Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, said on Monday that the GOP in the Senate “must” produce legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, before the final summer recess.
The Senate is expected to take up the Better Care Reconciliation Bill of 2017 on Tuesday, and Meadows said the GOP needs to do what’s necessary to get the legislation passed.
“You talked about trying to pass health care,” Jeff Ballou, Al Jazeera Media Network news editor and president of the National Press Club asked Meadows at a luncheon event where Meadows was the keynote speaker. “What are you going to do if the motion to proceed in the Senate fails?”
‘Well, obviously any time you pass anything in the House and it doesn’t go anywhere in the Senate — we’re used to that and sadly we’re used to that,” Meadows said.
“But I think this is a unique situation in that where we are with this and a motion to proceed and ultimately getting something out of the Senate is a must,” Meadows said. “It is not something that we can fail at.
“Primarily it’s because a number of us have campaigned on [it] for a number of years,” Meadows said.
“It’s something that the president campaigned on, and so what I would say, just like when they put the fork in it and said it was done in the House — that it was over with — the bill was pulled on that infamous Friday afternoon,” Meadows said.
“We have to stay engaged,” Meadows said, even if that means the Senate stays in session in August until “ultimately the pressure of going home becomes so great that they come to some sort of compromise.”
Meadows, now serving his third term in Congress, is also on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee where he is chairman of the Government Operations Subcommittee. Meadows also serves on the House Foreign Affairs and Transportation and Infrastructure committees.
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