In taking his stand, Kasich went on to tell ABC’s This Week that his fellow Republican party members sometimes try too hard to wring blood from a rock. “Sometimes my party asks too much,” he said, referencing the notion that the U.S. Senate’s health care bill is constructed to shift money from the poor to the rich. Whatever Sen. Mitch McConnell might be cooking up to lock in a few extra votes after the July Fourth holiday, it’ll seem to Kasich to be just another bid “to try to buy people off.”
Those sorts of messages continue to mark Kasich’s position as distinct from the broader party, something he hammered on the presidential campaign trail last year. In his comments, he returned to his brand of holistic politics, one could almost say, and urged Democrats to take a seat at the table with their Republican counterparts and President Donald Trump. The nickle-and-dime race to a majority vote in Washington isn’t doing the country any favors.
“Right now, they don’t want to concede anything,” he concluded. “Right now, they’re not ready, they are not ready to sit down and put the nation first in my opinion.”
Back home in Ohio, the Medicaid freeze remains vetoed. It’s unclear whether Statehouse Republicans will mount a vote to override that veto (they would need a three-fifths majority vote).
This article appears in Jun 28 – Jul 4, 2017.
If John Kasich did not spend so much time parading around the country as a presidential “contender”…..there would not be a state leadership vacuum caused by an empty governor’s office.