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WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 26: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
walks to his office on July 26, 2017 in Washington, DC. The U.S. Senate will
continue debate on the Better Care Reconciliation Act. (Photo by Justin
Sullivan/Getty Images)
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Republicans Got Good At Symbolic Repeals Of Obamacare, But Flinched When
Faced With Reality
Ryan Grim
July 28 2017, 4:14 a.m.
Before the Affordable Care Act had even been signed into law, congressional
Republicans were promising to repeal it. Those solemn vows continued
throughout the 2010 midterms, helping Republicans take back the House in the
tea party wave.
They used that position of power to pass repeal after repeal after repeal -
and to point at the Democratic-controlled Senate as an obstacle to be
overcome.
In 2014 they finally took the upper chamber back. With unified control of
Congress, in 2015 they sent President Obama a full repeal of Obamacare. He
vetoed it. The message to activists was clear: Republicans needed to control
the White House, too.
In 2016, they took the White House. And then things got real.
With the prospect of repeal actually becoming law, the House blinked in
March, and Speaker Paul Ryan pulled his repeal-and-replace bill from the
House floor. As flawed as the Affordable Care Act was and is, repeal would
throw millions off of health insurance and drive up premiums. Republicans
had nothing better to replace it with, largely because the ACA was
originally a Heritage-devised concept to begin with. "Obamacare is the law
of the land," Ryan acknowledged.
Not so fast, said President Trump, never one to worry about real-world
consequences. Entirely divorced from the policy discussion, Trump looked
only at the politics of failure and recoiled. He piled on the House Freedom
Caucus, blaming them for a loss that had many fathers. And so the Freedom
Caucus said fine, we'll vote for something and send it to the Senate, where
it'll die.
The premise behind the renewed effort in the House to pass a bill was always
that: the Senate will fix whatever we do, so don't worry about the details
of what's in ours. For the House, it felt a bit like Obama was back in the
White House, with his veto pen the blankie that Republicans needed to take
legislative nap. As long as voting was a dream, it was doable.
In May, Republicans were bussed to the White House for a surreal display, a
celebration in the Rose Garden after repealing Obamacare in a single
chamber.
As the debate moved to the Senate, Trump began to get some whiff of what was
in the bill, and railed at it, accurately, as "mean."
But still he demanded a vote. The promises to lawmakers that they were not
really making law grew more explicit. Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell, R-Ky., promised moderates that Medicaid cuts they opposed would
never actually be implemented. Somehow, that wasn't enough, and Republicans
in the center and the right revolted, the final nails being driven in
simultaneously by Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas - with
Moran demanding the process start over and make sure to address pre-existing
conditions.
It had become blindingly clear by that point that Republicans were not
willing to vote for a repeal bill that could become law. Nevertheless, Trump
persisted.
The demands for a fantasy vote grew even more extreme. McConnell pushed his
colleagues to vote for something - anything - just to get the bill to a
conference committee, so that the two chambers could work something up and
bring it back for a vote.
So he held a vote to bring the bill to the floor, with assurances that both
of the party's major projects - repeal and repeal-and-replace - would fail
on the floor.
With a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Mike Pence, he succeeded,
winning a day of headlines about GOP momentum, even as the votes on repeal
themselves went down badly.
After dispatching with repeal and repeal-and-replace in not-close-votes, the
Senate moved on to "skinny repeal" - a repeal of just a wee bit of
Obamacare, just enough to get 50 votes and move to conference committee,
where, somehow, the fundamental dynamics that had blocked repeal would
somehow be overcome.
But wait, asked Senate Republicans, what if we pass something - and it
actually becomes law? It was too much to contemplate.
Sens. Lindsey Graham, Ron Johnson, John McCain and Bill Cassidy held a press
conference Thursday night in the Capitol demanding full assurance from the
House that the lower chamber would not, under any circumstances, take up the
bill they planned to pass and send it to the White House. If the Senate
could be assured it would go to conference committee instead, they promised,
then they would support it.
To be clear: they demanded a public promise that the bill they were voting
for would never become law in order to agree to vote for it.
The promise Ryan offered was less than a promise. "If moving forward
requires a conference committee, that is something the House is willing to
do," he offered in a late-night statement.
But he had a condition: the Senate needed to put up. Eventually. "We expect
the Senate to act first on whatever the conference committee produces," Ryan
insisted.
In other words, fine, vote for your sham bill. But when the conference
committee creates one more sham, y'all have to vote on it first, proving to
the American people - and, more importantly, to Trump - that it is the
Senate that doesn't have the votes. Never mind that the House didn't have
the votes, either, when they thought it was real.
McCain, who returned to the Senate after a brain-cancer diagnosis to cast
the dramatic vote McConnell needed to get the bill on the floor, put it as
well as anybody could. Just before the Senate took up the critical vote, he
told reporters, "Wait for the show."
McCain joined with Susan Collins an Lisa Murkowski to give the chamber just
enough votes to kill it, 51-49.
It was all a show.
