McConnell: GOP senators will meet Obama halfway to solve economic problems

By Ramsey Cox - 11/08/12 11:32 AM ET

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Wednesday that GOP senators would meet President Obama halfway on economic issues during his second term.

“To the extent [Obama] wants to move to the political center, which is where the work gets done in a divided government, we’ll be there to meet him half way,” McConnell said in a statement made a day after Obama won reelection and Republicans failed to take control of the Senate.

“That begins by proposing a way for both parties to work together in avoiding the ‘fiscal cliff’ without harming a weak and fragile economy, and when that is behind us work with us to reform the tax code and our broken entitlement system. Republicans are eager to hear the president’s proposals on these and many other pressing issues going forward and to do the work the people sent us here to do.”

Lawmakers are expected to work on a major deficit reduction package during the lame-duck session since Bush-era tax rates expire at the end of the year and sequestration, automatic spending cuts, is set to take effect in January. Democrats have said they want more revenue to be part of the deal, preferably through raising taxes on the wealthy, but Republicans have been unwilling to budge on that issue.

McConnell said the president’s reelection victory didn’t mean that Americans approved of his first term — it was just an opportunity for Obama to fix the problems he didn’t the first time around.

“The voters have not endorsed the failures or excesses of the President’s first term, they have simply given him more time to finish the job they asked him to do together with a Congress that restored balance to Washington after two years of one-party control,” McConnell said. “Now it’s time for the president to propose solutions that actually have a chance of passing the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and a closely-divided Senate, step up to the plate on the challenges of the moment, and deliver in a way that he did not in his first four years in office.”