House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) stressed the importance of having a bold agenda in 2016 at a Ripon Society luncheon meeting this week.
McCarthy and Scalise also discussed key accomplishments in Congress during the past year.
“It was a busy year,” Scalise said. “The majority leader had a very impressive schedule on the floor. And we’re going to have a very impressive schedule on the floor this year…It’s important for us to be bold, especially with a presidential race later this year that’s going to take all of the oxygen out of the room. While we have a few months, while people are still paying attention to what’s going on in Congress, we have a real opportunity to show people what we stand for.
“But when you look at 2015, we ended with an omnibus bill where we laid out a number of things we wanted to achieve. We wanted to first of all get more buy-in from our own members. Early on, getting 100 of our members to vote for it would have been a significant accomplishment. But we pushed for a majority of the majority, and we had 150 Republicans vote for the final product. There were some important components in that, especially tied to tax extenders. We got 20 different tax extenders made permanent, including R&D, putting some certainty in a tax code that’s had big, big problems with uncertainty. That was a big achievement.”
Scalise said that another big achievement was coming together with the Senate to pass a budget that gets to balance in a 10-year window for the first time since 2001.
“That’s not something that should happen every 15 years, but it was something we were able to do,” Scalise said. “It was a big achievement, too, and it gave us a tool of reconciliation to go after Obamacare. Ultimately, we were able to pass a bill that guts Obamacare and defunds Planned Parenthood and get it to the president’s desk. He vetoed it last week. But the majority leader has set a date, and on January 26 we’ll have the first-ever House vote to override a Barack Obama veto. It shows people that if you actually had a president who shared our values, you could gut Obamacare, which has devastated jobs all across the country.”
McCarthy said that, moving forward, the goal is to come out and frame an agenda.
“We want to be very bold,” McCarthy said. “We want to have something that we like. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the presidential race — nobody can predict that. But we want to make sure we have something that we can run on. I think that will help the presidential nominee.”
McCarthy also pointed to America’s uncertain political and economic climate, adding that the nation is in the midst of a “positive disruption.”
“I call it positive disruption,” McCarthy said. “Positive disruption is happening all across this country. We are actually in our fourth Industrial Revolution, and it’s happening much faster than any revolution we’ve had before. How old is Uber? Yet it has transformed something that has been around forever — the taxi industry, which is like a big bureaucracy. Think about all the disruption that’s happening politically and economically. We need to start having it inside government, as well.”