USA TODAY International Edition
Tough road for Congress after health care failure
Republicans ponder what’s next as bill reveals rift in party
Repeal and replace: RIP.
A last-ditch proposal by Senate Republicans to unwind the Affordable Care Act collapsed Tuesday, leaving Obamacare’s critics nearly out of time to meet a procedural deadline this weekend and notably short on ideas for a consensus that could pass.
So after seven years of promising to expunge President Obama’s signature domestic initiative from the books — a commitment that helped the GOP take control first of the House and the Senate and finally of the White House — Republicans are left with hard choices about what to do now.
Republicans face the prospect of going into next year’s elections with Obamacare intact and the immigration law for “DREAMers” being negotiated between President Trump and Democratic lawmakers.
Republicans have roundly denounced the DACA program, an Obama initiative that provided some protection from deportation for young people brought illegally to the country as children.
They risk sufficient disenchantment by the GOP’s base voters that they would stay home from the polls next November, or perhaps embrace anti-establishment candidates urging them to throw the current bums out.
An early test: Tuesday’s special Senate election in Alabama. Sen. Luther Strange, the appointed incumbent backed by Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., trailed in final polls against provocative conservative challenger Roy Moore.
The one-two punch of setbacks on health care and the loss by Trump’s favored candidate in the Alabama Senate race would underscore questions about the president’s clout, the GOP’s unity and the prospects for the legislative agility needed to enact other initiatives coming down the pike, including a tax bill the president plans to pitch on Wednesday.
McConnell had planned to bring the bill, crafted by Sens. Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy, to the floor for a vote this week. But the bill did not have enough GOP votes to pass it, with Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, John McCain of Arizona, and Rand Paul of Kentucky all announcing their opposition.
With those defections, there was no apparent credible path toward delivering on the campaign promise that has long been shorthanded as “repeal and replace.”
After Saturday, the parliamentary maneuver that would allow approval with no Democratic votes is set to expire. Even some new legislative device that might bypass a Democratic filibuster would do nothing to address the fundamental disagreement within the GOP’s ranks about what ought to be done on health care proposals that are live-or-die issues for millions of Americans.
Trump famously noted to the nation’s governors in February that campaigning against Obamacare was easier than actually doing something about it in office. “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated,” he complained plaintively to them.
Of course, health care is notoriously complicated, not to mention politically dangerous. A vote along partisan lines by Democrats to enact the Affordable Care Act was a major factor behind the party’s loss of the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014.
For Republicans, similar perils loom in next year’s midterms.
The health care terrain has become more treacherous for Republicans by the impact of the Affordable Care Act.
One of Obamacare’s core principles — that the government is obligated to guarantee that individuals with pre-existing medical conditions are able to buy affordable health insurance — is now so widely accepted that Republicans were unable to unite behind any bill that failed to do that.
Democrats note that it took the prospect of Obamacare’s repeal to convince a majority of Americans they liked the law.
Trump sounded resigned to defeat. “We’re going to lose two or three votes,” he said on the Rick & Bubba” radio show, “and that’s the end of that.”
Because health care is complicated.