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McConnell’s Challenger’s Campaign Picking Up Steam, Gains Key Conservative Group’s Endorsement

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Photo Credit: Gage SkidmoreMatt Bevin, who plans to challenge Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell in the 2014 Kentucky GOP primary, picked up a big endorsement from a national conservative group Sunday evening.

The Madison Project, a conservative fundraising group headed by former Rep. Jim Ryun (R-Kan.), who once held track’s world record in the mile, will give Bevin access to donors from around the country. Ryun’s son, Drew, a former deputy political director at the Republican National Committee, is also involved.

The group praised Bevin’s candidacy in a letter to activists and donors as someone poised to storm “the decaying castle of the GOP establishment for millions of conservatives.”

“As a self-made successful businessman, Matt Bevin understands that the failed leadership in the Republican Party cannot be fixed with the very elements that precipitated its failure,” they wrote.

The letter touts Bevin’s accomplishments in the private sector, such as building two investment companies and being named the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2009. One of those funds, Integrity Asset Management, grew to $1.8 billion in assets.

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Tea Party Candidate Announces Senate Bid Against ‘Mud-Slinging Mitch’ McConnell

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Frankfort, Kentucky – Kentucky businessman Matt Bevin announced he would be running against Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell in the Kentucky Republican senate primary.

“Never before in American political history has the leader of a party lost a primary election,” Bevin acknowledged in his remarks, given in the rotunda of the Kentucky state capitol. “Never. But never before has it been so important to make that happen.”

Flanked by his wife and nine children, Bevin attacked the GOP as being “a party that is as complicit in our impending deficit crisis as the Democratic party,” according to his prepared remarks.

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Harry Reid: Mitch McConnell ‘Tried to Make Love to the Tea Party and They Didn’t Like It’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: APSenate Majority Leader Harry Reid is enjoying the possibility of a tea party backed challenger to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

“He tried to make love to the tea party and they didn’t like it,” Reid quipped about McConnell to at an event hosted by the pro-Obama nonprofit Organizing for Action.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi spoke after Reid, saying that President George Washington warned about political parties who were at war with their own government

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Harry Reid says nuclear option still on the table

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Monday that the “nuclear option” is still on the table if Republicans move to block more executive branch nominees.

The procedural move that would end filibusters of President Barack Obama’s nominees with a simple majority “can always come back,” Reid said at an event hosted by the pro-Obama non-profit Organizing for Action.

The Senate reached a last-minute deal last week to avoid the nuclear option. Since the deal, the Senate approved Richard Cordray’s nomination to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Gina McCarthy to serve as EPA administrator; Tom Perez as Labor secretary, among other nominees. Read more from this story HERE.

Potential Primary Challenger to McConnell Courting Conservative Groups

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Photo Credit: APKentucky investment executive Matt Bevin has met with some of the nation’s top conservative groups ahead of an expected GOP primary challenge to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, sources told POLITICO.

Bevin, a partner in the Louisville-based hedge fund Waycross Partners, has not publicly confirmed that he will run against McConnell. But an entity dubbed “Matt Bevin for Senate” has reserved airtime in multiple Kentucky TV markets starting this week, and spokespeople for Bevin and McConnell traded on-record barbs last Friday.

In the run-up to his anticipated campaign, Bevin has spoken with leaders of at least three national right-leaning advocacy groups: the widely feared Club for Growth, the Jim DeMint-founded Senate Conservatives Fund and the Madison Project, a small-government group chaired by former Kansas Rep. Jim Ryun.

Those organizations aren’t yet commenting on Bevin, given that he hasn’t declared his campaign.

While the all-but-announced McConnell challenger is believed to be wealthy enough to commit some personal resources to the race, it’s not clear whether he can – or will – fully self-fund a campaign. A key test of his viability may be whether conservative outside groups are willing to give him back-up on the airwaves.

