Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has asked Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid four times now to allow a vote on the Obamacare repeal that passed the House earlier this year. Sen. Reid has refused to allow a vote. McConnell lashed into Reid and his fellow Democrats in the Senate for avoiding open support of the unpopular bill shortly before an election. Below are some excerpts from McConnell’s comments urging Reid to allow a vote on repeal.
“Earlier this week, the majority leader and a number of his colleagues took to the floor to defend the president’s health care law and to tout provisions they believe to be popular with the public. What they didn’t do was allow for a vote on the entirety of the bill, which proves to be even more of a disaster with each passing day, and which a majority of Americans continue to oppose. Put another way, Senate Democrats spent nearly an entire day talking about parts of Obamacare that poll well, but refused to spend 15 minutes being caught on camera voting to uphold the entire law.”
“What are they afraid of? Why won’t they allow a vote? When the healthcare bill was working its way through Congress, you’ll recall that the former speaker of the House, Speaker Pelosi, famously said we’d need to pass the bill to find what was in it. Well, now that we’ve had some time to study its consequences, I can’t think of any reason why Senators wouldn’t want to stand up and be counted with a vote on the floor—either for or against repeal. Does Obamacare get a passing or a failing grade? That’s all I asked for on Tuesday—a vote to either reaffirm or repudiate the votes we all took on Obamacare based on everything we know about it now that we couldn’t know then.”
“A week doesn’t seem to pass that we don’t learn about some problem this law creates or doesn’t solve. There’s this headline in the Wall Street Journal today: ‘Small Firms See Pain in Health Law.’ And just yesterday, we learned that it will increase federal spending and subsidies on health care by $580 billion. Which means that even after you count the more than $700 billion that it takes out of Medicare, it still increases federal health spending and subsidies by more than a half trillion dollars. Let’s have a vote. Is Obamacare making things better or worse? Let’s show the American people where we stand. It’s what the American people want. It’s the vote they deserve.”
