USA TODAY International Edition
RYAN SLOWS DOWN ON REPEALING OBAMACARE
House speaker says GOP has ‘ a couple of months at least’ to find unity
A new push to pass GOP legislation that would repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act will take months, not days, House Speaker Paul Ryan indicated Wednesday as the latest talks among Republicans produced no apparent breakthrough.
“We’ve got a couple months at least,” the Wisconsin Republican said in an interview Wednesday with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which is part of the USA TODAY Network.
“We’ve gotten pretty far in coming together,” he said, “but I also think we’re not there yet — because the stakes are so high, and people are just having to get used to” being the governing party.
Ryan defended his stewardship on the issue and what he portrayed as a leadership style of “nudging” his colleagues, not bullying them. “Leadership can’t be autocratic. I’ve watched that. It doesn’t work,” Ryan said. “I’m not an arm- breaker.”
Though discussions between Vice President Pence and House Republicans briefly stirred talk of legislative movement this week, Ryan played down the notion of quick action, saying members were “shopping concepts to each other.” The House will begin a two- week recess next week.
At a forum Wednesday hosted by the website Wis Politics. com, Ryan said of a bill, “We can keep working this for weeks now.”
GOP leaders expressed far more urgency when they scrambled unsuccessfully for votes last month. In the end, Ryan was unable to generate enough Republican support for the bill to pass, so he called off a vote planned for March 24.
Ryan said he had “built cushions into our schedule” to accommodate delays or setbacks.
“The president wanted us to get
it going ... we wanted to meet that aggressive timetable. But we’ve always had more time, and we’re now using that,” he said.
Polls suggest the health care defeat has left Ryan’s public standing in shaky condition.
In a national survey by Quinnipiac University released Monday, the speaker was viewed favorably by 28% of voters and unfavorably by 52%. Twenty- one percent approved of the job Republicans are doing in Congress, and 70% disapproved.
In an earlier poll by Quinnipiac, the GOP health care bill Ryan pushed drew only 17% support.
“I’ve long believed we have to do very difficult and challenging things to get this country back on track, and the process of doing this may not be popular at the moment,” Ryan said.
Ryan said making such significant changes isn’t easy.
“It’s very disruptive,” he said. “It’s high stakes, and of course, it’s controversial. ... I am unconcerned about popularity and polling when I’m focused on advancing our principles and policies that we believe are necessary to get the country back on track.”
As difficult issues such as a tax overhaul loom, Ryan said one takeaway from the failure to find consensus among different GOP factions on health care is that “we have to talk things out much, much, much more thoroughly.”
He said it was his job to get GOP conservatives and moderates to understand each other’s districts and points of view and “make some concessions to one another in order to govern.”
The bill collapsed in part because moderate Republicans could not accept changes offered by the White House to lure the support of members of the House Freedom Caucus, the most conservative GOP faction in the House of Representatives.
Pence convened talks among the Republican factions to look for agreement on how to revise and resurrect the bill, but those talks never resulted in a new draft.
Ryan rejected the idea that there is no fundamental consensus within the GOP on how to replace Obamacare.
He sought to put a positive spin on last month’s defeat, saying that bringing the health care debate to the cusp of a floor vote clarified where things stood within the Republican caucus.
Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows, R- N. C., said he’d like revised legislation to come up for a vote before the two- week House recess.
But Meadows said that if the timeline is extended, that could allow for an entirely new proposal to be formed.
“Obviously, if we’re talking about months, not days, then perhaps it opens up a whole lot of other things to discuss that might make the final negotiations a lot easier than where we’ve been,” Meadows said Wednesday.
Ryan appears to be willing to spend the time such discussions might take.
“It’s not the Tom DeLay system around here,” he said referring to the former House majority leader from Texas, whose forceful leadership style earned him the nickname The Hammer. “I believe in persuading instead of intimidating.”
“I am unconcerned about popularity and polling when I’m focused on advancing our principles and policies that we believe are necessary to get the country back on track.” House Speaker Paul Ryan