Republicans Keep Admitting Everything They Said About Obama Was a Lie

[DonViejo]

12:22 P.M.

By Jonathan Chait@jonathanchait

White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, appearing on Fox News Sunday, repeated the official administration line that Democrats had to choose between legislation and investigation. Chris Wallace reminded Mulvaney that he had supported a Republican Congress that had engaged in continuous investigations of the White House, reopening probes to chase conspiracy theories even after they had been conclusively debunked.

This prompted Mulvaney to make an interesting confession. The Republican Congress never wanted to pass laws in the first place:

WALLACE: You were there, of what the Republicans did to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on Benghazi, on Fast and Furious. And they got some things done despite the fact that these were aggressive partisan investigations.

MULVANEY: Well, we didn’t get very much done. Listen, I’ll be the first to admit that when the tea party wave, of which I was one, got here in 2011, the last thing we were interested in was giving President Obama legislative successes.

When somebody says “I’ll be the first to admit,” it’s usually an idiom, suggesting they are not trying to hide a fact that is widely known and frequently confessed. But in this case the sentence construction makes more sense if read literally. Mulvaney may actually be the first person to admit that congressional Republicans did not want to give Obama any legislative successes at all.

Mitch McConnell boasted that he pressured Republicans to refuse to compromise with any of the Obama administration’s priorities in his first two years (“We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals. Because we thought — correctly, I think — that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan.”).

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http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/republicans-admit-everything-they-said-about-obama-was-a-lie.html

[guillaumeb]

1. I edited your title for clarity and nuance. It now reads:

Republicans Keep Admitting Everything They Said About Everything Was a Lie

No need to thank me.