Several Republican senators have begun questioning whether they can support the Senate GOP leadership healthcare bill, unveiled on Thursday, illustrating the difficult dance ahead for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
It’s a tightrope walk similar to, but much more precarious, than the one House Speaker Paul Ryan—a much less experienced navigator in the ways of Washington than McConnell—found himself in just a couple months ago. Ryan had to pull his American Health Care Act (AHCA) a couple times under fierce opposition and did not even finish getting the bill through the House of Representatives in the end. Ryan had to dump the bill, and it was an effort independent of his office—led by House Freedom Caucus chairman Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) and now former Tuesday Group co-chair Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-NJ)—that got the bill across the finish line.
Meadows’ conservatives and MacArthur’s moderates, while Ryan was in Europe and Hollywood enjoying the high life, took it upon themselves to outside the purview of House leadership re-negotiate where Ryan failed and get the AHCA across the finish line to final passage in the House. Republicans in the House had lots of room for failure, though: with a more-than-20-seat majority, Ryan could afford to lose somewhere in the low twenties of House Republicans on his healthcare bill and still pass it without Democrat support.
McConnell now faces a similar but more hurdle-filled battle, but can afford to lose only two Senate Republicans and still pass his healthcare bill through the Senate via reconciliation—and have Vice President Mike Pence on standby to be the tie-breaking vote.
McConnell, who has proven much more adept than Ryan at maneuvering his chamber and his conference, has an opportunity moving forward to not cause problems for himself—if he handles this healthcare mess with precision. The biggest problems Ryan had stemmed from his centralization of the process in the Speaker’s office. When the bill was eventually fixed and passed—after Ryan failed and walked away taking off to Europe and Hollywood—it was a decentralization out from the speaker’s office to the members that got it done. Meadows and MacArthur had the football, not Ryan. It remains to be seen if McConnell will hand the football to members like Rand Paul or Ted Cruz or Lisa Murkowski or Susan Collins, but if he tries to rig the bill for passage from the Majority Leader’s office it may blow up in his face just like it blew up in Ryan’s.
Working in McConnell’s favor right now is the same thing that worked in Ryan’s favor—an opportunity Ryan missed during the House process—which is that President Trump’s first comments on the legislation were in both cases that it was a “negotiation.”
“Obamacare is dead and we’re putting a plan out today that is going to be negotiated,” Trump said on Thursday of the Senate bill.
In the House, Ryan tried to ramrod it through all the committees and the floor without input from his members—and he failed on the floor. In the Senate, McConnell may well try to handle more adeptly—or he might not—and the future of the American healthcare system hangs in the balance why McConnell plays his most important game yet.
Many Republican senators are beginning to announce varying levels of opposition to the bill. There is expected to be enough GOP senators to kill the bill if it gets no Democrat support—three—who formally announce opposition to the bill on Thursday.
Ironically, it was Ryan who started Thursday with a news conference of his own in which he urged Senate Republicans—and McConnell—to pass the bill McConnell’s team just introduced.
“I think the bottom line is: I want them to pass the bill, so we can all get on with keeping our promise,” Ryan told reporters, while also adding that he does not want to get in the Senate’s way of doing business.
But the best place McConnell can probably look for guidance is to look at Ryan’s history of failure to pass major legislation like healthcare, and try to avoid the same pitfalls as his much weaker counterpart on the other side of Capitol Hill.
It all started back on March 7, when Ryan introduced the AHCA—and Republicans in the House Freedom Caucus introduced two GOP alternatives to the original Ryan plan. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the original chairman of the Freedom Caucus who has since handed the reins to current chair Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), rolled out a reintroduction of the full Obamacare repeal from 2015 that passed Congress. In addition, a replacement bill from Rep. Mark Sanford (R-SC) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) was introduced too.
Within hours, and in the coming days, conservative organizations from across the grassroots movement panned the bill. Everyone from CATO to Heritage Action to FreedomWorks, the Club For Growth, Americans for Limited Government, Tea Party Patriots and more came out against the bill. The AARP and American Medical Association, interest groups on healthcare matters, panned the bill too.
The House bill came under withering scrutiny, too, from people inside the Republican Party. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) led the charge from the U.S. Senate against the first version of the legislation, flanked by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Mike Lee (R-UT), Tom Cotton (R-AR), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Susan Collins (R-ME) and many more GOP senators.
Meanwhile, enough House Republicans to crush the bill’s chances started trickling out against it since Ryan did not do enough to bring in member voices from across the conference.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), an ally of the president and his agenda in the U.S. Senate, clearly stated in an interview with Breitbart News just two days after Ryan introduced the bill that it would not pass the House of Representatives.
“I would encourage my old friends in the House to slow down and fix the many problems in this bill before they vote on it. If they do that, it can pass and it can pass with a big majority,” Cotton said on March 9. “And I think that’d be good for the American people. But if they move forward with the legislation that was introduced Monday, I have real doubts about whether it can pass the House of Representatives and there’s no need for that to happen because we are relatively close to the right kind of reform that’s better for the American people. It’s better to spend a few weeks getting that right than moving it fast.”
Ryan did not listen, and kept steering the president more in favor of the bill. As Sen. Paul told Breitbart News back in March, it appears as though Ryan was misleading President Trump.
“I don’t think it makes any sense and I think he’s trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the president,” Paul said in an interview published on March 8. “I think when I’ve spoken with president Trump, I think he agrees with me that we should repeal and replace but I don’t think he’s stuck on that they have to be in the same bill necessarily. Paul Ryan, I think, is selling it to the White House and telling the White House, ‘Oh, it’s a piece of cake, it’s a done deal.’ And I don’t think that’s an accurate depiction of things.”
That all happened as audio of when Speaker Ryan abandoned now President Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign when the Access Hollywood video came out in the Washington Post, and made it clear he thought it was acceptable for other House Republicans to do the same.
“I am not going to defend Donald Trump—not now, not in the future,” Ryan said on a conference call with House Republican members in October, just a month before the American people decided whether Trump or Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton would be their next president of the United States.
Trump’s popularity in Ryan’s own district in Wisconsin—a state that Trump won without help from Ryan on the campaign trail, flipping it away from the Democrats for the first time in decades—has eclipsed Ryan’s drooping numbers. And now Ryan has drawn another primary challenge from businessman Paul Nehlen, who came up short in his last bid against Ryan, while also coming under fire from even one of his own on-again-off-again consultants Frank Luntz. Luntz, as Breitbart News has reported, said during a recent appearance on CBS This Morning on CBS News about a focus group he conducted of Trump supporters that he believes Ryan to be in serious political trouble. Luntz said he thinks Ryan is in as bad shape as his predecessor former Speaker John Boehner was two years ago, when he was forced to resign in disgrace after his own party’s members revolted against him in the House of Representatives threatening to force a public vote on his speakership. McConnell can avoid such a similar fate if he plays smart in the next few weeks.
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