Senate heads toward health-bill showdown
WASHINGTON — Senate Republican leaders, trying to keep alive their flagging effort to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, are barreling toward a showdown vote Tuesday to begin debate on repealing the health law, but senators have yet to be told precisely what legislation they will even be debating.
Apparently short of votes even to begin that process, President Donald Trump ratcheted up pressure for Republican senators to get on board, criticizing them for inaction and warning that they risked betraying seven years worth of promises to gut the health law and revamp it if they did not.
“Remember ‘repeal and replace,’ ‘repeal and replace’ — they kept saying it over and over again,” Trump said at the White House, flanked by people he said had been victims of
what he called the “disaster known as Obamacare.”
“Every Republican running for office promised immediate relief from this disastrous law, but so far, Senate Republicans have not done their job in ending the Obamacare nightmare,” the president added.
The remarks from Trump, who has been largely absent from the policy debate, had the ring of a threat by a president who has grown frustrated watching Republicans repeatedly try and fail to reach consensus on his promise to immediately roll back the health law and enact a better system. He said their constituents would exact a price for inaction — “you’ll see that at the voter booth, believe me” — and hinted that any Republican who did not support the bid to open debate on an as-yet-determined health bill would be painted as complicit in preserving a health law passed on the basis of “a big, fat, ugly lie.”
“For Senate Republicans, this is their chance to keep their promise,” Trump said, repeating the “repeal-and-replace” mantra on which they campaigned. “There’s been enough talk and no action; now is the time for action.”
After nearly seven months of planning, debating and legislating, much of it behind closed doors, the Senate this week has apparently reached the moment when votes will have to be cast. The fight on the Senate floor will unfold in stages.
First, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, is expected to move ahead with a procedural vote Tuesday to take up the health care bill that narrowly passed the House in May. If that vote is approved, the Senate would begin debating a bill to repeal and replace President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement, but nobody expects that measure to reach a final vote.
Instead, if McConnell can muster 50 votes to begin debate on the House bill, he could quickly move to replace it with an entirely new bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act without a replacement. If that amendment vote fails, as expected, he could move to replace the bill that was passed in the House with a health bill that has been worked out in closed-door negotiations between Republican senators.
None of that would happen if senators vote against the motion to proceed, and at the moment, McConnell still appears short of the votes. He can afford to lose only two Senate Republicans, or only one if Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who announced last week that he has brain cancer, is absent. However, McCain indicated late Monday that he would be able to return to the Senate for Tuesday’s vote.
Sen. Susan Collins, RMaine, appears all but certain to vote no on the procedural vote, regardless of what legislation McConnell promises to put before the chamber if the initial hurdle can be cleared.
At least two other Republicans, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, have indicated they will not vote to proceed if Senate leaders plan to then put forth a bill that would repeal the health law without providing a replacement.
Republican leaders are pressuring their members to go along at least with the procedural step, to bring them closer to delivering on their longtime promise of repealing the Affordable Care Act, which was adopted without any Republican votes.
“It’s hard to believe somebody who has run and won election could go home and face the voters again and say, ‘I’m not even willing to debate it on the floor,’” Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, a member of the Republican leadership, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday