GOP Meltdown: Senate Leader Faces Nightmare Election While Republicans in the House Defeat Themselves

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“In total, the bill provides $44.1 billion in discretionary spending – a reduction of $7.7 billion below the fiscal year 2013 enacted level and $13.9 billion below the President’s budget request,” House Appropriations Committee Chairman, Republican Hal Rogers, said in a late June press release, boasting of the slash-and-burn legislation.

After Wednesday’s House floor debacle, Rogers issued a defiant statement, saying, “This means that all government program – not just those on the discretionary side of the ledger – must be reduced.”

Meanwhile, in the Senate on Wednesday, Republicans fillibustered their version of the same bill—which would have spent $10 billion more than the House—blocking it from a vote. McConnell then pushed his GOP caucus to vote as a block and stop it from going forward. This means McConnell is not yet a weakened Senate leader, but it does mean he is at the helm of the GOP’s obstructionist machinery.

Kentucky voters may not be following the details of this political dysfunstion, but the mid-July poll placing Democrat Alison Grimes in a dead heat with McConnell suggests that a sizeable number of that state’s voters have had enough of their senior senator.

This fall’s epic budget battles are only beginning. Progressives and Democrats can only hope that McConnell’s role in the GOP’s attack on federal support for a range of middle-class and anti-poverty programs will not be forgotten by November 2014, and will spell the beginning of the end of his long political career.