page_title: Political positions of Mitch McConnell
section_title: Economy
hierarchical_section_title: Political positions of Mitch McConnell / Economy
caption_attribution_description: President Barack Obama meets with Senate Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., in the Oval Office, Aug. 4, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
context_page_description: The political positions of Mitch McConnell are reflected by his United States Senate voting record, public speeches, and interviews, as well as his actions as Senate majority and minority leader. McConnell was known as a pragmatist and a moderate Republican early in his political career, but shifted to the right over time. He led opposition to stricter campaign finance laws, culminating in the Supreme Court ruling that partially overturned the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act in 2010.
context_section_description: In 2010, McConnell requested earmarks for the defense contractor BAE Systems while the company was under investigation by the Department of Justice for alleged bribery of foreign officials.
  In June 2011, McConnell introduced a Constitutional Balanced Budget Amendment. The amendment would require two-thirds votes in Congress to increase taxes or for federal spending to exceed the current year's tax receipts or 18% of the prior year's GDP. The amendment specifies situations when these requirements would be waived.
  During the Great Recession, as Congress and the Obama administration negotiated reforms of the banking system, McConnell played an important role in preventing the addition of a provision requiring banks to prefund a reserve intended to be used to rescue insolvent banks in the future. When there appeared to be bipartisan and majority support for such a bank-funded reserve, McConnell criticized the provision, referred to it as a "bailout fund" and turned "opposition to it a litmus test for Senate Republicans", according to one study. According to the study, "McConnell's attack, along with his insistence that opposition would be a matter of party principle, undermined the fragile coalition supporting the prefunded reserve, and the White House – fearing that advocating a bank levy as part of the president's broader reform would enable opponents to kill the whole bill – shelved the idea."
  After two intercessions to get federal grants for Alltech, whose president T. Pearse Lyons made subsequent campaign contributions to McConnell, to build a plant in Kentucky for producing ethanol from algae, corncobs, and switchgrass, McConnell criticized President Obama in 2012 for twice mentioning biofuel production from algae in a speech touting his "all-of-the-above" energy policy.
  In 2014, McConnell voted to help break Ted Cruz's filibuster attempt against a debt limit increase and then against the bill itself. In 2014, McConnell opposed the Paycheck Fairness Act (a bill that "punishes employers for retaliating against workers who share wage information, puts the justification burden on employers as to why someone is paid less and allows workers to sue for punitive damages of wage discrimination") because it would "line the pockets of trial lawyers", not help women.
  In July 2014, McConnell expressed opposition to a U.S. Senate bill that would limit the practice of corporate inversion by U.S. corporations seeking to limit U.S. tax liability.
  Under McConnell, the Republican-led Senate voted to pass the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.
  In 2018, McConnell called for entitlement cuts and raised concern about government deficits. He blamed the deficit on government spending, and dismissed criticisms of the tax cuts bill he passed the year prior, which added more than $1 trillion in debt.
  In 2019, McConnell introduced legislation to eliminate the estate tax (which is a tax on inheritances over $11.2 million).
caption: McConnell with President Barack Obama, August 2010
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