Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Sunday he has no interest in another government shutdown.
During an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” the Kentucky Republican reiterated a point he has made many times since voters gave Republicans control of the Senate: Despite his differences with President Obama, McConnell does not wish to see small parts of the government shut down over a debt ceiling fight.
“I made it very clear after the November election that we’re certainly not going to shut down the government or default on the national debt,” McConnell said Sunday on CBS.
McConnell was referring to an episode in 2013 when an impasse over heaping more debt on American taxpayers led the government to furlough a small percentage of non-essential employees. According to opinion polls at the time, most respondents blamed the GOP for the “shutdown,” and though Republicans went on to make historic gains in the 2014 midterm elections, party leaders remain extremely wary of confrontation with the president and the Democratic minorities in the House and Senate.
The specter of a shutdown is looming again because next week will see the end of a temporary agreement under which the so-called debt ceiling, a cap on how much debt the federal government can assume, will end. Federal debt — the sum of public debt plus “intra-government” IOUs — topped $18 trillion in December.
Republicans have said in the past that they want concessions from Democrats in return for agreeing to raise the debt ceiling. The Obama administration has previously shot down this notion.
“We’ll figure some way to handle it and hopefully it might carry some other important legislation that we can agree on in connection with it,” McConnell said.
Sunday’s interview on CBS was McConnell’s first since becoming majority leader.