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The Grand Old Poseurs

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Last week, Speaker of the House John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell ostentatiously announced their intention to fight implementation of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). They sent a letter to the President decrying the way IPAB will “impact America’s seniors … in the absence of the democratic process.” Sadly, the exercise was a charade. McConnell and Boehner know perfectly well that Obama has no intention of setting up this controversial rationing board until after 2015.

IPAB, as you will recall, was created by the authors of Obamacare to do the dirty work of cutting Medicare costs. It will be, for all intents and purposes, a death panel composed of 15 unelected apparatchiks whose method of “cost control” will be old-fashioned government rationing. It will simply deny payment for expensive medical procedures without which the lives of many seniors will be forfeit. However, as David Hogberg pointed out last month, the President has made no move to implement this integral component of “reform.”

Why not? Well, IPAB comes into play only if Medicare costs increase at a certain rate above the Consumer Price Index. Perhaps Obama had a presentiment that the program’s costs, which have been out of control for decades, would miraculously stop increasing at their usual rate. As it happens, that is precisely what his new CMS actuary has reported. On April 30, acting actuary Paul Spitalnic advised his boss that “the projected 5-year Medicare per capita growth rate” won’t hit the trigger amount that would require the intervention of IPAB.

This memo was sent 9 days before Boehner and McConnell sent their meaningless missive. They have no doubt been planning for some time to make IPAB an issue in the 2014 midterms, and were caught flat-footed when our wily President and his creatures at HHS contrived to put off implementation until after those crucial elections. In other words, these two Republican “leaders” have once again been outmaneuvered by President Obama and are now attempting to obscure that pathetic reality with empty words and impotent posturing.

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Republicans Are Refusing To Appoint Members To Obamacare’s Most Notorious Panel

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Photo Credit: Business Insider One of the most politically intense fights over the Affordable Care Act was over the creation of the Independent Payment Advisory Board, infamously dubbed a “death panel” by Republicans during the 2010 elections.

On Thursday, Republican House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell signaled that they would keep working to keep opposition alive by doing everything they can to impede the board’s implementation.

The two leaders wrote a letter to President Barack Obama, notifying him that they would not be submitting any recommendations to the panel because of their opposition to it and to the law in general.

Here’s the relevant part of their letter explaining why they aren’t offering any recommendations:

In order to allow supporters to claim that the law’s Medicare cuts would be realized in the future, it tasked IPAB with reducing payments to providers or eliminating payments for certain treatments and procedures altogether. These reduced payments will force providers to stop seeing Medicare patients, the same way an increased number of doctors have stopped taking Medicaid patients. This will lead to access problems, waiting lists and denied care for seniors.

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Sen. Mitch McConnell's and RNC Chair Reince Priebus' Staff Attend Congressional Tea Party Caucus Meeting

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Photo Credit: APThe Tea Party Caucus is back in action with a new strategy and a growing membership.

Roughly 20 House Republicans attended a closed-door meeting Thursday evening in the Rayburn House Office Building, along with staffers from nearly 40 congressional offices, including those of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and fellow Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul.

It comes as conservatives continue to flex their muscle, making life difficult for GOP leaders in the House on issues like Obamacare, and as the debate on immigration legislation heats up.

Conservative mainstays such as Reps. Paul Broun (R-Ga.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Tom Price (R-Ga.), Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) and Steve King (R-Iowa) were among those at the meeting. A source said the entire GOP House delegation from South Carolina was there as well.

Mike Shields, chief of staff to Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, spoke at the meeting – an indication that the GOP establishment is making an effort to work with the tea party lawmakers.

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Will Rand Paul Do What’s Right and Help Primary McConnell?

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Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

Rand Paul really struck a chord with many conservatives when he declared at CPAC that “the GOP of old has grown stale and moss-covered,——I don’t think we need to name any names here, do we?” But will he adhere to his own admonishment?

