As Democrats push an economic midterm agenda, House Speaker and Ohio Republican John Boehner penned a new op-ed arguing that the president and his party are ruining everything.
“In the last year and a half, the House has passed more than 40 bills aimed at creating jobs, supporting wage earners, and easing the financial pains that working families all over America are suffering with in President Obama’s economy,” Boehner argues in a piece written for TIME. “Where are these bills now? They are stuck in the Senate. Why they are stuck, is a question for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.”
A plurality of voters recently told George Washington University pollsters that the economy was their top issue in the upcoming midterms, and both parties are struggling to win the argument with just two short months until Election Day.
“Even though the president and his party in the Senate have not been willing to deal with us, Republicans will continue to work and pass meaningful legislation this month,” Boehner argued in Monday’s editorial, pointing to dozens of bills that passed the House but are dead-on-arrival in the Senate due to a lack of support and partisanship.
The same George Washington University poll and a Gallup poll from May have found that Republicans appear to have an advantage when it comes to the economy, but Democrats are seizing on quantifiable issues in an attempt to turn things around.
Democrats redoubled talk of hiking the minimum wage, pay equity, and helping the Middle Class over Labor Day, with the president and vice president lobbying the exact same argument Boehner’s trying out a week later. Each have argued the other’s party is stunting economic growth and blocking their own party’s earnest efforts to help the Middle Class.
“The policies I’m talking about have two things in common,” the president said, after championing policies like pay equity, a higher minimum wage, and Obamacare. “They’re going to help more working families get ahead, and the Republicans who run our Congress oppose almost all of them.”
Jane Timm