Cruz confident he can ‘get to yes’
Texas senator says GOP health care bill must lower premiums to win approval
WASHINGTON — In a desperate push to land an Obamacare repeal bill on his desk, President Donald Trump is reaching out to Republican holdouts in the Senate.
That includes trying to win over his primary election opponent, Ted Cruz.
The tea party agitator from Texas and the nation’s premier critic of former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, has made it clear that he did not think Senate GOP leaders are going far enough to repeal Obamacare, their central promise to the grassroots base.
But after spending a halfhour on the phone with Trump last week, Cruz was no longer breathing fire like he was during his infamous “Green Eggs and Ham” speech, the 2013 filibuster that helped spark a government shutdown over Obamacare.
With Republicans still at loggerheads over a new health care bill, Cruz said he is willing to negotiate. Afterward, he called his discussion with Trump “productive” and expressed confidence that he could “get to yes.”
But as Congress takes a 10-day July Fourth recess, the GOP plan remains on hold over the prickly details of meeting conservatives’ demands to end Obamacare insurance mandates, taxes and subsidies — all while fulfilling moderate Republicans’ hopes of continued protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions and Trump’s pre-inaugural promise of “insurance for everybody.”
For Cruz, the key point is that it doesn’t do enough to jettison Obamacare’s mandated insurance benefits,
which he says have pushed premiums up to unacceptable levels.
“I discussed with him that the central focus needs to be on lowering premiums,” Cruz said of last week’s call. “The current draft doesn’t do nearly enough.”
Complicating this legislative Rubik’s cube: how to reduce taxes on wealthy investors while palatably rolling back spending on Medicaid, the health program for the poor, disabled, children and pregnant women. Obamacare’s expansion of the multibilliondollar program has now taken root in 31 states and the District of Columbia — though not in Texas and 19 other Republican-led states, mostly in the South.
Amid the outrage of Democrats and the squeamishness of some moderate Republicans, the unfolding drama in the Senate has made one thing clear: The heady days of repealing Obamacare on “Day One” of Trump’s presidency are over. The latest missed deadline, July 4, now becomes just another milestone capping seven years of conservative frustration.
With Republicans back home during the break to regroup, Texas Democrats, like Democrats everywhere, are feeling emboldened. “The vote delay is evidence that more and more Republicans see Trumpcare as a prescription for misery and disaster for hardworking families,” said Houston Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee.
Don’t just ‘trim’ Obamacare
An important strain of criticism also comes from the right, with some tea party groups echoing the complaint of Cruz — along with Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Mike Lee of Utah and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin — that Republicans have fallen short of their promise to cut down Obamacare root and branch.
“Root and branch doesn’t mean trim the hedges,” said Andy Roth of Club for Growth, a free-market group that supports full repeal. “It’s got to be the entire Obamacare bill, including the regs, including the taxes, including the subsidies. All of it needs to go.”
With pressure coming from right and left, Cruz and Texas U.S. Sens. John Cornyn, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s official vote-counter as Republican Whip, have sought to put a brave face on the Senate delay.
But their words and actions suggest a hard choice for Republicans: cut a quick deal, risking a voter backlash over lost subsidies and consumer protections, or negotiate at length for a compromise, risking the ire of their conservative base.
Jenny Beth Martin, president and co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, said conservative voters gave Republicans a mandate to repeal Obamacare. “If it does not happen, I think that the base is going to be very upset, and they will work to hold those congressmen and senators accountable.”
Emerging from a tense closeddoor meeting of Republican senators on Wednesday, Cornyn ducked questions about what changes might be afoot to win passage in the Senate.
“This is a big, complex topic,” said Cornyn, backing into his ornate Capitol leadership office. “I cannot really give you a short answer.”
Asked if Republicans might put more money back into Medicaid, Cornyn acknowledged that the idea might be in play. “That’s part of the issues we need to resolve,” he said. “They’re all up in the air until we can find a way to build consensus to 50 votes.”
