President Obama surrounded himself on Tuesday with people he said needed Obamacare and trashed Republicans for their role in shutting down the government over the healthcare reform.
Republicans had “shut down the government over an ideological crusade to deny affordable health care to millions of Americans,” the president said, while retelling personal stories of those who needed Obamacare.
“The Republicans have put us here,” host Joe Scarborough said Wednesday. “But make no mistake of it, Harry Reid and Barack Obama are loving every second of it. President Obama is squeezing it for all he can; it’s an all-or-nothing approach.”
Scarborough went on to criticize Democrats for killing the piecemeal funding bills House Republicans had proposed.
“The V.A. would be funded today if the Democrats had not killed the bill last night in the House and if Harry Reid didn’t have an all-or-nothing strategy,” he said. Reid promised to kill any such piecemeal bills in the Senate and the president had promised to veto them.
“These piecemeal efforts are not serious, and they are no way to run a government,” White House spokesman Amy Brundage said in a statement yesterday. “If House Republicans are legitimately concerned about the impacts of a shutdown—which extend across government from our small businesses to women, children and seniors— they should do their job and pass a clean CR to reopen the government.”
“Park services would be open today if the Democrats had not all voted ‘No’ to open the parks,” he said. “If you live in Washington, D.C., and you need vital services, and there’s a bill to take care of that last night…the Democrats were the ones that killed those last night.”
Jane Timm