Sen. Mitch McConnell

When the 111th Congress began, the top priority of the American people was clear: They wanted us to help them create good private-sector jobs and help put the economy back on solid ground.

Instead, Washington Democrats devoted all of their energy to implementing the kinds of dramatic social and economic policies they’d been dreaming of for decades.

That, in a nutshell, is the story of the 111th Congress. In the end, it will be remembered as a classic case of overreach by a governing party that not only misread its mandate but doubled-down on its various costly, government-driven domestic policy proposals even as it became clear that the vast majority of Americans vehemently opposed them.

This is why Americans are so energized heading into the fall elections — Democrats ignored the priorities of ordinary citizens in favor of their own legislative dreams in the two years they’ve been in charge of both Congress and the White House. By setting themselves squarely against the public, Democrats set themselves up for a rebuke.

Of course, things could have turned out differently. For the past 19 months, Republicans in Congress came together, again and again, to steer Democrats away from their leftward lurch. It quickly became clear, however, that Democrats in Washington were not interested in moderation or bipartisan consensus. Whether it was the health care bill, the economic stimulus or the financial regulatory bill, Democrats were intent on pressing ahead alone.

The result: the most costly and dramatic expansion of government power in decades.

Democrats set the tone early. When the 111th Congress convened, Republicans, like most Americans, were deeply rattled by the financial crisis of the previous year. We were committed to identifying the factors that led to that crisis and to working together to ensure that taxpayers would never again be asked to cover for Wall Street’s mistakes.

But Democratic leaders had different plans. Instead of addressing the economic crisis head on, they used the recession as an excuse to push a raft of unrelated goals. A stimulus bill that was supposed to be timely, targeted and temporary turned out, under closer inspection, to be more like a decades-old Democratic wish list. Just 17 percent of the bill went to infrastructure projects touted at the time as a recipe for “shovel ready” jobs.

Many Kentuckians I spoke to at the time were deeply skeptical of the idea that borrowing $1 trillion and giving it to the government to spend on more programs would revive the economy. But the administration pressed ahead, ignoring both the concerns of the public and the advice of one of its own top economists, who had warned that “poorly provided fiscal stimulus can have worse side effects than the disease that is to be cured.”

The administration even went so far as to predict that unemployment wouldn’t rise above 8 percent if the stimulus became law. We know how that turned out: Unemployment, now at 9.6 percent, has hovered near double digits since the stimulus passed; we took on an additional trillion dollars in debt, and Americans’ confidence in the administration’s economic arguments never recovered.

Still, the administration and its allies in Congress continued to make the ham-handed argument that costly programs, which expand government, increase regulations and add to our already record deficits and debts, are somehow good for the economy.

Americans know better. They know that a $1.3 trillion deficit and a $13 trillion debt are the direct result of Washington Democrats’ dogmatic adherence to the strange belief that you have to increase spending to reduce spending. As I often say, the problem is not that the government taxes too little; it’s that Washington spends too much.

Americans get this.

The American people didn’t believe spending money on government programs would help the economy — any more than they believed spending more money on health care would lower its cost. Republicans agreed, and we have never tired of saying so. When we heard Democrats making bad arguments, we disagreed with them loudly and offered common-sense alternatives based on what we heard back home.

So where does that leave us for the remainder of the 111th Congress?

President Barack Obama is already preparing to spend the rest of the year arguing in favor of tax hikes to help pay for his party’s profligate spending over the past year and a half. After adding more than $2.5 trillion to the debt and losing 2.5 million more jobs, Democrats in Washington now want to take more money from the struggling Americans who need it most — and from the small-business owners across our country who create jobs.

Combine this with the president’s recent proposal for yet another stimulus bill, and it’s clear that Washington Democrats are still uninterested in listening to what the American people have to say about reviving the economy and creating jobs.

Saying no to more spending, more taxes and more debt is exactly what our constituents have been asking us — and sometimes shouting at us — to do. So we’ll keep doing it. No amount of spin about Republican obstructionism will change that.

Americans have been speaking out. It’s time Washington started listening.