Even more fucking high...

McConnell forecasts bipartisanship in new year

The Kentucky Republican told reporters to expect a shift in the Senate.

By SEUNG MIN KIM

After a rough-and-tumble year of partisan battles, Mitch McConnell says he’s ready to try something new: bipartisanship.

The Senate majority leader’s two marquee accomplishments in 2017 — a massive tax overhaul and confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court — were done with little or no Democratic support. His bid to repeal Obamacare collapsed, but that was never meant to pick up Democratic votes anyway.

But now McConnell is adopting a bipartisan tone as Republicans head into a difficult election year in which control of the Capitol is at stake.

“I think one thing you can say about this year, it was pretty partisan,” McConnell said Friday during his traditional year-end news conference on Capitol Hill. “We’re gonna be looking for areas of bipartisan agreement because that’s the way the Senate is. There’s only a few narrow exceptions, as all of you know, to those principles in the Senate.”

Laying out his preliminary agenda for 2018, McConnell said he is “almost certain” that he will tee up legislation that curbs part of the Dodd-Frank law that overhauled the financial industry after the 2008 crisis. That bill can likely overcome any filibuster threat, as it has nearly a dozen Democratic co-sponsors, including some who are the GOP’s biggest political targets in the November midterms.

McConnell also stressed that he has committed to bringing up legislation to address the future of hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants in the United States as long as a bipartisan group of senators can strike an agreement. The Kentucky Republican has also mentioned overhauling the nation’s infrastructure as a potential policy target for next year.

McConnell also signaled he has little interest in pursuing some sharply partisan measures next year. Of Senate Republicans who are itching to take up Obamacare repeal again, he said simply, “I wish them well.” And McConnell again threw cold water on the prospect of Speaker Paul Ryan’s desire to overhaul entitlement and welfare programs.

“I’ve been here a while and the only time we’ve been able to do that is on a bipartisan basis,” McConnell said of changing entitlement programs. “It was Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill, raised the age of Social Security and that was before I got here, so it’s been a while.”

McConnell added: “The sensitivity of entitlements is such that you almost have to have a bipartisan agreement in order to achieve a result.”

President Donald Trump will meet with Ryan and McConnell in early January to begin hashing out the party’s 2018 agenda, the majority leader told reporters.

On Trump, McConnell said the two men have “established a really good working relationship” — despite deep disputes between them earlier this year over the failure of Obamacare repeal and political campaign strategy.

“You can sense this tax exercise kind of brought everybody together, because we knew we weren’t going to have any support from the other side,” McConnell said. “We worked together seamlessly. I think we go into the new year with a high level of confidence in our ability to work together with the administration.”

McConnell is even coming around to one of Trump’s practices he once criticized: “With regard to the president’s tweeting habits, I haven’t been a fan until this week. I’m warming up to the tweets, actually.”

He also urged Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.), the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to complete a bipartisan report on Russian meddling into the 2016 campaign because “if it’s purely partisan, I don’t think anybody will give it any credibility.”

Still, McConnell acknowledged some looming political clashes are on the horizon.

While he said he hoped he could reach an agreement with Democrats on lifting strict spending caps for defense and domestic programs, the majority leader said the Pentagon has been hit harder, budgetwise, and that “there’s an urgency there” with relieving the across-the-board cuts enacted under a 2011 deficit reduction law.

Democrats have demanded equal increases in spending for both domestic and defense programs.

And on immigration, McConnell declined to answer whether he personally supports a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers. While the bipartisan Senate group is discussing ways to provide a permanent status for the young undocumented immigrants, a GOP plan McConnell has endorsed only provides temporary protections to current beneficiaries of the Deferred Actions for Childhood Arrivals program for three years.

McConnell also said Congress must address “chain migration,” which refers to naturalized U.S. citizens or permanent residents sponsoring immediate relatives for green cards, a frequent target of Trump and the right.

“I think you all are familiar with the fact that I’m pretty supportive of legal immigration,” McConnell said, invoking his wife Elaine Chao, the current Transportation secretary who immigrated to the United States from Taiwan when she was 8 years old. On Dreamers, “we want to have a signature, we don’t just want to spin our wheels here and have nothing to show for it.”