Senate Agenda

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Now, Madam President, on another matter, after a week of work with our constituents, the Senate reconvenes with a chance to refocus on the most important issues facing our folks back home.

Already on multiple occasions this year, we have demonstrated that even a narrowly divided Chamber is capable of taking productive, bipartisan steps on serious issues. Wide majorities have come together to extend access to the critical PPP loans, invest in drinking water infrastructure, and equip the justice system to better combat hate crimes against Asian Americans. This week, the Senate is set to do the same on legislation regarding competition with China, and many of our colleagues are working hard to make further consensus possible on issues that have historically enjoyed bipartisan support, like transportation infrastructure.

Remember, this sort of collaboration on serious priorities is what the American people insisted upon just last November. They elected a 50-50 Senate, shrunk Democrats' majority in the House, and took President Biden up on a promise to unite the country. So the question at the outset of this work period is how Democrats will use their razor-thin majority over the next few weeks. Unfortunately, the Democratic leader already signaled his answer a week ago by laying out a June agenda that is transparently designed to fail.

As I understand it, Senate Democrats intend to focus this month on the demands of their radical base: exploiting the cause of pay fairness to send a windfall to trial lawyers; saddling hospitals, schools, and small businesses with crippling new legal burdens if they fail to keep pace with ``woke'' social norms; and opening an unprecedented new front in the left's war on the Second Amendment.

As written, these are not proposals aimed at earning bipartisan support. They are not designed to clear the Senate's necessarily high bar for ending debate. Bizarrely, it appears they are being floated in order to illustrate that the bar is too high.

After a spring in which the Senate has repeatedly passed mainstream legislation by wide margins, Democrats have decided that now--now is the time to argue that the legislative process is somehow broken.

Let's not forget the Democrats' poster child for why the Senate should change its rules is a bill that would forcibly change the rules for elections in every State in America.

Let me say that again. Democrats' poster child for why the Senate should change its rules is a bill that would forcibly change the rules for elections in every State in America.

Their marquee bill, S. 1, is such a brazen political power grab that the question isn't whether it could earn bipartisan support; the question is how wide the bipartisan opposition will be. This is the bill the Democratic leader has placed at the vanguard of his campaign to destroy the filibuster, even though multiple Members of his own majority are now on the record objecting to it.

So make no mistake: Failing to sell reckless, wholesale changes to our democracy isn't proof that the guardrails should be removed; it is a reminder that they are there for a reason.

The American people rightly expect a 50-50 Senate to spend its time finding common ground, but our Democratic colleagues seem to believe that the most important expectations are those of their far-left fringe. They put forward an agenda that is designed to fail, and fail it will.

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