President Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan have said that welfare reform is on their to-do list for 2018. Mitch McConnell apparently has a different plan.
The Senate Majority Leader on Thursday told Axios’s Mike Allen that he “would not expect to see” welfare reform on the Senate GOP agenda next year.
What will the Senate turn to? “We have to have Democratic involvement,” McConnell said. “So things like infrastructure … to do something in that area we’re going to have to have Democratic participation.”
New York magazine’s Ed Kilgore translates: “This is Washington-speak (McConnell’s native tongue) for an edict that the Senate leadership is ruling out the use of the budget reconciliation process — the procedure used successfully on tax cuts and unsuccessfully on health care this year — for an attack even on the less popular entitlements, in part because it would poison the well for any deals with Democrats on pleasant preelection goodies like infrastructure spending.”
