Sen. Mitch McConnell says that if Republicans take control of the Senate, as expected, getting rid of Obamacare will be his top priority as Senate majority leader.
But with President Barack Obama still in office and armed with a veto pen, it will be impossible to simply repeal the law outright, McConnell, of Kentucky, said Tuesday on
Fox News Channel's "Your World with Neil Cavuto."
Instead, he said, Congress will target parts of the Affordable Care Act that are unpopular with the public. They will work to repeal the medical device tax, restore the 40-hour workweek, and repeal the individual mandate, "which people hate, detest and despise," McConnell said.
Even with a GOP majority in the Senate, no one is expecting the party to have enough votes to override a presidential veto, so McConnell said they will pass legislation and send it to Obama's desk to get him to "take ownership" by either signing or vetoing them.
But even if Republicans take over the Senate, McConnell has to win his own tight re-election bid before he can attain the powerful position of majority leader. Polls show him neck-and-neck with Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's super-PAC and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee have pumped money into Grimes' campaign, but McConnell, the minority leader, says that's just part of the territory.
"If you're leader of one of the parties, you get an awful lot of unwanted attention. Every crazy liberal in the country wishes me ill," he told Cavuto. "The president's been trying to beat me for years. I'm proud of my enemies. I wouldn't trade them with anybody."
McConnell has given his own campaign $1.8 million in the closing days of the race, but he told Cavuto it isn't a sign he's flailing. He did it to counter the money flowing into Grimes' campaign from outside the state, he said.
"I did the same thing six years ago," he said. "It's simply a reaction to their doubling down on me, and I'm doubling down on them."
Both Bill and Hillary Clinton have stumped for Grimes in Kentucky in recent days. McConnell says they won't be much help because Kentuckians "know there's not a dime's worth of difference between an Obama Democrat and a Clinton Democrat."
When McConnell last ran, Hillary Clinton spent the day before the election in a county McConnell had never carried, he told Cavuto. He ended up winning that county.
"Both the Clintons support the war on coal that's created a depression in eastern Kentucky, with a lot of coal miners losing their jobs," McConnell said.
Coal is a major employer in Kentucky, and Grimes has said she supports the coal industry, too. A recent ad by Grimes received four Pinocchios from
The Washington Post after she tried to tie McConnell to the shutdown of the Big Sandy power plant.
Grimes is an "Obama Democrat" and supports his agenda, "no matter how much she may bob and weave and try to deceive," McConnell told Cavuto.
McConnell called Hillary Clinton's recent remark that corporations don't create jobs "astonishing." Though Clinton said the next day that she had misspoken, McConnell said she will govern no differently from Obama if elected president in 2016.
One of the reasons the country has experienced the most tepid recovery since World War II is the Obama administration's view toward business in general, he said.
"The country has had enough of this spending and borrowing and taxing and regulation and tepid growth that's the result of these kind of left-wing policies," he said.
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