Upon winning the White House on Tuesday night (early Wednesday), Trump was “magnanimous” and “gracious” and displayed a “perfect temperament”, the speaker noted.
High atop their lists – and one of Trump’s main refrains on the campaign trail – was the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act.
President Obama’s healthcare reforms, ensuring more Americans from poorer backgrounds have access to health insurance, will be an immediate target for all Republicans.
It wasn’t just the Access Hollywood video that had drawn Ryan’s rebuke over the past year.
“For the first time since 1980, and despite being outspent, Senate Republicans have held the majority for two election cycles in a row”, Thibodeau said. But few expect Schumer and his Democrats to sign on to too many of Trump’s plans.
Democrats will also apparently go into next year’s session with a 26-16 advantage in the Senate, having picked up a net of two seats in that chamber.
When reporters pressed Ryan about his relationship with Trump, he said, “I think our relationship is fine”. “The opportunity is now here”. By that time, representatives for both parties agreed that Republicans had secured 72 seats.
“I think most of the things that he’s likely to advocate, we’re going to be enthusiastically for”, McConnell said.
Most Democrats rejected the notion that Trump would enter the White House with a mandate.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), for instance, has cited a “robust infrastructure jobs bill” and child care and paid family leave issues, which Trump campaigned on but that Republicans have opposed, as areas of potential cooperation. Even the speaker, sitting next to the President-elect at his conference table, pulled a phrase from Trump’s stump speech to tout their new partnership.
“The big difference is we now have complete Republican control”, Collins told Reuters.
The Democratic Party might have been more unified (at the end, anyway) than the GOP, but it’s at least as badly broken.
If Trump succeeds in all he has promised, he will have saved the country from disaster.
Although there have been rumblings from some very pro-Trump conservatives, Ryan said he was not anxious about any challenge to his leadership. Scott Garrett, a Freedom Caucus member from New Jersey’s New York City suburbs; moderate Bob Dold from outside Chicago; Cresent Hardy of Nevada and New Hampshire’s Frank Guinta. They must now use it, or they will lose it. Among those are Maine, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which hadn’t backed a GOP presidential candidate since the 1980s, leaving both parties trying to discern how much Tuesday may have reordered the lineup of blue, red and swing states.
“We have only one option and that is sitting down together, looking at this landscape, looking at the things we have to get done for the state of ME, for their well being, for people’s safety, and that work has to happen immediately and it has to happen together”, she says.
Tuesday’s congressional results left both leaders in a strong position to pass major legislation.
“When people were voting for change, they didn’t decide they wanted to change the Republican Senate”, said McConnell. “Repealing is easy. Replacing is not so easy”.
Dave Nagle, the former congressman from Waterloo who leads that committee, says the party now needs to retool for the next election and reclaim its mantle as the party of working people.
Congressional bosses and Trump advisers predict swift moves to expand production of American gas, oil and coal, whether by building new pipelines (including the long-delayed Keystone XL pipeline from Canada), easing exports of natural gas or opening public lands to new drilling and mining.
Afterwards, following an hour-long meeting with McConnell on the other side of the Capitol, Trump stood at the Senate majority leader’s side and stressed that “we have a lot to do”. He also laid down a stark divide with Trump by opposing term limits on members of Congress despite Trump’s calls to “drain the swamp”. “We’re going to find solutions to the challenges that are before our state”, said Senator Thibodeau. I don’t anticipate that it will be any different during the 128th.