‘For the sake of the taxpayers, for the sake of the justice system, for the sake of the men and women who wear the uniform, it’s time to put politics aside and do the work of today’



Washington, D.C. – Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell delivered the following remarks on the Senate floor Thursday regarding Democrats’ mismanagement of Congress and the urgent need to fund our troops, prevent the middle class tax hike, confirm an Attorney General and send the 2008 appropriations bills to the President’s desk:



“Yesterday the Acting Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service sent a letter to Congress warning about the consequences of not addressing the AMT tax right away. She said that if we don’t do something about this middle class tax hike by December as many as 50 million Americans, more than a third of all U.S. taxpayers, will either get hit by a tax that was never meant for them or forced to wait months for a refund that many of them count on for their family budgets.



“Mr. President, I’d like to submit the letter from Acting Commissioner Linda Stiff for the record.



“When most people get a letter from the IRS, they get scared. But the Democrats didn’t even blink. They don’t seem all that concerned about forcing 50 million Americans to write an interest-free loan to the government in the form of unpaid tax returns worth about $75 billion. 75 billion dollars. That’s more than the gross domestic product of a hundred different countries — just sitting in the Treasury instead of the bank accounts and pockets of Americans who earned it.



“Now, if this were the only thing Senate Democrats were procrastinating over, Americans would have reason enough to be angry. But it’s not. It’s just the latest in a string of core duties they promised they’d address before Election Day but put back on the shelf after all the votes were counted.



“Instead of fulfilling their campaign promises, they launched into a series of legislative misadventures that have put us five weeks into the new fiscal year with the same number of appropriations bills we started with (zero), a Justice Department with more empty offices than the Dirksen building in August, and no indication from anyone on the other side that any of this will change.



“Regarding appropriations, the President has already said he’ll veto spending bills that exceed the budget request. Yet Democrats will now knowingly pass a Labor/HHS bill that exceeds the President’s budget by billions of dollars and attach it to the MilCon/Veterans Appropriations bill. We already know the result. These bills are coming right back to the Senate for a do-over. This is a waste of time, and just more of the same from a party that’s been intent all year on using this chamber as a stage for political theater rather than a workshop to actually get things done.



“Over at the Justice Department, Democrats have been clamoring for new leadership all year. The Senior Senator from New York was the loudest of them all. More than five months ago he told us ‘the nation needs a new attorney general, and it can’t afford to wait.’ The President responded in good faith by nominating the very man the Senior Senator from New York recommended for the job.



“Yet America has now waited longer for a vote on Michael Mukasey than on any other attorney general nominee in decades. They’ve waited more than 40 days now. Compare that to Janet Reno, whose confirmation came less than two weeks after she was named.



“Democrats have found plenty of time for votes that didn’t matter. Now it’s time to turn to votes that do. They found time for midnight votes on political Iraq resolutions. Now Americans are wondering when we’ll have a midnight vote to fix an error in the tax code that promises to leave more than one third of them high and dry come April.



“They found time for a vote on how we felt about the last attorney general. Now people want to know when we’ll have the midnight vote on restoring leadership at the Justice Department.



“They had the time to vote again and again to cut off funds to our troops in the field — voted on the Feingold Amendment to cut off funds three times. Now Americans want to know when they’ll have a midnight vote to send the rest of the money to the troops — or on any one of the twelve appropriations bills in a form that we can expect the president to sign.



“This fixation on political gamesmanship has come at a serious cost. What we are seeing here goes far beyond mismanagement. And the American people have caught on. For the sake of the taxpayers, for the sake of the justice system, for the sake of the men and women who wear the uniform, it’s time to put politics aside and do the work of today.



“No more gimmicks, no more games. Time is short. The stakes are high. Let’s get on with it.”



###