Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio said that legislators must take action on tax reform and healthcare to convince voters that they can do their jobs successfully.
"I think it's important that we show we can govern and, specifically, we have a great opportunity before us on tax reform," Portman said Wednesday on Fox News' "America's Newsroom."
"We have got a broken tax code, everybody knows that, and the ability to simplify the tax code and then make our businesses more competitive, so that American workers can have higher wages and better benefits, is an opportunity right before us. I hope we can do it in a bipartisan way . . . that's the way we've done it in the past. The last big tax reform in 1986 was bipartisan," Portman noted.
Working together with Democrats is vital, Portman said.
"I think the president's expectation was that we would work together to get these things done, and, frankly, we haven't had a lot of buy-in from Democrats on this stuff, and that's too bad," the senator told Fox News.
Portman added that work on repealing and replacing Obamacare is not dead.
"We can't give up . . . we have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. I'm not giving up, and we can't give up. We have to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, and we have to replace it with something better," he said in the Fox News interview.
The senator said he has already been in discussion on actions to take for the repeal.
"I've talked to two House members this week, and I plan to talk to others to figure out how we ensure that we can indeed replace this with something that works better," Portman said in the interview.
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