“I actually slow-walked the organization of the Senate in the beginning, until we had public statements from both Sinema and Manchin indicating they wouldn’t do that,” Sen. McConnell said on his efforts to preserve the filibuster.
“I never budged on that. Never budged. So yeah, I’m proud of it,” McConnell said, hailing it as an “extremely important” win for conservatives. He said it’ll mean they no longer “pay a ransom on the domestic side” in order to secure hefty military spending.
It could set the table for future negotiations, when the GOP is sure to keep demanding higher spending on defense and less on education, health care, Pell Grants and other domestic items. Democrats have plenty to be happy about in the new bill, but breaching the"parity" standard has been a source of angst.
The move infuriated Democrats. Schumer refused. But it prompted Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., to issue categorical statements that they wouldn’t nuke the filibuster. His decision to work with Democrats has drawn heavy criticism from the right wing of the GOP, deepening his bitter feud with Trump, who accused him of being too compromising with the opposition party. McConnell rejects that position, arguing that those bills are all in the “best interest of the country.”A “byproduct” of those bipartisan wins, he said, was that they “may have reassured Manchin and Sinema” that they didn’t need to nuke the filibuster to get things done.
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