Tonight some House Republicans are planning to attend the president’s address to a joint session of Congress carrying copies of GOP health care bills. If the president says, as he has done on many previous occasions, that opponents of Democratic health care proposals have no plans of their own, those Republicans plan to hold up copies of their bills in protest.
“If the president decides again that he is going to assert that there is no plan on our side, we’re going to show him that’s not true,” says one GOP aide.
Rep. Tom Price, head of the Republican Study Committee, plans to attend tonight’s speech carrying a copy of H.R. 3400, the Empowering Patients First Act, which Price, who is a medical doctor, proposed in July. Other Republicans may carry H.R. 2520, which is Rep. Paul Ryan’s Patients’ Choice Act, and H.R. 3218, which is Rep. John Shadegg’s Improving Health Care for All Americans Act. The purpose of bringing the bills to the session — and of holding them up, if Obama repeats his claim that Republicans have no plan — is to “show the president that his rhetoric that there are no solutions on the Republican side is false,” says the aide. “We’ve got a plan and we’re ready to show it to him — literally.”
