House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said the Senate needs to act on House-passed legislation if Republicans want to gain seats in 2018.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Tuesday that the Senate needs to act on House-passed legislation if Republicans want to gain seats in 2018.
While the California Republican said he doesn’ t like to gauge how many seats will be gained or lost, he said that the party’s success will be contingent on whether they deliver on the promises they made on the campaign trail.
“I always look to the policies that we create will determine what the outcome will be, ” he told The Daily Caller News Foundation in a Tuesday interview. “If we are successful in this agenda, we will gain seats. If we continue to have the Senate bogging us down, it will be a challenge.”
McCarthy noted that the House has sent more than 250 bills over to the upper chamber since the start of the 115th Congress, yet the Senate has failed to act on a number of them.
“I took in the metrics of the number of bills that have passed and I took it back to [George] H. W. Bush, so you’ re going back more than 30 years. This is actually the most productive Congress, more than 269 bills passed out of the House, ” he said. “The challenge is over on the Senate side, so when you combine it, it makes it a little challenging.”
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Senate Republicans are currently struggling to come to a consensus on their Obamacare repeal bill. GOP leadership in the upper chamber has failed to gain the support needed to send the bill back to the lower chamber, despite having both revised the bill and proposed bringing a clean repeal bill to the floor.
McCarthy argued that lawmakers need to compromise, citing the need to fix the health care system due to rising premiums and collapsing Obamacare co-ops.
“What I think is happening, especially on the Senate side, they’ re looking for things to be 100 percent sure of what they want, and that’s just within the Republican world. I mean, yeah, people have a difference of opinion in the party, but you’ ve got to find the common ground, ” McCarthy said. “I mean Ronald Reagan always said, ‘Ya know, if I’ m getting 80 percent of what I want, take that and I’ ll come back the next day to work for what I didn’ t get.’”
He noted that the legislative process can often be messy, but ultimately there needs to be a give and take if lawmakers want to accomplish their goals.
“Somebody may get upset, but two members shouldn’ t derail the entire country of where they want to go. I mean, what’s unique is when it comes to health care, we’ ve campaigned on this for a number of years, ” McCarthy said. “We’ ve won the majority because of what we promised. What I really want members to understand is, keep your promise and then let’s move forward.”
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