House lawmakers will have to provide their Senate colleagues some “adult supervision” by moving ahead on a healthcare bill without them, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) suggested Monday.
Weiner, who has spent the past week pushing Democrats to more forcefully assert their majority status in the healthcare debate, said that the House should no longer wait for the Senate to act before sending its own bill to conference with the Senate.
“We need some adult supervision, so we need the House to act,” Weiner said during an appearance on MSNBC. “Honestly, this is getting ridiculous over there.”
Weiner’s words reflect a growing frustration with the Senate for not having moved forward on healthcare, letting members of the Senate Finance Committee continue to try to cobble together a reform bill by mid-September.
The New York liberal decried a “vacuum” of leadership during the August congressional recess, and called on the House to move forward to fill the void.
But problems still percolate in House Democrats’ own backyard; Blue Dog Democrat Co-Chairwoman Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-N.D.) suggested this weekend that the public (or “government-run”) option favored by Weiner and other liberals wouldn’t survive a conference with the Senate bill — if the public option even makes it into the preliminary House bill.
Weiner called on President Obama to make his own position more clear as the health debate progresses, too.
“I think the time has come for the president to say here’s why we need it and here’s what it is,” he said. “We need to the president to be very clear what he wants, and then we’ll do it.”