Incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says both he and outgoing leader Harry Reid will have adjustments to make as they trade jobs when the new Republican-led Senate takes over in January.
"If you're a football fan, it's like the difference between being the offensive coordinator and the defensive coordinator," he said in an interview broadcast Thursday on Fox News Channel's "On the Record with Greta Van Susteren."
"They're both important jobs, but you've got a better chance to score on offense."
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McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said he'll now be calling the plays on what happens in the Senate, and it won't look much like the Nevada Democrat's game plan for the past eight years.
"My agenda's going to be very different from Harry Reid's agenda," McConnell said.
Most of the ballyhooed "do-nothing Congress" charges stem from Reid's refusal to pass bill's in the Senate, McConnell said, adding that he will change that.
He posited that the Senate didn’t vote anymore because President Barack Obama got everything he wanted in his first two years.
Obama didn’t want anything to come to his desk he didn’t' like, and Reid convinced members they would be bad votes that would hurt them in the election, McConnell said.
But that, he said, "proved to be a very bad miscalculation," as Republicans took back control of the Senate in November's midterm elections.
McConnell said it is unclear whether the "nuclear option," instituted by Reid, in which only a 50 percent majority is needed instead of the longstanding 60 percent, would be reversed.
"You never know," he told Van Susteren. "The precedent's there for the future. It's like trying to un-ring a bell."
He reiterated that Congress will now pass 12 separate spending bills to avoid the threat of a "government shutdown." If Obama vetoes one bill, it won't have the cataclysmic effect of de-funding the entire federal government.
He said he expects Obamacare to come up for a complete do-over if the Supreme Court rules in the spring that states that use the federal exchange cannot have their residents receive subsidies to help pay their premiums.
McConnell said he met with Obama on Wednesday and talked about areas Republicans agree with the administration, such as trade agreements, corporate tax rates and infrastructure improvements.
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