At tomorrow’s White House health care summit, lawmakers from both parties will sit down for six hours and, ostensibly, try to come up with a bipartisan compromise. But for the Republicans, only one compromise is acceptable: Scrap the bills we have and start over.
Minority leaders in the House and the Senate have both called for a total do-over, and other members of the Republican contingent are echoing the line.
“I and my Republican colleagues have called for the White House discussion on Feb. 25 to begin with a clean sheet of paper, rather than starting with the massive (and massively unpopular) bills passed by Congress,” House Minority Leader John Boehner wrote in an op-ed yesterday in the Hamilton Journal News. “Republicans welcome discussion, a chance to start over and an opportunity to offer our ideas.”
His counterpart in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, says the same.
Americans “really want us to shelve this bill and start over,” McConnell said this Sunday. “And I hope that’s what the president does.” He added that it would be “arrogant” for Democrats to do otherwise.
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who will attend the summit, is trying to gather 10,000 signatures to a petition calling on Democrats to, you guessed it, “start over.”
“I’ve been invited and plan to attend tomorrow’s summit and I can assure you I will do everything in my power to represent our point of view. What we must do is scrap the current plan for a government takeover of health care and start over,” he wrote in a fund-raising email to supporters. “This legislation can’t be fixed — it must be scrapped.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), another attendee, told reporters today that he agrees.
“I can tell you what our approach is: 70 percent of the people in this country thought we ought to start over,” Grassley said, according to the Des Moines Register.
The Republican National Committee released a web video today titled “Scrap It,” urging the president to “actually listen to the American people” by starting over.
Boehner and McConnell have also dismissed the summit as a publicity stunt by President Obama and the Democrats.
“We’re happy to go down there,” McConnell said yesterday. “I’m always pleased to see him. He’s fun to be around, and I’m sure we’ll have a great six hours. We’re happy to be there, but I’m not quite sure what the purpose is.”
