WASHINGTON (AP) – Republicans now controlling Congress will focus on people’s concerns about jobs and health care and steer the country away from President Barack Obama’s failed policies, the newly minted senator giving her party’s official response to the State of Union address said Tuesday.
“Americans have been hurting, but when we demanded solutions, too often Washington responded with the same stale mindset that led to failed policies like Obamacare,” Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, referring to Obama’s health care overhaul, said in excerpts from her speech released before its delivery. “It’s a mindset that gave us political talking points, not serious solutions.”
Ernst cited Americans’ worries about stagnant wages, lost jobs and lost health care coverage. She called on Obama to cooperate with Republicans to simplify the tax code by lowering rates and eliminating unspecified loopholes, and to ease trade barriers with Europe and Asia.
Ernst, 44, is a fresh face on the national political scene who has been in the Senate for all of two weeks. She rocketed to prominence in Republican circles last year, when the little-known conservative state senator and Iraq war veteran won the GOP primary and captured a vacant Senate seat that retiring Democrat Tom Harkin had held for three decades.