Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said the United States has "a debt the size of our economy" and should not pass President Barack Obama's jobs package.
McConnell told "State of the Union" host Candy Crowley Sunday the American Jobs Act purposefully is designed not to pass.
"The only thing bipartisan about these proposals has been the opposition to them," he said. "The president is deliberately trying to create an issue here."
The 2012 election will be a referendum on Obama — and the president knows it, McConnell said.
"Their story line is that there must be some villain out there who's keeping this administration from succeeding," he said. "They're looking around for anybody else to blame other than themselves. They got everything they wanted from Congress the first two years. Their policies are in place, and they are demonstrably not working."
Vice President Joe Biden said earlier on the program the first stimulus bill has created three million jobs. McConnell said there are 1.5 million fewer jobs today then when Obama took office.
The unemployment rate in the public sector is nowhere near private-sector unemployment, McConnell said.
"With regard to the private sector, what it needs is for us to quit spending, quit borrowing, quit overregulating, and quit threatening to raise taxes," he said. "That's the reason the private sector's all clogged up."
He said business owners tell him they are smothered by health-care mandates, regulations on lenders, and the Dodd-Frank legislation.
"This is a government-prolonged recession," he said.
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