President Obama will deliver a speech to a joint session of Congress tomorrow, addressing health care and his attempt to make it a bipartisan bill.
Other than inaugurations, electoral vote counts, and State of the Union addresses, tomorrow’s speech will be only the thirteenth time since 1981 the President has lectured a joint session of Congress.
Although the White House has said President Obama will not be specific about the health care bill, Vice President Biden expressed, “There’s going to be a major speech laying out in understandable, clear terms, what our administration wants to happen with regard to health care, and what we are going to push for specifically.”
“We’re going to get something substantial . . . It’s going to be a whole lot of screaming and hollering before we get there, but I believe we’re going to get there. I believe the president will lay out, I know the president will lay out very clearly Wednesday, what he thinks those pieces have to be and will be,” continued the Vice President.
Obama, who has allowed Congress to be more outspoken than he on the health care issue, will come out of the shadows in an attempt to answer looming questions. He will address “specifically what he wants in health reform and setting the contours of the battlefield.”
Not all Democrats have supported the public option for healthcare. Oakland Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee expressed her feelings of the bill saying that she refuses to vote for a plan that does not have a public option.
The timing of the President’s health care bill has come under question because he could have initiated it at the beginning of his term in office. Instead, he passed the stimulus bill in February and ‘Cash for Clunkers’ during the summer. Republican Texas Representative Michael Burgess expressed that “the President could’ve passed anything he wanted in February. He could’ve done his health care bill first and it would’ve been the law of the land today had he chosen different timing.”
Loading ...