House GOP Plan for September: Shame the Senate

Boehner and other House GOP leaders are reportedly on board with adding to the spending bill the president's request for authority to go after ISIS. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call File Photo)

Posted September 3, 2014 at 4:35pm

Speaker John A. Boehner outlined the September legislative agenda in a Wednesday afternoon conference call with House Republican lawmakers, describing a scheduled 12-day session that will be “brief, but busy.”

The most pressing item on the agenda is a short-term spending bill to avert a government shutdown on Sept. 30, but Boehner also spoke strongly and at length, according to a read-out from a source on the call, in favor of using the remaining legislative days before the November elections to draw “a very stark contrast between ourselves and the Democrats who run Washington.”

The Republican-led House, Boehner said, “is going to spend September focused on American solutions to help get people back to work, lower costs at home and restore opportunity for all Americans.”

House Republicans’ “closing argument” before they depart for the campaign trail ahead of Election Day, Boehner said, will be moving legislation designed to have tangible results for the American people, while the “do-nothing Senate plans to spend the final legislative days before November talking about the Koch brothers.”

Boehner’s comments mirrored an early August memo from Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., alerting members that leadership would be taking dozens of jobs and energy bills that have already been passed individually by the House and bundling them together in packages to send over to the Senate again — a move intended to put more pressure on the chamber’s Democratic leadership.

With the GOP almost certain to retain control of the House in the 114th Congress, the chamber’s Republicans now appear to be rallying to help tilt the balance of power in the Senate.