June 25, 2025 03:41 PM UTC

Mitch McConnell (Briefly) Becomes The Most Honest Republican

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• by: Colorado Pols

Newsweek reports on the latest defining slip-up from former Senate Majority Leader and intermittently reanimated cadaver Mitch McConnell, who gave his most honest if heartless assessment about public opinion on the Republican budget proposal that will deprive millions of Americans of their Medicaid health coverage including one in three residents of McConnell’s native Kentucky:

Republican Senator Mitch McConnell said during a closed-door meeting with Republicans on Tuesday that people worried about cuts to Medicaid in the Senate’s reconciliation bill will “get over it,” Punchbowl News reported…

According to Punchbowl, McConnell made the comments while addressing the possibility that the GOP could face major electoral losses due to the bill.

“I know a lot of us are hearing from people back home about Medicaid,” McConnell said, per Punchbowl. “But they’ll get over it.”

Steve Benen at MSNBC:

There’s no recording of McConnell’s comment at the meeting, so it’s impossible to get a sense of the context, but the Kentucky Republican’s office hasn’t denied that he said it. Rather, a McConnell spokesperson told Punchbowl that the senator “was speaking about the people who are abusing Medicaid — the able-bodied Americans who should be working.”

Or put another way, the party is cutting Medicaid, despite protestations to the contrary, and the Americans who will lose their health security are just freeloaders who’ll simply “get over it.”

If McConnell did qualify his statement, saying “those deadbeats will get over it” or something similar instead of dismissing the multitude back home calling their Senators to complain about Medicaid cuts that the Senate has managed to make even more painful than the House, we believe that would have made it into the reporting. Either way, the public according to opinion polls do not consider the millions of Americans threatened with the loss of their health coverage under the GOP budget bill to be freeloaders. None of this is necessary. The voters don’t support it.

And they’re not going to “get over it.”

For endangered Republicans like Colorado’s Rep. Gabe Evans trying desperately to keep a positive spin on legislation that could cut short his career in Congress, McConnell is merely restating Evans’ own position with the bluntness that comes from years representing a safe seat. The difference, of course, is that while McConnell is in the midst of his long goodbye in Kentucky, Gabe Evans still has a future to sacrifice in Colorado’s most competitive congressional race.

Just like Donald Trump left Gabe Evans to twist on renewable energy, Mitch McConnell sees no need to soften the blow on cutting Medicaid.