Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
Omni Shoreham Hotel
Washington, D.C.

February 8, 2008

It’s great to be here. Great to get away from the Capitol for a little while. You’ll understand why if you’ve been keeping an eye on Congress since the Democrats took over. Twelve years of pent-up liberalism on display daily. It’s been great entertainment for C-SPAN junkies. They haven’t had this much fun since Bill Clinton’s second term. But I can assure you the rest of us are not amused.

Conservatives have been coming to CPAC conventions in growing numbers every year since 1974, but presidential election years are always the most exciting. CPAC participants should be proud that today, this is the one place every Republican candidate must come to prove his or her worth as a conservative. Once they do, the base rallies behind them, and five of the last seven times, we’ve won. And when Americans see what the liberals are offering this year, we’ll win again.

President Bush just spoke about his accomplishments in office. He forgot to mention one more: eight years ago, he showed the Clinton’s the door. With the help of you all, we’re going to make sure they stay out…

I’ve had some disagreements with John McCain over the years, but he’s my friend. More importantly for this race, he’s a conservative. And he has my full support.

During a presidential election year, most people are focused on the mudslinging. They want to see how far the candidates will go to win. This morning I will discuss why, in the midst of this national spectacle, the Senate must be a different kind of place. Most eyes will be on the candidates, but the people’s business goes on. And it shouldn’t be tainted by the kind of partisanship we’ve come to expect in today’s political campaigns. Once the race is won, the campaigns should end.

Of course, political coverage always focuses on the fights. They say journalism is two-thirds conflict. But as Leader of the Republicans in the Senate, I’m more interested in another two-thirds, the two-thirds majority Senate Democrats need to advance their agenda. The only way we can keep them from enacting their agenda is by sticking together as a party. Governor Romney gave us a good reason for party unity yesterday. He said he hates to lose, but that the stakes are too high to stay in if staying in endangered Senator McCain’s chances in the general. So he dropped out for the sake of the party.

This kind of a show of unity is good for the party. It’s good for the nation. And it’s the only reason Senate Republicans had such astonishing success last year in the face of a liberal assault. Remember: when the Democrats took over, they had big plans. They were all trumpeting the so-called “Six for ’06,” and the hard Left was already writing the press releases announcing our retreat from Iraq. Republicans were not exactly euphoric about our prospects.

But the last scene of the session was very different from the first. Just a few weeks ago, we saw House Democrats finish out the last session huddled around the House chamber and enacting a Republican agenda on taxes — by extending middle-class tax relief without raising taxes elsewhere; on spending — by keeping to the President’s top line on Appropriations Bills and not a penny more; on energy — by passing a conservation bill that didn’t raise taxes or utility rates; and on the War on Terror — by approving, without strings, funding for troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This incredible finale didn’t come about by accident. There are 49 of us in the Republican Conference. And every one has different interests. Some of those differences are regional. Some are based on a different degree of personal emphasis on this or that issue. But what unites us as a conference is a shared belief in the principles that motivated the Founders.

We believe government should serve the people, not the other way around …  and this makes us suspicious of new or expanded entitlements … We believe in a strong defense … and this means that once we’ve committed to a fight, our troops ought to have the tools and the funds they need to finish the job … We believe in maximum personal freedom … And we believe that judges ought to follow the Constitution — not try to rewrite it at the urging of liberal pressure groups …

Our friends on the other side take a different view. You can sum up their idea of government in three words: taxation, regulation, and litigation. Every one of their proposals has one of these three principles at its root.

The problem, of course, is most Americans don’t accept these principles, which is why Democrats often have to shield their real intentions with vague campaign rhetoric about change or hope; by giving policy proposals names that suggest the opposite of their intent — my favorite was last year’s Employee Free Choice Act — or by vilifying Republicans, as they did this week in daring us to vote against $50 billion dollars in add-ons to an economic stimulus bill that even Nancy Pelosi thought were out of hand.

I’m happy to report we won that fight yesterday. We won it because Republicans hung together — ensuring that Americans will get their rebate checks, that the economy will get a boost, and that taxpayers won’t be saddled with an extra $50 billion dollars in unnecessary spending …

A lot of Democratic proposals are bad for individual Americans who value freedom and security and protecting America’s interests abroad. But these partisan political tactics are also bad for America. When members of Congress politicize an issue that should be bipartisan, or conceal their intent from the voters, they undermine the people’s trust in government.

We saw this on vivid display last year. The more Democrats politicized issues, the further Congress’s approval ratings sank. By the end of the year, Congress’s approval was at its lowest point since polling began.

