Mitch McConnell just retired after helping Democrats pass a nearly $2 trillion omnibus spending bill that Republicans had campaigned for years to stop.
Ron DeSantis just walked into the University of Alabama and said the quiet part out loud about men like McConnell.
And what Ron DeSantis said it will take to fix the damage RINOs like McConnell caused should make every Republican in Washington, DC very uncomfortable.
He Named the Pattern and Put It on His Own Party
DeSantis didn't soften it.
"The Republicans run on reducing spending, limiting government, shrink it, and they never do it," he said. "And they sign off on all these massive spending bills."
That is a documented pattern with a documented author.
In December 2022, McConnell and 17 other Senate Republicans joined every Senate Democrat to pass a $1.85 trillion spending package – 4,155 pages of legislative text, released on a Tuesday and voted through by Thursday, crammed with at least 4,000 earmarks for lawmakers' pet projects, negotiated entirely behind closed doors.
Republicans had just won back the House.
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McConnell handed away the incoming majority's leverage anyway – locking in Biden-era spending priorities before the new Congress could touch them.
The Daily Signal called it "a stunning act of betrayal."
Senator Mike Lee went to the Senate floor and called it extortion.
Conservative voters called it what they'd come to expect.
Republicans ran on stopping exactly that kind of spending.
Then the man leading Senate Republicans helped write the check.
The Number That Shows You What That Cost
The betrayals compounded into something that can no longer be called a political problem.
America is now spending more paying interest on its debt than it spends on the entire national defense.
Interest payments hit $881 billion in 2024 – topping the $851 billion defense budget for the first time since the late 1920s.
In 2025, interest hit $971 billion.
The Congressional Budget Office projects interest will exceed $1 trillion in 2026 and climb toward $1.8 trillion by 2035.
By 2038, interest payments are projected to surpass all discretionary spending combined – the military, highways, veterans' benefits, every federal agency, all of it.
That's what happens when Mitch McConnell spends 30 years telling Republican voters he's fighting for them.
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DeSantis knows electing another round of politicians who promise to fix it isn't going to work.
"I'm convinced," he said, "you're not just going to, 'Oh, we'll just win some elections and we'll solve the fiscal.'"
"I think you need to change the structure so that the incentives change," he added.
Florida Showed the Country What Actually Works
DeSantis isn't just diagnosing the disease.
He's pointing to the cure.
Florida cut its state budget four consecutive years while the population grew and inflation made everything more expensive.
The state paid off 52% of its historic debt on his watch.
He used the line-item veto to cut roughly 3% of the state budget in a single year – and did it by telling every interest group with its hand out that the money simply wasn't there.
"The sky has not fallen," DeSantis told the Alabama audience. "You can do this."
The difference between Tallahassee and Washington isn't the character of the politicians.
It's the rules.
Florida has a balanced-budget requirement.
Washington, DC does not.
A Florida governor has a line-item veto.
The president does not.
Which means when McConnell looked at a 4,155-page bill stuffed with earmarks, the system gave him every reason to say yes and almost no structural reason to say no.
He Is Asking States to Do What Washington Refused to Do
DeSantis has been on the road for months building a coalition around two constitutional amendments – a federal balanced-budget requirement and a presidential line-item veto.
He launched the nonprofit Balanced Budget Now alongside Idaho Gov. Brad Little and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, and has traveled personally to Kentucky, Montana, and Idaho to lobby state legislatures.
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Twenty-eight states have now certified Article V applications for a balanced-budget amendment – six shy of the 34 needed to force congressional action.
The Founding Fathers built Article V into the Constitution because they saw this coming.
They knew there would come a moment when the federal government couldn't discipline itself and gave the states the power to step in.
That moment is now.
Republican voter morale is low heading into the midterms, DeSantis says, and the reason isn't complicated.
Voters who gave Republicans the Senate, the House, and the White House watched McConnell hand Democrats a $1.85 trillion spending bill as a retirement gift.
The anger is earned.
And DeSantis is telling them a new batch of campaign promises won't fix it – only changing the rules before the debt eats the country alive.
Sources:
- Fox 49 Staff, "DeSantis blasts Republican campaigns on smaller government, then 'never' delivering," Fox 49, September 22, 2026.
- Jarrett Stepman, "The Consequences of Senate Republicans' Omnibus Surrender," The Daily Signal, December 22, 2022.
- Tyler O'Neil, "'Stunning Act of Betrayal': Here Are the 18 Senate Republicans Who Voted to Pass $1.85 Trillion McConnell-Schumer Omnibus Bill," The Daily Signal, December 22, 2022.
- The Capitolist, "Gov. DeSantis Heads to Idaho to Rally Support for Federal Balanced Budget Amendment," The Capitolist, August 2, 2026.
- Click Orlando, "Florida Gov. DeSantis says we'll never fix the mess without these 2 amendments," Click Orlando, May 20, 2026.
- Peterson Foundation, "What Is the National Debt Costing Us?" Peterson Foundation, February 12, 2026.
