The GOP refuses to vote on meaningful legislation.
Ari MelberHouse Republicans are set to vote down President Obama’s healthcare law for the thirty-third time, although it is the first repeal vote since the Supreme Court upheld most of the law as constitutional.
The GOP’s constant reiteration of its opposition to the president’s largest domestic achievement has reduced legislating to message discipline—and the political class continues to debate the wisdom of this strategy.
But whether or not this is “smart political theater,” the Republicans’ eagerness to clog Congress with symbolic votes is a sharp contrast to all the jobs legislation that they have bottled up. Remember when President Obama pushed hard for a massive jobs and stimulus plan, the American Jobs Act, which would inject over $400 billion into the economy? The program was even “tilted heavily toward the Republican prescription of tax cuts,” as Bloomberg reported, in order to draw support. The president went all out for the plan in an address to a joint session of Congress. A majority even backed the Jobs Act in the Senate, but Republicans filibustered, and in the House, they never even scheduled a floor vote for the bill:
In fact, as the above chart explains, Republicans sent Obama’s jobs proposals to eleven different committees but never bothered to vote on it. The bill’s history on the Library of Congress website reads like a sad series of hand-me-downs.
Other jobs bills, like Representative Rosa DeLauro’s Layoff Prevention Act, which would simply tweak the tax code so that employers had more flexibility to cut workers’ hours instead of terminating them—and only within selected “short-time compensation programs”—have never gotten a committee vote. Nevermind the floor debate. These are the kind of jobs measures that Congress should be debating, not the optics of deliberate redundancy.
But still, asking whether Republicans look good by attacking healthcare again is the wrong question. By stoking another healthcare debate, even for a failed vote after a court loss, they are distracting people from the relentless GOP obstruction on economic recovery. And if there’s no jobs plan, of course, it’s easier for their nominee to keep asking where the jobs are.
Ari MelberTwitterAri Melber is The Nation's Net movement correspondent, covering politics, law, public policy and new media, and a regular contributor to the magazine's blog. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a J.D. from Cornell Law School, where he was an editor of the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy. Contact Ari: on Facebook, on Twitter, and at amelber@hotmail.com. Melber is also an attorney, a columnist for Politico and a contributing editor at techPresident, a nonpartisan website covering technology’s impact on democracy. During the 2008 general election, he traveled with the Obama Campaign on special assignment for The Washington Independent. He previously served as a Legislative Aide in the US Senate and as a national staff member of the 2004 John Kerry Presidential Campaign. As a commentator on public affairs, Melber frequently speaks on national television and radio, including including appearances on NBC, CNBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, C-SPAN, MSNBC, Bloomberg News, FOX News, and NPR, on programs such as “The Today Show,” “American Morning,” “Washington Journal,” “Power Lunch,” "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell," "The Joy Behar Show," “The Dylan Ratigan Show,” and “The Daily Rundown,” among others. Melber has also been a featured speaker at Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Columbia, NYU, The Center for American Progress and many other institutions. He has contributed chapters or essays to the books “America Now,” (St. Martins, 2009), “At Issue: Affirmative Action,” (Cengage, 2009), and “MoveOn’s 50 Ways to Love Your Country,” (Inner Ocean Publishing, 2004). His reporting has been cited by a wide range of news organizations, academic journals and nonfiction books, including the The Washington Post, The New York Times, ABC News, NBC News, CNN, FOX News, National Review Online, The New England Journal of Medicine and Boston University Law Review. He is a member of the American Constitution Society, he serves on the advisory board of the Roosevelt Institute and lives in Manhattan.