Yet, urged on by their base, Democrats tried again and again to force their agenda on the rest of us. In every single case, we stopped them. How? Because we stayed together as a team. In the House, a majority is good enough to get just about anything through. But in the Senate, virtually anything of consequence requires bipartisan support. It’s the only legislative body on earth where a majority isn’t enough. So as long as Republicans hold onto 41, we have a say in what becomes law.

Now it’s not exactly easy to keep that many senators in agreement on anything. One of my predecessors in the Whip Office once said it’s like trying to keeping frogs in a wheelbarrow. But it’s always worth it. Last year’s experience left absolutely no doubt about that among Republicans.

Over the course of the year, the Senate Majority held 17 votes aimed at changing the mission or cutting off funds for the troops in Iraq. The House has held 19. Yet the results couldn’t have been more different: in the House, all but one of the 19 bills passed. In the Senate, all but one of the 17 votes failed. And the one that did pass on our side only passed because Republicans wanted to accelerate the veto process so the troops could get their funds as soon as possible.

Many of the Democrats’ most radical proposals last year never actually got the attention of most Americans, but that’s only because they either couldn’t find 60 senators to support their ideas or because Republicans held onto 41. Early on, they tried to satisfy liberal interests like Big Labor, trial lawyers, and anti-war fringe outfits like Code Pink and MoveOn.Org.

They tried to let airport security workers collectively bargain, giving the people who are hired to carry out a rapid response plan during a terrorist attack the power to veto those plans in exchange for longer coffee breaks. Republicans didn’t let it happen.

They tried to shut down Guantanamo Bay and have its inmates transferred to American soil. Folks in Kentucky don’t want these guys living in their backyards. Neither does the rest of the country. Republicans didn’t let it happen.

They tried to eliminate the secret ballot from union drives so workers would have to publicly state in front of union bosses and employers alike whether they were for or against forming a union. That’s the Employee Free Choice Act I mentioned earlier. How would you vote if your boss was standing over your shoulder? The secret ballot is at the heart of Democracy. Republicans weren’t going to let anyone take it away. It didn’t happen.

They tried to revive the so-called Fairness Doctrine — a kind of federal speech code that was done away with more than twenty years ago because it violated the First Amendment. It basically says you’ve got to give Al Franken the same airtime as Rush Limbaugh wherever Limbaugh’s show is aired. Well, Republicans didn’t let them do it. Truck drivers and cabbies everywhere were grateful.

Now they want to hamstring our ability to monitor terrorists and allow trial lawyers to punish phone companies for cooperating with the government. You may remember that Democrats waited until almost midnight on the day before the August recess to pass the Protect America Act, a bill that was based on the urgent advice of the Director of National Intelligence.

Now this is a common-sense law. It says intelligence officials should be able to listen in on communications between foreign terrorists that are routed through the U.S. It expires next week, and Democrats are trying to water down its reauthorization so trial lawyers can have a shot at suing telephone companies that may have assisted the government in tracking terrorists right after 9/11.

We’re confident Democrats will come around on this at the last minute. But the question remains: if we’re having this much trouble passing a sensible security law under a president who wants it, what will the security landscape look like under a president who doesn’t?

We’ve had some success with judicial nominations. We got Judge Leslie Southwick confirmed for a seat on the Fifth District Court of Appeals that had been vacant for years. We got Judge Michael Mukasey confirmed to lead the Justice Department after a fight nobody saw coming. Remember that Judge Mukasey was suggested by his own home-state senator, Senator Schumer. But liberal pressure groups decided they didn’t like him, so we had to endure weeks of posturing before he was finally confirmed.

All last year Republicans used the rules of the Senate to either improve worthy legislation or stop things that would never have had popular support, but which rose to the top of the Democrats’ legislative agenda on the insistence of pressure groups — just the kind of thing the framers worried about and which they designed the Senate to prevent. We succeeded again and again because we hung together.

Governor Romney explained yesterday why he was getting out of the race. He said he doesn’t like to lose. But he thinks Republicans have a better chance in November if he got out now. He sacrificed his own chances of winning for the sake of the larger party goals.

Republicans in the Senate have been operating under a similar principle. We’ve repeatedly come together for a single greater cause: the future security and prosperity of the entire nation. And by sticking together, we have done more than prevent a number of very bad ideas from becoming law. We’ve insisted, again and again, that Democrats govern in the middle, which is a little bit to the left of where we’d like them. But the alternative would have been far worse.

By sticking together, and with your help in holding us accountable, we did something else too. We rediscovered some old principles. And I have no doubt that if Republicans everywhere continue to stick together this year, we will not only win in November.

We will be reenergized in our convictions — and ready to confront the nation’s challenges with confidence that Republicans, when united, are best-prepared to lead our nation through the great challenges of our time, by bringing it closer to the conservative ideals upon which it was founded.