By Friday, as lawmakers headed home, Republicans signaled that they might forgo some of the proposed tax cuts in favor of helping more low-income people with their insurance premiums — possibly with bigger tax credits to replace Obamacare’s direct subsidies.
While no public decisions have been made, it seems Cornyn and the other GOP leaders continued to walk a tight-rope between their conservatives and moderate factions, just like their House counterparts did in May to narrowly pass their version of a health care bill.
While still a holdout, Cruz played a key role in negotiating with the conservative House Freedom Caucus holdouts, just as he’s been credited with a leading role in a 13-member working group to fashion a deal in the Senate.
GOP must compromise
The Senate holdouts, however, might be less amenable to zigzagging pressure from the White House. After holding a Rose Garden rally to celebrate passage of the House bill, Trump went on to denounce it as “mean” — both in public and private.
Then after pressing Senate Republicans to come together, he said that if the bill fails, “It’s going to be something that we’re not going to like, and that’s OK, and I can understand that.’’
At the end of the week on Friday, Trump seemed to call an audible on twitter: “If Republican Senators are unable to pass what they are working on now, they should immediately REPEAL, and then REPLACE at a later date!”
A full scale repeal bill, however, would appear to be a longshot at best.
In some ways, Cruz saw the GOP dilemma coming. In a 2013 interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, he speculated that if Republicans didn’t defund Obamacare then, “Obamacare will never, ever be repealed.”
Cruz’s argument was based on his belief that once Obamacare exchanges and subsidies kick in, it would be an uphill political climb to unwind them.
Nevertheless, Cruz ran for president last year promising to repeal “every word” of Obamacare. With Trump’s victory in November and Republicans in control of both the White House and both houses of Congress, he talked of an “historic opportunity” to deliver on that promise.
But as Republicans gradually came to terms with political reality, Cruz acknowledged that he and his conservative allies might have to settle for something less.
“We are engaged in a very real conversation where everybody, from the most conservative members to the most moderate members, recognize that we’re going to have to give some,” Cruz said. “We’re going to get less than 100 percent of what we want.”
But whether it’s total failure, or merely passage of what conservatives are calling the “Obamacare 1.1” compromise, Cruz allies say they’ve got his back.
“I think Senator Cruz is going to be fine,” said David Bozell, an influential activist who heads ForAmerica, a conservative marketing and social media group. “He’s been fighting this fight for a number of years.”
Given the Senate’s political math, where Republicans hold 52 seats, Cruz said some kind of compromise may be the only way forward.
“This remains a conversation across a wide spectrum of view,” Cruz said. “We have a very narrow majority in the Senate…. If three Republicans vote no, we’re done.”
Parties must ‘come together’
Meanwhile, Bozell and other conservatives have rallied around one key demand Cruz has made of Republican leaders: allow companies that meet all of Obamacare’s minimum insurance requirements to sell additional plans with less coverage at lower cost.
Cruz argues it would satisfy his top health care priority: lower premiums.
Democrats argue that such a system would destabilize the markets and undermine the current mandates for minimum protection. They also say that the sort of bare-bones policies that sell with low premiums also come with skimpy coverage, high deductibles and large out-of-pocket costs that many struggling families could not afford — with or without tax credits.
While Cruz’s “freedom option” is reportedly under discussion among GOP leaders, it has not received much public traction, infuriating his conservative base.
“That the current GOP leadership is finding reasons to oppose Senator Cruz’s amendment tells you how far that leadership is away from full repeal,” said Texas Public Policy Foundation Director Chip Roy, the senator’s former chief of staff. “And how much that leadership is bending to the will of the moderates in the Senate.”
But Cruz sounded a note of optimism on striking a deal that can unify Republicans in the coming weeks, if not days. In a new era of Republican control, he suggested, the bywords might be practicality and compromise. Neither is a virtue of Cruz, his critics contend, but the senator is willing to try.
“I believe we can do that,” Cruz said, “but it’s going to take everyone being willing to give and come together behind shared principles.”