Cantor Highlights Democratic Opposition To Jobs Bill

By Janie Amaya

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said Tuesday night’s vote in the Senate proved that the American Jobs Act is not just opposed by Republicans, but by Democrats as well.

“The Senate’s action last night, proved that the month-long campaign that the White House has been on to promote the Presidents bill, failed,” Cantor said during a press conference in the RNC’s lobby, noting that the vote demonstrated that the President couldn’t even get the necessary support in his own party to pass the bill.

He noted that even in the House, the chief sponsor of the President’s jobs bill put it in by request, which Cantor says does not indicate whole-hearted support of the bill.

“When we hear several on the other side of the aisle in the Senate indicate that somehow, this is [the Republican’s] economy and we’re to blame because we are not passing the President’s bill, I think we can all see through that now,” Cantor said.

The bill failed to pass its first procedural hurdle after two Democratic Senators, Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.) voted against invoking cloture. Democrats would have likely seen more defectors if the package had moved to a final vote.

Speaker of the House, John Boehner (R-Ohio), who joined Cantor, said the American Jobs Act is contrary to what is needed right now to help small businesses grow, adding that moving forward with the Free Trade bills with Panama, Colombia, and South Korea is an area of common ground.

“We’re going to continue to work with the President in order to create a better environment,” Boehner said. “Not everything the President outlined is something we agree with, certainly not everything we’ve outlined is something the President would agree with.”