Sen. Mitch McConnell: Americans Don't Approve of Anything Obama Has Done

The national popular vote would effectively abolish the Electoral College. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell visited the Heritage Foundation to outline his concerns about the plan. Senator, thanks for joining us. Glad to be with you. You said this is one of the stories that is not getting the attention that it deserves. Tell us why you're so concerned about the national popular vote and why it may be unconstitutional. Well, they have a good soundbite, those who want to change the Constitution, but not changing the Constitution. By the way, they're trying to do it with an interstate compact. They say with a candidate for president who has the most votes ought to win, and for most people that sounds like a pretty good explanation. The problem is achieving finality without error in a national vote count in a contested election is impossible. Right now, we have 50 separate elections. You get an outcome in each election. That gives you the electoral votes. You count up the electoral votes, and it's over before time to swear in the new president. Imagine a situation where every single vote in every single precinct in America was fed into a national count. You'd have endless litigation in every close election, and about three, four times a century we have really tight national popular vote elections. We wouldn't be able to know who was going to be in the White House by January 20th, the time the Constitution prescribes for swearing in the new president. There's a reason why we've stuck with the Electoral College for 235 years. The reason is other efforts have been made to amend it, and the way that you amend the Constitution, they have all failed because it's a bad idea. You've called the Keystone XL project a great example of a shovel-ready project that would create jobs. What steps can you take to put pressure on the Obama administration to get this project moving forward? We're going to try to pass legislation to get the Keystone XL pipeline started. For your viewers who are not familiar with it, it's a pipeline from Canada down through the central part of the United States to carry energy to us, as opposed to China. The Canadians have an option. They can go to Asia, or they can send it to us. This is a shovel-ready project. It can start tomorrow. All it needs is presidential approval. All the environmental traps have already been run, and then the president decided, oh, I'm not going to decide this until after the next election, presumably to curry favor with environmentalists who don't like any form of energy production. But we need jobs. This is a project ready to go. All it needs is the permission of the president of the United States. So legislatively, we're going to demand that the president make a decision within 60 days. We're going to try to pass it. The president was in Kansas this week. He was railing against Republicans on this class warfare argument that he keeps making. He said conservative economics have never worked. But here's the problem. It doesn't work. It has never worked. Well, he's totally wrong, as he is on many things. I mean, conservative economics do work. Cutting taxes has produced more revenue for the government, a better economy. Every time we've tried it from John Kennedy to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, the result has always been the same. The president is trying to pit one set of Americans against another. He's trying to turn this election into anything but what the election is really about. The election is about his performance. He will have been there four years this time next year. How did he do? How did people like the stimulus? How did they like Obamacare? How did they like Dodd-Frank? How did they like this level of unemployment? Has he done a good job? This election is going to be a referendum on his performance. And if the election were tomorrow, he'd be going into another line of work. Senator John Cornyn recently visited the Heritage Foundation, and on that point said he believes the president has given up on governing. Well, certainly the campaign started at a historically early time. I mean, he was on these campaign-type bus tours in August of 2011. Last time I looked, the election was in November of 12, so that's 15 months early with the bus tours. Look, his strategy is quite simple. It's to blame anybody but himself for the problems that we have. Among the culprits that have been listed, the tsunami in Japan, the debt crisis in Europe, and of course the Republicans in Congress and rich people in Wall Street. In other words, anybody but me. My view is he'll have a hard time convincing America that he deserves four more years of this. There's nothing, nothing he's done that the American people approve of. So of course he's trying to change the subject, make the election about anybody other than him and his performance. And finally, one thing you don't hear him mention often is the fact that the Senate Democrats have failed to pass a budget for over 950 days now. What does that say about the state of affairs? They have no interest in any kind of fiscal responsibility. They're only interested in trying to raise taxes. It's stunning. Three years now that we have, under a Democratic-controlled Senate, we have no budget passed at all. And it's the height of irresponsibility. The American people are going to have to decide next year in a democracy that people get to decide whether they want to continue this kind of mismanagement and lack of results.