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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid received a heads-up on the deal to transfer Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in exchange for the five Taliban officials detained in Guantanamo Bay — but it’s not clear who else did. In a brief interview, Reid said the White House contacted him ahead of the swap — but not by much. “It must have been either the day before or the day of. I don’t remember for sure,” Reid said. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declined to comment when asked about White House outreach with regards to Bergdahl. Reid’s remarks underscore a growing divide on...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is suggesting that Kentucky's health insurance exchange could survive repeal of ObamaCare, the law that created the marketplace.  In a statement, McConnell campaign spokeswoman Allison Moore said Kentucky should "decide for itself whether to keep" the exchange "or set up a different marketplace" if the healthcare law is repealed. The comment follows criticism of McConnell last week for arguing that Kentucky's exchange, known as Kynect, is not connected to the Affordable Care Act.  The healthcare law created a system of exchanges, including Kynect, where consumers in each state can purchase coverage, often while receiving assistance...

...if we take back the Senate Before you shake your fist, consider the strategy at work here. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on Thursday that if he were to emerge as majority leader following this fall’s elections, he’d prefer to keep in place the minority party’s ability to filibuster legislation…While he said he thought Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had done a “lot of damage” by using parliamentary procedure to enable some judicial and executive nominees to move through the chamber with 50 votes, he suggested that he had no plans to try to undo that change. He...

<p>LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but he would not say Friday what that would mean for the 413,000 Kentuckians who have health insurance through the state's health care exchange.</p>

Fresh off his resounding Republican primary victory Tuesday night, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell Thursday laid out a broad vision of what the Senate would look like under his control. Bottom line, McConnell, wouldn’t run the way Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., runs it now, the Kentucky Republican told the center-right American Enterprise Institute. ‘A Senate majority under my leadership would break sharply from the practices of the Reid era in favor of a more free-wheeling approach to problem solving,’ McConnell said in a speech. ‘I would work to restore (the Senate’s) traditional role as a place where good...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had vowed to crush the tea party in this spring’s primaries. His decisive win on Tuesday over a tea party challenger in Kentucky’s GOP primary has fueled plenty of establishment-over-tea party stories. Let’s just say the war ain’t over. “After the primary is over, it’s really the responsibility of everyone who wants to see a change in Washington, D.C., come November to support our candidates,” said Texas Sen. John Cornyn, McConnell’s deputy GOP Senate leader, who survived a much more tepid tea party onslaught in his own primary in early March. Cornyn singled out Kentucky’s...

Sen. Mitch McConnell was all smiles today: Not only because of his Republican primary victory in Kentucky, but because of a string of about-face endorsements from conservative groups intent on destroying him. “I’m happy to have them on board,” McConnell said dryly, standing just off the floor of the Senate, where he hopes to become majority leader in November if Republicans pick up six seats and control of the Senate. “Collectively, this group spent about $1 million against me in the primary,” McConnell said. “But they all got on board last night.” Not only did they get on board, they...

Matt Bevin reaches into the breast pocket of his jacket and extracts a wrinkled, yellow piece of paper. "Fraud Alert," it reads, in alarming, official-seeming font. "Sensitive Materials Enclosed. Please Open Immediately." A Republican he met received the notice in the mail a few weeks ago and showed it to Bevin, who now carries it with him wherever he goes. Bevin, Mitch McConnell's tea party-backed Republican primary challenger in Kentucky, flattens it out on the table in the back of a community ballroom in Georgetown where he just addressed the Scott County Republican Party's Lincoln Day Dinner. The unfolded paper...

Support for the tea party has dropped to an all-time low, said a new CBS News poll released Wednesday. Just 15 percent of Americans told the pollsters that they are supporters of the tea party movement today, which is less than half the level of support at its peak of 31 percent in November 2010 shortly after the midterm election when the movement fueled a landslide Republican win to take majority control of the House.

