Reid: ‘No intention of just rolling over’

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) on Wednesday fired back at Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) characterization of the chamber as dysfunctional during eight years of Democratic control.

{mosads}McConnell, speaking on the Senate floor this week, has repeatedly characterized the upper chamber as a body paralyzed by Reid’s iron grip on the agenda.

The new Republican majority leader pledged Wednesday to “restore the Senate” by returning to regular order and getting committees working again.

Reid said McConnell’s narrative is off-base.

“The new majority leader claims the Senate has not achieved, in his words, ‘squat,’ in recent years. The numbers in fact tell a different story,” he said in a statement read from the floor by Assistant Democratic Leader Dick Durbin (Ill.).

Reid said that over the past six years the U.S. economy has added 10 million jobs, the stock market has reached an all-time high and the domestic automobile industry was saved from bankruptcy.

He also said 10 million Americans now have health insurance thanks to the Affordable Care Act, which Democrats passed in 2010.

“While some here in Washington may see that as ‘squat,’ the economic recovery has been very real to American families. I know how important it has been to working Nevadans,” he said in the statement delivered by Durbin and later emailed to reporters.

Reid said the Senate confirmed 132 judges in the 113th Congress, the most since the Carter administration, and 611 of President Obama’s nominees “in spite of Republican opposition.”

He urged McConnell to work with Democrats over the next year to confirm more of the president’s nominees and pass legislation to create jobs and spur growth in the economy.

“Working together, we can easily meet and surpass last Congress’s benchmark of 611 confirmations,” he said.

Reid pledged to work with Republicans but warned, “I have no intention of just rolling over.”

“Any attempt to erode protections for working American families — the dismantling of Dodd-Frank, the weakening of net neutrality rules or the Republicans’ never-ending quest to repeal ObamaCare — will be met with a swift and unified Democratic opposition,” he said.
 
Still, Reid promised not to engage in the “gratuitous obstruction” that he says Republicans were guilty of in the last two Congresses.

“The filibuster is an indispensable tool of the minority, but Republicans’ abuse of it last Congress has come to epitomize the gridlock here in the United States Capitol,” he said.

He pointed to the GOP filibuster of former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel (Neb.), whom Obama nominated to serve as secretary of Defense.