Grassley addresses Vegas shooting, ACA repeal during conference call

During a conference call with Iowa reporters on Monday afternoon, U.S. Senator Charles Grassley, a Republican from New Hartford, spoke about the deadly Las Vegas shooting just hours after the news broke and discussed his party's efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act now that the Graham-Cassidy bill has stalled in the Senate.
           
“It goes beyond ‘it’s a terrible tragedy,’ harming obviously innocent people. Our prayers are with these people, the wounded and the families of the deceased,” he said. “A detailed commentary wouldn’t be appropriate right now because we’re still getting a lot of information.”
           
Grassley went on to note that if the reports he’d been hearing were true, alleged shooter Stephen Paddock used fully automatic weapons, which are outlawed in the United States. He has been in contact with federal law enforcement agencies, and no rationale had been established for the rampage that left at least 59 people dead and over 500 injured.
           
Talk then shifted the ACA and a recent interview that Grassley gave with The Des Moines Register’s Jason Noble, when he said that Republicans should vote to repeal Obamacare even if they hadn’t read the full text of the bill because they had campaigned on a promise to do so. 
 
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