At present, every poll has McConnell’s race against Alison Lundergan Grimes, Kentucky’s secretary of state, as a dead heat with Election Day just six months away. Grimes also easily won her Tuesday primary. Her race with McConnell also is expected to be the most expensive congressional race this election cycle, as Republicans try to win a net six seats to take control of the upper chamber. If that happened, McConnell would replace Nevada's Democratic Sen. Harry Reid as the Senate majority leader.

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Some businesses in states with pitched Republican primary fights are turning to a relatively new tool to help ensure the outcome they want: telling employees how they want them to vote. Thanks in part to Citizens United, it's perfectly legal — but it probably doesn't do much good. Bloomberg Businessweek describes the concerted effort by business groups to get their member corporations ready to weigh in on the election — an election, we'll remind you, that has largely been framed as business-versus-Tea Party. The National Association of Manufacturers spent a week in Kentucky, briefing "as many as 10 businesses a...

Matt Bevin seemed like the ideal candidate to challenge Mitch McConnell. The handsome and personable businessman, a father of nine, impressed national conservative groups looking for a chance to knock off the Senate Republican leader. These groups, from the Senate Conservatives Fund to FreedomWorks, the Tea Party Patriots and the Madison Project, invested more than $1 million in the Kentucky GOP primary. Bevin himself spent more than $3 million, including $1 million of his own fortune. And, yet, polls indicate he’s going to get creamed Tuesday.

That’s among likely voters too, although when you’re looking at a lead this big, it doesn’t much matter which slice of adults you’re using. I thought next Tuesday’s primary night open thread would be rip-roaring food-fight fun between “true conservatives” and RINOs. Instead, we’re destined for a snoozer. Note the tea-party numbers, in particular. Bevin never got traction even among his ostensible core constituency.

Jahan Wilcox is the rapid response director at the RNC. He’s charged with responding quickly to attack Democrats and rebut Democrat attacks on the GOP. Last night, Jahan Wilcox responded quickly to Thom Tillis’s victory in North Carolina by declaring that next would be to defeat Matt Bevin, the Republican candidate in Kentucky, who Wilcox called a “fraud.”

March 12, 2014 – In a recent interview with The New York Times McConnell said “I think we are going to crush them everywhere… I don’t think they are going to have a single nominee anywhere in the country… I know this: Politics doesn’t like losers, if you don’t have anything to point to, it is kind of hard to keep it going.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has finally let America know who his true opponents are, and they aren’t the Democrats. When asked about conservative candidates like Matt Bevin, who is challenging him for his Senate seat in...

Between now and the end of June, more than two dozen states will hold primary elections. A major subplot of this year’s midterm elections is the competition between the Republican establishment and the tea party wing of the party. The establishment is fighting back, but has the tea party already won? The general election is still six months off. But Tuesday opens the summer preseason of intraparty contests, which starts with an important primary in North Carolina. Between now and the end of June, more than two dozen states will hold primary elections. After a July break, the preseason will...

The Republican Establishment always says conservative purists would rather lose than compromise. But the opposite is playing out in Nebraska. The moment Ben Sasse got endorsed by the Senate Conservatives Fund, Mitch McConnell went all in for Shane Osborn. Well, Osborn is now toast. He has extremely high negatives, extreme negative poll numbers, and outside groups have just finished him off with an ad blasting his involvement in a made up military memo. That leaves Sid Dinsdale who’d have you know he is a lifelong Republican despite years of significant giving to Democrats. Dinsdale too, however, is behind in the...

30 years ago, a man ran for the Senate because his opponent kept claiming to be for spending cuts while raising spending. His opponent kept claiming to be a conservative, while letting big government grow, even when he was the majority and could stop it. Maybe that candidate needs to be reminded of his own words.

Frustrated with President Barack Obama’s reaction to Russian action in Ukraine, a group of Republican senators said Wednesday they will introduce legislation outlining a more muscular response. “What we’ve seen from the administration is a lot of rhetoric,” Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, said on the Senate floor Wednesday morning. The White House has been dealing “with the situation after something bad has already occurred,” he said. Earlier this week, violence flared up in another area of Ukraine that hugs the Russian border, as the new government in Kiev criticized local police...