Health bill’s failure puts GOP’s agenda in question
Infighting suggests party may struggle to get other priorities accomplished
“We were a 10- year opposition party, where being against things was easy to do.” House Speaker Paul Ryan, R- Wis.
Republicans suffered a bruising, self- inflicted blow Friday when they tanked their own health care bill and gave up on that long- held priority.
The question now is whether the GOP can recover and accomplish other items on the congressional agenda — whether it’s passing spending bills to keep the government open or enacting sweeping tax reform.
“They lost their first major legislative fight and did it in spectacular fashion,” said David Cohen, a political science professor at the University of Akron.
That does not bode well, Cohen said, because “so much of politics is built on momentum,” with success begetting more success — or failure leading to more defections and distrust.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R- Wis., painted a rosy picture of the GOP’s next steps Friday, even while admitting that the failure to pass the health care bill was a setback. He said the party would move on to tax reform, deficit reduction, rebuilding the military, securing the border and boosting infrastructure spending.
Ryan and others said tax reform and other issues would be easier because there’s more agreement within the party on how to proceed.
“Republicans are moving full speed ahead with President Trump on the first pro- growth tax reform in a generation,” said Rep. Kevin Brady, R- Texas, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which will oversee that effort.
But the divisions that sank the health bill are still raw, with Republicans engaged in a round of intraparty recriminations and finger- pointing.
Rep. Chris Collins, R- N. Y., said tensions inside the House Republican conference are so high that some lawmakers aren’t speaking to each other, and some are even “storming past each other” in the Capitol hallways.
And there’s a reason Republicans tackled health care first. They were rolling that into a budget “reconciliation” bill, a special framework that is not subject to a filibuster. Anything else the Republicans do will have to win 60 votes in the Senate, where Republicans control 52 seats. And the budget bill would set a framework for other tax and spending matters, which affect everything else the GOP does.
Asked earlier in the week what would happen if the health bill failed, Rep. Tom Cole, R- Okla, said: “I think you have to go back to square one and rethink your entire legislative schedule.”
Ryan conceded that tax reform is more difficult with Obamacare left in place because that law included tax increases the GOP had hoped to repeal.
“That just means the Obamacare taxes stick with Obamacare,” Ryan said. “We’re going to go fix the rest of the tax code.”
He also admitted that Republicans would have to do a little soul- searching to figure out what went wrong in the heath care debate and repair frayed relations.
“We will need time to reflect on how we got to his moment,” he told reporters Friday. “We were a 10- year opposition party, where being against things was easy to do.” Now, he said, the party is undergoing “growing pains” as it adjusts to controlling all levers of government.
Political analyst Stuart Rothenberg called it “quite an admission” for Ryan to acknowledge the GOP is not yet a “governing party.”
“What an embarrassment. What else can you say?” Rothenberg tweeted. “They promised. They voted to repeal — until they were in charge.”
Cohen, the political scientist, said Republicans should move now to infrastructure spending, where they could attract Democratic support and build some bipartisan rapport.
“You could probably get ( an infrastructure bill) through the House and the Senate and put some points on the board and show that you can govern,” he said. Tax reform is more complicated, he said, and it could expose the same rifts that caused the health care bill to collapse.
Top congressional Democrats chastised Republicans for being in disarray and gave little indication they would come to the table on other issues.
Some suggested they could work with the GOP on smaller pieces of the health care puzzle. At the top of their list is lowering prescription drug costs, an issue Trump has also expressed an interest in addressing.
But that’s not a major priority for Republicans in Congress. And their appetite to revisit anything related to health care may be greatly diminished after Friday’s painful episode.