McConnell: 'At Some Point Here, this President Needs to Become the Adult'

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) charged Sunday that Democrats aren’t taking the debt ceiling seriously as another hike looms on the horizon.

“Let me tell you what isn’t adult behavior. You know how the Democrats raised the debt ceiling in the previous Congress?” McConnell said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “They airdropped it into Obamacare. Nobody got to vote on it. That’s how seriously they take the debt ceiling.”

“…So at some point here, this president needs to become the adult, because the speaker and I have been the adults in the room, arguing that we ought to do something about the nation’s most serious long- term problem,” he added.

The timing of President Obama’s request to raise the debt ceiling is likely to come after the presidential election.

“Why do we need to use the request of any president to discuss deficit and debt?” McConnell said. “Look, we have a debt now bigger than our economy. That alone makes us look a lot like Greece. We’ve had the lowest labor participation rate in 30 years. We’ve had 39 straight months of unemployment above 8 percent. The country’s in a lot of trouble.”

He said Obama was advocating “a position to the left of the European Central Bank” at this weekend’s G-8 summit. “And yet the president is arguing that the Europeans should replicate policies that clearly haven’t worked here.”