Immediately after the election results were finalized on Tuesday, President Obama, House Speaker Boehner and presumptive Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell all publically expressed their willingness to work together in the next two years for the good of the country.
So much for that.
In a wide-ranging interview with reporters on Thursday, November 6, Speaker Boehner provided some detail on what he had in mind with respect to working with the White House. "Finding common ground is going to be hard work, but it will be even harder if the president isn't willing to work with us," Boehner told reporters gathered for an afternoon news conference on Capitol Hill. "I've told the president before, he needs to put politics aside and rebuild trust."
Boehner then proceed to demonstrate he is incapable of following his own advice, since he then focused much of his attention on his desire to replace and reform key components of the Affordable Care Act, stating with confidence that such measures could pass the House of Representatives during the upcoming session. Well, duh. As NSAlert readers are aware, the House has voted on and passed various ACA repeal measures more than forty times during the current session, so passing more of the same in the next session would not seem to involve much heavy lifting. Doing so would also not seem to be in the spirit of "putting politics aside" or "rebuilding trust," since the President would veto such efforts and, in any event, such measures would never pass the Senate, even with Republicans in the majority. Such actions would, however, be in the spirit of politics as usual, which voters last Tuesday seem to have rejected.
