In a recent Politico op-ed as detached from reality as her political views, DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz wrote, “Come November, voters will have a choice between a Democratic Party trying to fix our nation’s problems and a Republican Party interested only in standing in our way.”
I’d like to know what Democratic Party she’s talking about. Because it’s certainly not the one that controls the White House and the U.S. Senate today. It’s certainly not the Democratic Party she belongs too.
If that party is “trying to fix our nation’s problems,” they clearly don’t know what they’re doing. Consider their record.
They took a healthcare system in need of reform and made it worse with ObamaCare. Their “Affordable Care Act” made healthcare more expensive. Premiums have been increasing since the law passed and are expected to spike—in some cases by double-digit percentages—in 2015, making life harder for families who already can’t make ends meet. Instead of giving Americans more choices, ObamaCare resulted in millions of Americans receiving health care insurance cancellation notices; it also has restricted families’ access to their preferred doctors.
Moreover, poll after poll shows more Americans disapprove of ObamaCare than approve of it. If Wasserman Schultz wants to criticize Republicans for opposing ObamaCare, then she’s criticizing us for standing with the American people. I’ll choose that side any day.
Let’s also look at jobs and the economy. How exactly are Democrats trying to “fix our nation’s problems” here? The Republican-led House of Representatives has passed over forty jobs bills. Forty. But the Democrat-controlled Senate won’t touch them. Harry Reid won’t even bring them up for a vote.
Jobs and the economy are Americans’ number one priority. According to Gallup, a majority of Americans—57 percent—say the economy is getting worse right now. Nineteen million of our fellow Americans are unemployed, are underemployed, or have given up looking for work. The percentage of Americans in the labor force is at a low not seen since the Carter presidency. It’s unacceptable that Harry Reid is letting jobs bills—including plans to build the Keystone Pipeline—gather dust at a time when Americans desperately need jobs.
Likewise, Harry Reid refuses to take up legislation that would expand education opportunities for disadvantaged kids. It looks like he has no intention of bringing up the House-passed Success and Opportunity through Quality Charter Schools Act, which would help kids in failing schools get into better schools.
That’s par for the course. More often than not, liberal Democrats stand in the way of expanding school choice. Nevertheless, Republicans continue to fight to give parents the chance to choose a good school for their kids.
When it comes to education, Democrats haven’t done anything to “fix” the problem; they’ve spent more time locking arms with the special interests to keep our neediest kids out of better schools.
Finally, the issue grabbing headlines lately is the humanitarian crisis at the border. Here again, President Obama and Democrats didn’t just fail to solve the crisis when they had the chance; the president helped create the crisis in the first place.
In 2012, President Obama started unilaterally rewriting our immigration laws, deciding he would only enforce the ones he liked. As a result, residents of other countries believe they can come to the United States and stay here.
This was a foreseeable crisis; it was a preventable crisis. Governor Perry and other leaders in our border states have been alerting the president about the issue long before it reached crisis level. At the beginning of the year, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops warned that an estimated 60,000 children would arrive in the United States; still the White House didn’t act.
The stories we hear and images we see from the border and holding facilities are heartbreaking, yet the president still refuses to visit the border. He was even in Texas last week. He couldn’t find time to visit the border, but he could find time for fundraisers, including one for the Democratic National Committee. I’m sure DNC Chair Wasserman Schultz is grateful for that, but I hope she realizes that the border, not the DNC’s finances, is actually one of “our nation’s problems” that we need “to fix.”
Jobs. ObamaCare. Education. Border security. These are just a few of the issues where Democrats are blocking real solutions and actual legislation—and in fact have made the problems worse.
Republicans, on the other hand, have passed legislation out of the House, and have given voice to the concerns of working class Americans. Unfortunately, those concerns fall on deaf ears in Harry Reid’s Senate and the Obama White House.
In other words, Republicans are standing with the American people, not “standing in our way.” But if ObamaCare and killing jobs are examples of what Democrats think it means to “fix our nation’s problems,” then, yes, we will keep fighting until we have a healthcare system and an economy that actually work for the American people.