Although the year has just begun, the Republican base is already voicing concerns that GOP and Congressional leaders are too focused on last year’s accomplishments and are not pushing hard enough to advance the agenda they promised in 2016.
During a planning retreat in West Virginia, Congressional Republicans attempted to address these concerns, and formulate a plan – both the House and Senate – to execute their legislative agenda.
A senior Republican advisor believes that there are divisions over the plan of President Trump where he has allocated a massive $1.5 trillion budget for immigration and infrastructure package. “Nothing’s going to get done this year,” he added.
Everyone must have heard about the need of bipartisan legislation in recent times. The need to have it in the parliament is more than ever. The increase in internal divisions is the primary reason for this and Majority Leader of the Senate Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) feels this is a good time to introduce bipartisan legislation.
McConnell believes that the party is currently not seeing eye to eye on several key issues. In addition to this, the party is also looking to overcome the 60-vote filibuster threshold in the upper chamber.
To answer this, a GOP policy expert and former Senate advisor said in a statement “There’s a very to simple way to deal with all these differences of opinions. You can let the legislative process work and they will be adjudicated along the way.”
Another major change is coming on the Right to Try bill. It is believed that the experimental medications are likely to see certain changes once the House passes the bill. This was revealed by Greg Walden (R-Ore.) who is the Committee Chairman of Energy and Commerce.
Walden told reporters on Monday, “I think there’s some improvements that we could make to the good work that Sen. Johnson did that will improve upon the concept. As you know, some of the advocacy groups have actually been concerned about the language that came over from the Senate and are not full throated in support of it, and so we want to make sure that we listen to them, and that we get this in a way that works for everybody.”
