Kentucky’s longest-serving senator, Mitch McConnell, critiqued the Biden administration and his fellow Congressional Republicans in a speech to local community leaders and business owners Tuesday in Louisville.
The Senate minority leader began his remarks by comparing his seven-term tenure to working as a cemetery groundskeeper.
“Everybody's under you, but no one is listening,” McConnell said Tuesday during a Greater Louisville Inc.’s Capitol Connection luncheon.
While McConnell — who announced his plans to step down as Senate GOP leader earlier this year — touted his success on the Senate floor, he said working with the Biden Administration has been a “regulatory nightmare.”
McConnell outlined what he sees as the two most grievous errors in Biden’s leadership: inflation and issues at the southern border.
On Tuesday, the Kentucky Republican said the Biden administration created nationwide inflation.
“It's easy to start inflation, and really hard to turn it off,” McConnell said.
The Federal Reserve is expected to cut interest rates sometime this year, but stubborn inflation above 2% could make cuts elusive.
McConnell also lambasted Biden’s policies concerning the country’s border with Mexico. He said Biden has “basically opened the border” since he took office.
Earlier this month, Biden announced a partial asylum ban once the border encounters tally more than 2,500 a day. McConnell said these issues are a liability for President Biden as November’s election gets closer.
The remarks comes before the first presidential debate scheduled for Thursday. McConnell endorsed former President Donald Trump in March despite a long running conflict between the two Republicans.
“It's gonna be really interesting to see how they play off each other,” McConnell said.
He had some criticism to share about fellow Republicans in Congress, calling them “isolationist” toward foreign aid when a Democratic president is in office. He said there is no room for this sort of philosophy amid the war in Ukraine and the conflict in Israel.
“We're in the most dangerous international situation we've been in since right before World War II,” he said.
