Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) conceded Thursday that President Obama’s nominees for the Environmental Protection Agency (Gina McCarthy) and Labor Department (Tom Perez) have enough votes to break a filibuster.
“[T]hey’re the ones – Democrats – who have yet to schedule votes on the McCarthy and Perez nominations, despite the fact that both of these highly controversial nominees already have enough votes to clear a 60-vote hurdle,” he said.
His remarks clarify that the escalating battle over Senate rules and the nuclear option could hinge on nominees for the National Labor Relations Board, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and potentially the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
McConnell said of McCarthy and Perez:
“I don’t like that fact, and I certainly won’t be voting for either nominee. Tom Perez, in particular, is a far-left ideologue whose record of bending the rules to achieve his ends is deeply concerning to me, and just one of the reasons I plan to vote against him. But to pretend that the power to confirm those folks lies in the hands of anyone but the Majority Leader, well, it’s totally disingenuous.
“The White House knows this. And the Majority Leader would know it too if he spent a little more time working with his colleagues in a collegial way and a little less time trying to undermine and marginalize them.
“No, the real reason, as I said, that the Far-Left and Big Labor are leaning hard on Democrats to ‘go nuclear’, and that the Majority Leader is about to sacrifice his reputation and this institution to go along with it, is because what they really want is for the Senate to ratify the President’s unconstitutional decision to illegally appoint nominees to the NLRB and the CFPB without the input of the Senate.
