Trump, GOP leaders regroup on health bill
Bowing to disarray among their ranks, Senate Republicans delay vote until after Fourth recess
WASHINGTON — Facing intransigent Republican opposition, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, on Tuesday delayed a vote on legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act, dealing another setback to Republicans’ sevenyear effort to dismantle the health law and setting up a long, heated summer of health care battles.
McConnell faced resistance from across his conference, not only from the most moderate and conservative senators but from others, as well. Had he pressed forward this week, he almost surely would have lacked the votes even to begin debate on the bill.
“We will not be on the bill this week, but we’re still working toward getting at least 50 people in a comfortable place,” said McConnell, who is known as a canny strategist but was forced to acknowledge on Tuesday that he had more work to do.
The delay pushes Senate consideration of the bill until after a planned recess for the Fourth of July, but it does not guar-
antee that Republican senators will come together. Opponents of the bill, including patient advocacy groups and medical organizations, plan to lobby senators in their home states next week. Senators are likely to be dogged by demonstrators. Democrats vowed to keep up the pressure, and some Republican senators have suggested that their votes will be difficult to win.
After meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House, McConnell told reporters that if Republicans could not come to an agreement, they would be forced to negotiate a deal with Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader.
“The status quo is simply unsustainable,” McConnell said. “It’ll be dealt with in one of two ways: Either Republicans will agree and change the status quo, or the markets will continue to collapse, and we’ll have to sit down with Senator Schumer. And my suspicion is that any negotiation with the Democrats would include none of the reforms that we would like to make.”
Republicans have promised for seven years to repeal the health law, former President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement. But McConnell’s announcement on Tuesday was yet another major stumble in the unsteady quest by Republican congressional leaders to deliver a repeal bill to the desk of Trump, who has yet to sign his first piece of marquee legislation.
McConnell, the chief author of the Senate repeal bill, can afford to lose only two of the 52 Republican senators, but more than a half-dozen have, for widely divergent reasons, expressed deep reservations about the bill.
Trump, meeting with Republican senators at the White House, declared, “We’re getting very close.”
“This will be great if we get it done,” he said. “And if we don’t get it done, it’s just going to be something that we’re not going to like, and that’s OK, and I understand that very well.”
McConnell wrote his bill behind closed doors, betting he could fashion a product that would show significant improvement over the bill that was narrowly approved by the House last month. And he laid out an aggressive timeline for its passage, hoping to secure Senate approval roughly a week after unveiling the legislation.
Yet on Tuesday, just five days after releasing the bill, McConnell had to bow to reality: Republican senators were not ready to move ahead with the bill.
At least a small number might never be — raising questions about whether McConnell will be able to win over the votes for passage.
“It’s difficult for me to see how any tinkering is going to satisfy my fundamental and deep concerns about the impact of the bill,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who was among the lawmakers prepared to vote against taking up the bill this week.
McConnell and his leadership team are hoping to replicate the feat of Speaker Paul Ryan, who revived the House’s repeal bill and pushed it to passage six weeks after it appeared to be dead.
Democrats are unified against the repeal bill, but they were not celebrating on Tuesday.
“The mantra on our side is never to underestimate Mitch McConnell,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.
Schumer said: “We know the fight is not over. That is for sure.” Over the next few weeks, he said, McConnell “will try to use a slush fund to buy off Republicans, cut backroom deals, to try and get this thing done.”
At least four GOP senators — Collins, Dean Heller of Nevada, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky — had said they would vote against the motion to begin debate, enough to ensure it would fail. Other Republicans also appeared reluctant about moving forward.
After McConnell’s announcement, three other Republicans announced their opposition to the bill in its current form: Jerry Moran of Kansas, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Rob Portman of Ohio.
Capito and Portman expressed concern over how the bill would affect Medicaid and the opioid crisis, which has had devastating effects in their states.
The release of a Congressional Budget Office evaluation on Monday made it much more difficult for party leaders to win over hesitant Republican members. The budget office said the Senate bill would leave 22 million more people uninsured after 10 years, and many people buying insurance on the individual market would have skimpier coverage and higher out-of-pocket costs.