Democratic talking points notwithstanding, the 112th Congress is not Republican. The GOP controls just one chamber, the House of Representatives. The president’s party, i.e., the Democrats, still have a majority in the Senate.
While it took the Republican chamber 102 days to pass a budget, as of tomorrow the Democratic Congress will have gone nine times than long without passing a similar spending. There are no plans to vote on one in the next twenty-four hours.
Speaking to reporters “after a conference meeting in which he rallied House Republicans around the message that while the lower chamber is taking action on jobs legislation, the Senate is dithering and the president is campaigning”, House Speaker John Boehner reminded them just what the Republican chamber of the federal legislature has accomplished:
Citing the so-called “Forgotten 15” House-passed bipartisan bills that have been shelved in the Senate, Boehner told his conference, according to a source in the room: “These jobs bills are stuck in the Senate because we have a president who is disengaged from the legislative process. Instead of engaging in the legislative process, the president has been campaigning. If the president would get more engaged and call on the Senate to get moving, there’s a lot more we could get done this year on jobs for the American people.”
Democrats may “counter that the legislation Republicans have hyped would do little for job creation”, but Republicans would say the same thing about the “Jobs Act” the president has proposed. And Republicans can point to the failed “stimulus” as evidence, given the similarities between the legislation the president has proposed to the current Congress and the one which passed the previous Congress.
Seems for the president’s party, doing nothing means not doing what Democrats want to do.
The speaker makes a good point. If the president is truly concerned about job growth, why isn’t he pushing the chamber his party controls to act on job-creating legislation the other has passed.
And why aren’t our media reporting on the failure of the Democratic Senate to act on bills passed by the Republican House?