Top Democrat: Republicans blocking progress in D.C.

There were times in the past where Democrats and Republicans shared the blame equally for gumming up the congressional works, but this is not one of those times, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee said Monday.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., said Republicans are exclusively to blame for the latest round of obstructionism in Washington, D.C., on issues ranging from immigration reform to the minimum wage to equal pay for women. The apex of that attitude came when the government shut down last year, largely because of Republican objections to the Affordable Care Act.

“The extremism and the madness has got to stop. We’ve got to work together,” Wasserman Schultz told reporters, following a town hall at the Nevada Democratic Party headquarters near McCarran International Airport. Wasserman Schultz was in town to attend the NAACP’s annual convention, which is being held at the Mandalay Bay.

Earlier in the program, she told a group of about 30 women gathered in a phone banking area that one party can’t run things exclusively. “I know it can’t be my way or the highway,” she said. “We’ve got to work across the aisle.”

But Republicans are increasingly unwilling to to do that, especially in the House, where bills won’t come to the floor unless a majority of GOP members agree. That threatens legislation — for example, comprehensive immigration reform — that might pass the chamber with a majority of Democrats and a minority of Republicans.

“We are in the do-nothingest of the do-nothing Congresses,” she said.

Wasserman Schultz took time to praise fellow Democrats Rep. Dina Titus, Assemblywoman Lucy Flores and Erin Bilbray, who were also at the event and took questions from the audience. Titus is running for re-election in a district that overwhelmingly favors her, but Flores (running for lieutenant governor) and Bilbray (running for Congress in the 3rd Congressional District) have tougher races.

Although several of the candidates criticized bills vetoed in 2013 by Gov. Brian Sandoval, including legislation to extend the voter-registration deadline and to impose background checks for private-party gun sales, the Democratic party failed to find a top-tier candidate to oppose the Republican incumbent. (In fact, “none of these candidates,” won the Democratic gubernatorial primary.)

Asked if that showed a weak state party, Wasserman Schultz repeatedly touted the strength of the down-ticket Democratic candidates, including Flores, Bilbray and state Treasurer Kate Marshall, who’s running for secretary of state. (Marshall was scheduled to appear at today’s event, too, but was ill.)

But, asked if she could name another state where a state party had failed to muster a candidate for the top spot, Wasserman Schultz admitted there wasn’t one.

She insisted that Democrats had the electoral advantage in 2014, not only because of technological superiority, but also because of a more diverse bench of representatives in elected office. “Our side of the aisle looks like America, and their side of the aisle looks like a white male senior citizen convention,” Wasserman Schultz said, one of several zingers of the day.

Flores said the recent decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby — in which a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court majority held the religious owners of a private, closely held corporation could not be forced to offer certain forms of contraceptives to their employees under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act — shows the struggle for women’s rights continues.

“It’s not only not going to change, things are going to get worse,” Flores said. “We cannot ever let our guard down.”

In addition, she said Republicans are standing in the way of laws that a majority of Americans favor, including background checks. “They’re busy pandering to their very small, extreme base. And they’re more concerned about that than the safety of our kids in schools,” Flores said.

For her part, Bilbray once again called on Republican Rep. Joe Heck to sign a discharge petition to move a Senate-passed, bi-partisan immigration bill to the House floor for a vote. Heck has said he opposes some details of the Senate bill, but agrees with the major provisions in it. And Bilbray has said via Twitter that, if she were in a similar situation, she’d sign a discharge petition to at least move the legislation to the floor for an up-or-down vote.

She said she interacts with families who came to this country illegally at a free pediatric health-care clinic she and her husband, a physician, started. If Heck saw the suffering the families experienced as a result of not having immigration reforms in place, he’d sign the discharge petition, she said.

And she called on Heck to agree to more debates before the November election. Thus far, only one debate is in the making, and it won’t happen until early voting has already begun in mid-October, she said.