After nary a peep from House Republicans while the Senate blocked hundreds of Democratic proposals during the past few years, Republicans are now expressing frustration with the upper chamber for letting their bills die too.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, perturbed that the Republican proposal to repeal the health-care law will likely not see any daylight in the Senate, said Wednesday that the Senate is no place for bills to die.
“I’ve got a problem with the assumption here that somehow the Senate can be a place where legislation to go into a cul-de-sac or dead end,” Cantor told reporters. “Leader Reid continues to say that he is not going to bring this up for a vote in the Senate. The American people deserve a full hearing. They deserve to see this legislation go to the Senate for a full vote.”
“The Senate ought not be a place that legislation goes into a dead end,” he reiterated later.
Except that it is. Or at least, that’s what Republicans thought a few months ago.
By February 2010, the Democrat-controlled House passed more than 300 bills that were left floundering in the Senate. Some eventually passed through the chamber, but many died by the end of the 111th Congress. Republicans expressed few signs of protest while bill after bill proposed by House Democrats were rejected or ignored.
When asked about the apparent discrepancy, Rep. Nan Hayworth, Republican freshman from New York, said it was a difference between “bad” bills and a “great” bills.
“They were bad bills,” she said of the hundreds of Democratic proposal passed in the House that were never signed into law. “Now I’d like the Senate to pass this great bill, which is to repeal the Affordable Care Act and then promptly follow with a replacement plan that makes sense for the American people.”
Cantor had previously challenged Reid to take up a vote on health-care repeal, which is expected to pass the House Wednesday afternoon.
“If Harry Reid is so confident that the repeal vote should die in the Senate then he should bring it up for a vote if he’s so confident he’s got the votes,” Cantor said Tuesday.
Reid, who controls the Senate schedule, has said repeatedly he has no plans to take up the measure.
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