A group of 75 conservative leaders want Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to promise that Congress will not hold a lame-duck session after the November elections.
“At a time when the American people’s trust in their government is near an all-time low, the Republican-led Congress should demonstrate exemplary behavior by completing its work before the November elections so that voters can judge all the legislators on the basis of the votes they have cast,” conservative leaders wrote Thursday in a letter to McConnell and Ryan.
Sent from the Conservative Action Project, the letter includes signatures from CEOs affiliated with organizations representing economic, social, and national security elements of the conservative movement. The leaders were not speaking for their organizations.
75 conservative leaders signed a letter to @SenateMajLdr & @SpeakerRyan requesting no lame-duck session of Congress. https://t.co/TcAOAxFf4F
— Heritage on the Hill (@HeritageOTH) April 15, 2016
Three of those who signed have connections with The Heritage Foundation: Edwin Meese III, U.S. attorney general under President Reagan; Becky Norton Dunlop, a former Reagan White House adviser; and Michael Needham, CEO of Heritage Action for America, the think tank’s lobbying arm. The Daily Signal is the multimedia news organization of The Heritage Foundation.
The letter advises that Congress should complete its work before the Nov. 8 general elections, “because legislators who have been defeated in an election or are retiring are no longer accountable to the voters for their votes, any actions taken which required their votes are essentially undemocratic.”
In Congress, “conservatives don’t want to ground a lame-duck Congress altogether,” The Daily Signal’s Philip Wegmann reported:
[Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C.,] board member of the House Freedom Caucus, told The Daily Signal his group wants to force Congress to take difficult votes now so that the electorate can give a thumbs up or down at the polls in November.
‘None of this is about staying home in November and December. We should go to D.C., and we should work,’ Mulvaney said. He’s not ready to kill the lame-duck session because Congress still has work to do after the election.
The Conservative Action Project writes that “massive tax and spending increases, increases in the gasoline tax, pay raises for members of Congress, and ratifications of treaties that threaten U.S. sovereignty” have occurred during past lame-duck sessions. The letter says:
Historically, lame-duck sessions have been used by both parties to enact backroom deals that are neither beneficial to the American people nor representative of their will as expressed in the elections of only a few days or weeks before.
The conservative leaders note that pro forma sessions, typically a session where no legislative business occurs and lasts for only a few minutes, would still be necessary “in order to prevent the President from making a recess appointment to the Supreme Court.”
After the death of Antonin Scalia, McConnell and other Senate Republicans have held to the stance that the next president should nominate a replacement Supreme Court justice.
Writing that a lame-duck session would be President Barack Obama’s “swan song,” the conservative leaders say Obama, before leaving office, can be expected to attempt “to get his dream-policies enacted, his liberal judges confirmed, and his international agreements approved.”
“And all of it could be done without any concern for what the voters actually want because neither he [Obama] nor the departing legislators will ever face the voters again,” the letter says.
This report has been modified since publication.
