The House this week voted against the unpopular healthcare law authored by Democrats while the Senate is promoting bills aimed at making Republicans look like they don’t care about the middle class.
Sound familiar?
That’s because the two chambers are recycling partisan agenda items as they head out the door to campaign ahead of the pivotal November election.
In the GOP-led House, lawmakers Thursday passed the Employee Health Care Protection Act, which would let people hold onto individual insurance plans that do not meet Obamacare standards. It’s one of dozens of bills the House has passed aimed at repealing all or parts of the healthcare law.
The Senate, run by Democrats, has never taken up one of the GOP’s Obamacare bills so there is no chance Thursday’s bill will become law, but it’s great campaign fodder; the most recent Kaiser poll shows the approval rating for the law has sunk to 35 percent.
The bill was authored by Rep. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican who is running against one of the most vulnerable Senate Democrats, Mary Landrieu.
Republicans plan to recycle other bills the House passed this Congress that are aimed at winning over their base, including legislation to increase domestic energy production and a package of 14 bills aimed at creating and maintaining jobs. None of the bills stands a chance of becoming law.
“After the president’s promise that ‘if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep your healthcare plan,’ tens of thousands of Americans received cancellation notices,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said after the vote Thursday. “Now, Obamacare is about to force cancellation notices on potentially millions more.”
The rhetoric was just as thick across the Capitol, where Senate Democrats plowed ahead with an equally futile agenda aimed at giving a “fair shot” to the lower and middle class. The agenda includes recycling measures to raise the minimum wage, refinance student loans at a lower rate and rid elections of “dark money” spent by the ultra rich, who Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., frequently vilifies in speeches that condemn conservative industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch.
“Senate Democrats want a government that works for all Americans, not just the richest few,” Reid said Thursday, when Republicans blocked a constitutional amendment to give states and Congress the power to dictate campaign finance rules. “Today Senate Republicans clearly showed that they would rather sideline hard-working families in order to protect the Koch brothers and other radical interests that are working to fix our elections and buy our democracy.”
The Senate has tried and failed to pass campaign finance reform legislation in 2010 and 2012 and they admitted this week they knew the constitutional amendment would never win the 67 votes required to pass a constitutional amendment.
But Democrats know campaign finance reform has become a key issue with their base.
A poll conduced in July by Democracy Corp., a Democratic-leaning polling organization, found a majority of likely voters favors reforming the nation’s campaign finance laws.
Notably, the biggest support for reform was found among Democrats (74 percent), whom the party is trying to excite in order to get them to vote in greater numbers in the upcoming midterm elections, where turnout is typically low.
The Senate is also recycling the “Paycheck Fairness Act,” which would require businesses to justify different pay for men and women, among other new regulations. It’s got no chance of passage, as Republicans believe it will hurt businesses and defeated the bill in April. But the Senate will nonetheless spend days debating the measure before the GOP again kills it.
The sponsor of the bill is Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., who is running just five points ahead of former U.S. senator and Republican challenger Scott Brown.
“As a senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown voted against the Paycheck Fairness Act twice, first in 2010 and then again in 2012,” a Shaheen campaign spokesman said. “Scott Brown’s opposition to equal pay has contributed to his difficulties winning the support of women voters in New Hampshire.”