The imagery of stale air and moss-covered vegetation serves as the superlative metaphor for the way so many of us view the current crop of GOP leaders. Many of them are not necessarily liberal Republicans-in-name-only at heart; they just fail to inspire a following and fail to articulate conservative principles in a way that provides voters with a bold and exciting contrast. They are content to grow old in office, cutting backroom deals with Democrats to grow government, so long as their seat of power is protected.

At its core, the lack of fresh leaders and ideas is born out of the lack of choice and competition in primaries. The bedrock belief of conservatism is that choice and competition lead to better outcomes in the marketplace. The GOP – the party that is supposed to promote that belief – has been run like a country club for years. Our presidential nominees have always been the “next in line;” our congressional nominees have always been the ones with the most money and name recognition. Once elected to office, nobody has dared to challenge 95% of these individuals. Such a lack of rivalry would leave even the boldest conservative a bit complacent and moss-covered after several decades of free rides with Republican voters. Someone who was never a bold conservative to begin with is certainly rendered irredeemable after decades with no competition.

Hence, if we want to clean out the mildew within the GOP tent, we must open the door with some fresh air of healthy primary competition.

If you want a dictionary definition of the GOP establishment, it is Mitch McConnell and those who surround him. If you want to know the paradigm of stale, moss-covered leadership, it’s Mitch McConnell. Nobody could assert with a straight face – even those who personally admire him – that Mitch McConnell is an inspiring leader who has provided bold leadership against the big government establishment in Washington. He has voted for all of the things Rand Paul has inveighed against for years. He has cut backroom deals with Biden to raise taxes and the debt ceiling. He has been running around ridiculing Obamacare while doing nothing do defund it through the budget process until Ted Cruz forced his hand – and even then, he voted for the CR which ultimately contained that funding.

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Senate Republicans Willfully And Knowingly Lie To Their Constituents

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Photo Credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Last night, having noted the list of Republicans in the Senate who voted to fund Obamacare in yesterday’s Morning Briefing, I went through a series of emails from readers.

Readers from Texas, Kentucky, Utah, South Dakota, and Georgia all had the same story. They’d called the offices of Senators Chambliss, Cornyn, Hatch, Thune, McConnell, and Isakson to object to those senators funding Obamacare. They were all told by these Senate offices that these Senators had voted to defund Obamacare or, in the case of Senator Cornyn’s office, that there had been no vote on defunding Obamacare.

These Senators and their staffs are lying. They voted to fund Obamacare. More troubling, they know they did it.

Yesterday, on the floor of the Senate, Mitch McConnell again said, “Obamacare is a colossal mistake for our country. . . . We need to start all over. This bill needs to be repealed and it needs to be replaced. . . . And anyone who thinks we’ve given up this fight is dead wrong.”

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Mitch McConnell Declares Surrender On Obamacare

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Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

Joining Eric Cantor, John Boehner, Kevin McCarthy, and Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell is declaring surrender on Obamacare. He will no longer fight it.

You’d never know that if you paid attention to his preferred words about Obamacare at CPAC. McConnell told the crowd that “Obamacare should be repealed root and branch.” He also told the crowd that those who think he’s given up the fight are wrong. He pledged to continue to fight. I call bull.

The part of his speech that McConnell hopes you ignore is him saying, “When it came to Obamacare, we gave it everything we have, everything we have, and we just lost.” He’s also signaling that the Senate Republicans will neither filibuster the continuing resolution nor shut down the government.

The continuing resolution is the best vehicle to use as a fight to defund Obamacare. Republicans will not, despite their rhetoric right now, fight on the debt ceiling to undermine Obamacare. This is the fight.

McConnell has a history of throwing red meat to the crowd then turning his back on them. Last February, Jim DeMint offered an amendment to defund Obamacare. McConnell refused to offer it up as a Republican amendment in the Senate because he did not want to anger Harry Reid. The backlash caused McConnell to promise a month long PR campaign about Obamacare the following month.

Read more from this story HERE.