Blunt looks forward to Republican dominance in Senate

After Tuesday's election turned control of the Senate over to the Republican party, U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt said the GOP now has a chance to make the government more efficient and transparent.

The Republican senator said in a Wednesday conference call with reporters that the election was largely about the Democratic president and that Republicans had managed to present themselves as an "acceptable alternative" to try to move the country forward.

"Getting back to the way legislation is supposed to be done, that is one of the easier challenges for us to meet," Blunt said. "And frankly, my view is, so much has been left undone over the last seven years that there are significant opportunities out there for a new Congress to embrace the challenges that the American people want to see their government take up."

He also said Republicans have a chance now to become "either a governing majority or a complaining majority." Now that his party holds the reigns in both the House and the Senate, Blunt said he anticipates issues such as job growth and regulation reform will be tackled in the next few years.

The House has passed hundreds of bills over the past two years that never made it to the Senate floor, he said. As Senate majority leader, that power fell to Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, who will hold that position for the remainder of the year. After January, Blunt anticipates the Senate will be able to keep pace with the House. He hopes to see some version of the bills that involved education, job opportunities and health care make their way to the Senate again.

Blunt said President Barack Obama will have plenty of opportunities to look at legislation in the future, and some of it will likely deal with health care and the Affordable Care Act. The Republican Party's recent gains could give them "the tool to look at some of the spending elements of the president's health care plan," he said.

Primarily, Blunt said the power shift means the president needs to reconsider his involvement in the legislative process.

"I do think the president is no longer going to be allowed to be a nonparticipant in the legislative process. He just needs to decide if he wants to participate early or late," he said. "Does he want to stay out of this until bills wind up on his desk and his only option is to sign or veto? Or does he want to try to negotiate a bill that he would sign, during that process?"

Republicans will have many choices to make after next year and Blunt said it is important the focus remain on improving government, rather than maintaining the majority. He said he believes there is "a lot of pent-up interest in actually doing what senators and representatives are supposed to do," which is passing beneficial legislation and focusing on oversight.

"There's a lot to do. I think we have a chance to do it, and my belief is that being overly focused on keeping the majority is why the Democrats lost the majority," Blunt said. "If Sen. Reid would have let his members offer amendments, bring legislation to the floor, have a chance to define themselves as it related to their state -- rather than the only votes they had defined them as it related to the Obama agenda -- it would have been a different kind of election for most of them than it was. ... We shouldn't make the same mistake."

srinehart@semissourian.com

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