White House Press Secretary Jay Carney backed away from President Obama’s erstwhile insistence that Congress vote on his jobs proposals, a more modest position than Obama adopted before the Senate rejected his American Jobs Act.
Carney has declared that Obama “will not be satisfied” until Congress enacts the various pieces of his American Jobs Act, but Obama won’t try to force votes on Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. “[T]he Senate Majority Leader will set the schedule [on the votes],” Carney told reporters today, “and we are obviously in conversation with him about this.”
Carney’s comment displays a much less forceful posture from the White House than the president indicated last week. Before the Senate rejected his bill, Obama said that he would call Reid and be “insisting that we have a vote on this bill.”
The president still intends to run against House Republicans, it seems. One reporter asked, “does [Obama] see the Speaker [Boehner, R-Ohio] as being obstructionist still on the issue of infrastructure?” Carney did not answer the question, per se, but instead responded as if the questioner had charged Boehner with obstructionism. “I think the point that you’re making is useful because it goes to what we’ve said all along about the elements of the jobs act,” Carney said, “which is that they are all the kinds of proposals that Republicans and Democrats have supported in the past.”
