You may recall Ronald Reagan’s famous slogan for the START treaty (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) that brought the Soviet Russia and the United States together to reduce nuclear weapons by both nations, "Trust, but Verify".
The START treaty allowed both sides to make sure that nuclear weapons reductions were actually being carried out, not just saying they are doing it, but "verify" that it is being done.
Now that has all changed. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and his cohort Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) have put a hold on the legislation.
These obstructionist tactics are the same as they have been the previous two years, block everything and anything that could possible be seen as a victory for President Obama, and that includes ending the START treaty that was first put into place by Ronald Reagan and renewed by several congress’s and carried out by every President since, and it has always been a non-partisan issue.
There are some Republicans including Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) who are pushing to get the Treaty signed.
Former Sect. of States Henry Kissinger and James A. Baker have urged Republicans to sign the Treaty.
Brent Scowcroft, a former national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush who noted that this START treaty is not very different from previous ones negotiated and ratified under Republican presidents. "I’ve got to think that it’s the increasingly partisan nature and the desire for the president not to have a foreign policy victory."
Republicans are putting our nation at risk for politics because they want to say no to everything in order to return to power in 2012, even if that means placing our nation at risk as we have already seen them do with our economic recovery by voting against every single tax cut for small business’s that would have helped to create jobs the past two years. Many of those tax cuts were originally Republican ideas, but since Obama embraced them Republicans voted against them.
Now they are playing the same games with Nuclear Weapons.
As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell so embarrassingly said just before the November 2 election, "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."
That’s right, the Republican leader in the Senate doesn’t think our economy should be number one, or that the two wars should be number one, or our infrastructure, or education or manufacturing or jobs, his number one goal the next two years is politics as usual, removing a democrat from office and replace him with a republican, regardless of the consequences to the United States.
The number 2 goal for McConnell is to make sure the rich continue to get sweet deals from the Bush era tax cuts at the expense of the middle class, but that’s another story.
MSNBC talking about McConnell's number one goal