Incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Friday that President Barack Obama's policies amount to a "war on coal" and that he is prepared to fight administration policies that destroy jobs in his state.
"What the administration has done to the coal industry is a true outrage," he said, referring to estimates that his home state of Kentucky has lost close to 7,000 mining jobs since the middle of 2011.
"I'm going to go to war with him over coal," McConnell
told the Louisville Courier-Journal.
McConnell said Republicans would fight the White House "in any way that we can" on the issue in the next Congress.
He indicated that GOP lawmakers want to limit funding for the Environmental Protection Agency, which has spearheaded the Obama administration's push for what many in the coal industry believe are unreasonably harsh regulations that are destroying their livelihoods.
Obama's latest salvo in the "war on coal" came Wednesday in China, where he called for much substantially deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions than he had previously requested, the Associated Press and
Fox News reported.
McConnell said Obama does not seem to understand the clear message voters sent in last week's midterm elections.
"By the way, Mr. President, there was an election," McConnell said. "Did you notice that Republican governors got elected in Maryland, Massachusetts and Illinois, three of the bluest states in America?"
The Kentucky Republican said it is still possible that Obama might decide to compromise with Republicans, much as President Bill Clinton did after Republicans won a sweeping victory in the 1994 elections, capturing control of both the House and Senate for the first time in decades.
But early indications are that the president "just wants to pick a fight with the voters who clearly [said] the single biggest factor in this election, everybody agrees, was him . . . there's no getting around it," McConnell told the Courier-Journal.
"And yet he seems to be saying, 'I don't care what message you sent, here's what I'm going to do.'"
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