On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” columnist Charles Krauthammer criticized the failure of Republicans to pass Obamacare repeal and placed part of the blame on a lack of presidential leadership and nearly unbridgeable divides between Republican moderates and conservatives in both houses.
Krauthammer said, “This is an epic fail. This is historic. This is seven years of arguing gone down the drain, and I think they’re at the end of the road, at least in this phase on Obamacare.”
He added, “The idea that they’re going to get a repeal bill, standing alone, when repeal and replace was meant to mitigate the effects of repeal is ridiculous. It is not going to pass. they know it’s not going to pass. it’s a bluff.”
Krauthammer concluded, “There are three reasons why this went down. The first is that once you give an entitlement, which is what Obamacare did, you almost never can retrieve it and abandon it. The second is, there was no presidential leadership. You want to do something on this scale, you have to do — and here, we were critical of Obama, but he gave at least 32 national addresses. … Did anybody make the case for what was in this bill in the Senate other than it was a promise? And the last is, that it shows a divide between the moderates and the conservatives in the Republican causes in both houses is almost unbridgeable, and there’s no room to adjudicate the split. The moderates are afraid of the curtailment of Medicaid and the conservatives are the ones who wanted the curtail of Medicaid as an entitlement out of control. You put all of those together and you get an epic fail.”
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