With less than 6 hours to go until a government shutdown, Democratic Rep. Karen Bass predicted that her colleagues in the House would pass the Senate’s continuing resolution bill, which restores funding to the Affordable Care Act, if Speaker John Boehner would allow them to vote on it.
“At any time, if they chose to put the Senate bill up, if they put it up in the next five minutes,” she said, “I guarantee you that it would pass and there’s no need for this Senate shutdown.”
“We should demand that they put up the Senate bill right now,” she added.
But she doesn’t believe that such a vote is likely.
“Right now they don’t have anything else left in their playbook,” she said. “The idea that they would have us vote on another bill tonight that they know very well is not even going to taken up in the Senate is doing nothing other than driving the train right over the cliff and leading us into a shutdown. I don’t see any other way out of this at this point in time.”
The latest word from Speaker Boehner’s office makes such a vote seem equally unlikely at this point in time.
“The president called the speaker this evening to discuss funding for the government and Obamacare,” Boehner’s spokesman said in a statement released Monday evening. “The speaker told the president that Obamacare is costing jobs and that American families are being denied basic fairness when big businesses are getting exemptions that they are not. The call lasted nearly ten minutes.”
Bass also accused Boehner of letting the Tea Party members of his party run the show.
“The fundamental problem here is that Boehner has never led his caucus, he’s allowed a handful of his most extreme members to lead his caucus and he has been following behind them ever since,” she said.
“Off the record, a number of my Republican colleagues have told me that frankly they’re embarrassed by this because it does amount to a temper tantrum,” she said, referring to a CNN poll that found 69% of respondents believe Congressional Republicans are acting like spoiled children. “It’s just the utmost irresponsible thing that I have seen the Tea Party caucus within the Republican caucus do in the two and a half years that I’ve been here.”
Watch the interview in its entirety below.
Morgan Whitaker