure. Republicans have identified a much smaller package, around $600 billion, for roads, bridges and other projects that do qualify as infrastructure, he said.
“I think the administration will probably think of this as Plan B,” he said. “… If they are not able to get everybody behind the massive proposal then I think we’ve got a real chance to do something important for the country on a bipartisan basis.”
McConnell met privately with a group of business leaders at the James E. Bruce Convention Center before taking questions from reporters.
- SUPPORT US: Like what we do? Consider making a donation to the Hoptown Chronicle, a nonprofit news organization
He said the main issues he heard during their discussion were inflation and a shortage of available workers. Enhanced unemployment benefits have made not working more lucrative than working for many people in the country, including in Kentucky, he said.
Hopkinsville City Councilman Jason Bell, who owns a car detailing business, was part of the group that met with McConnell. He said skilled and unskilled labor is almost impossible to find. It is affecting his business, he said.
McConnell also answered questions about funding for Land Between the Lakes and about President Biden’s decision to pull all U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
The senator said he believes it is a mistake to bring back the limited number of military in Afghanistan, and he predicted the Taliban would be back in control of the country, possibly by the end of the year.
Concerning LBL, McConnell said there’s some confusion about reports that the U.S. Forest Service plans to cut most funding for the 170,000-acre national recreation area.
“We are trying to get to the bottom of whether or not in fact the administration is recommending some kind of reduction in funding,” he said.
McConnell said “old-timers in the room” would remember when he and former Congressman Ed Whitfield worked to shift LBL from the Tennessee Valley Authority to the Forest Service in the late 1990s. The move happened after TVA threatened to back out of its oversight of LBL.
At that time, said McConnell, it made since to shift LBL to the Forest Service.
“I think now we need to take a look at this, study (it) and see if the Forest Service is actually the best home for LBL,” he said. “It could be that we will conclude there’s a better place for it to be. So I think we ought to take a good, hard look at that. In the meantime we want to make sure funding is adequate because at least for the short term it’s still going to be in the Forest Service.”
There’s some speculation that the National Park Service would be a better agency to manage LBL.
McConnell called LBL “extremely important to Kentucky” and said it needs to be protected.
“That’s what I’ll be trying to accomplish,” he said.
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. She spent 30 years as a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition.
