President Barack Obama has billed Thursday’s health care summit as a chance for lawmakers to “seek common ground” to solve a decades-old problem.
He doesn’t want political theater, he insists, but a serious effort to forge bipartisan consensus.
And yet Obama is unveiling a health care bill just days before the six-hour summit that wouldn’t require a single GOP vote, with plans to short-circuit the Senate rules and push it through without Republicans if necessary.
That’s left some Republicans angrily questioning whether the summit is a sham and even Democrats uncertain and noncommittal.
“I’m not terribly heartened by what I’ve heard over the past week,” said Georgia Rep. Tom Price, a conservative Republican who wasn’t invited to the health care talks at Blair House on Thursday. “I’m not certain what the White House is up to, but it appears they are trying to meld a bill together without, again, any input from Republicans. It doesn’t sound like bipartisanship. ... I’m afraid it’s just another photo op.”