That's right. With nothing.
In the President's speech on inequality he said, "If Republicans have concrete plans that will actually reduce inequality, build the middle class, provide more ladders of opportunity to the poor, let’s hear them."
But the Republican National Committee and the Senate Minority Leader responded with silence.
The Speaker's office at least put out the statement before the speech, and bravely tweeted a bit afterwards. But that minimal activity was simply to drag out the House Republican "Plan For Economic Growth and Jobs, which is literally a set of talking points, and to complain that the Senate hasn't taken up any of the right-wing bills that the House Republicans rubber stamped this year.
As you might imagine, those bills are not a serious response to our decades-long period of widening inequality, considering they are a rehash of conservatism from the Reagan and Bush presidencies which presided over that widening inequality.
Deregulation. Weaker unions. Lower taxes for the rich. It's all there. It's all been done. It's all failed.
If Republicans ever want to be taken seriously as a governing party again, as I've argued previously, they need to admit they blew it on the economy when they were in charge, and propose new ideas that show they learned their lesson.
President Obama's challenge for Republicans to produce new ideas is actually a political lifeline, if they choose to grab it.
