Tuesday’s State of the Union address will reveal whether President Obama’s much discussed post-election shift to the “center” is mere rhetoric, Republicans said Sunday in the lead-up to his speech.
“We’re going to find out beginning next week … how much of this he really means,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said on “Fox News Sunday.” “It is kind of a trust-but-verify moment. Let’s see if he’s really willing to do it, and if he is, I think he’ll find a lot of help among Republicans in Congress.”
Republicans seek to corner majority Democrats into allowing a health care repeal vote even if GOP lawmakers expect to be on the losing side. “We need to have a vote on it because we promised the people we would,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said Sunday on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “We have to have a vote on repeal so that everybody is on record whether they want to repeal.”
Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who controls the Senate agenda, has said such a bill won’t come to a vote, but McConnell repeated his promise that a repeal vote will indeed take place. “I’m not going to discuss how we’ll do it from a parliamentary point of view here,” McConnell said on “Fox News Sunday.”
“If that does not pass, and I don’t think anyone is optimistic that it will, we intend to go after this health care bill in every way that we can. It’s the single worst piece of legislation that’s been passed in my time in the Senate,” McConnell said.