Biden, Pelosi Invent Nonexistent GOP Plan to Repeal Obamacare to Rally Base Ahead of Midterms

President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have glommed onto a fake claim by the Washington Post that Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has some secret plan to repeal Obamacare if the Republicans win back control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections.

In a statement on the 12-year anniversary of Obamacare’s passage on Wednesday, the Democrat president explicitly stated—without mentioning Johnson by name—that “just this year, a Republican senator shared his plan to repeal the ACA (Affordable Care Act), with no real plan to replace it”:

"Just this year, a Republican senator shared his plan to repeal the ACA."

In his statement on the anniversary, Biden makes an implicit reference towards @SenRonJohnson's recent comments in support of trying again to repeal the law when Republicans return to power. pic.twitter.com/tbd9xO8s5l

— bryan metzger (@metzgov) March 23, 2022

Similarly, Pelosi on Tuesday shared the Washington Post article in question claiming that “Republicans happily admit that they want to hike costs, terminate protections & endanger more than 130 million Americans’ health care”:

Democrats are fighting to #ProtectOurCare, working to strengthen the ACA & extend coverage to more Americans.

Meanwhile, Republicans happily admit that they want to hike costs, terminate protections & endanger more than 130 million Americans’ health care.https://t.co/ifZZ0p1BGS

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) March 22, 2022

The Washington Post article is based on a Breitbart News Daily interview with Johnson, a GOP senator up for reelection in the battleground state of Wisconsin. To regain the U.S. Senate majority, Republicans need to gain a net one seat in November—and to do that, they need to hold this Wisconsin seat.

On March 7, the Washington Post’s Amy Wang wrote a piece under this headline: “Sen. Ron Johnson says Obamacare should be repealed if GOP wins power back.”

Like the headline, in the article, Wang mischaracterizes Johnson’s comments during his Breitbart News interview to write that Johnson has a plan to repeal Obamacare—which is not what he said. The article from Wang begins as such:

Sen. Ron Johnson said he wants to see the GOP repeal the Affordable Care Act if his party wins the White House and the House and Senate majorities in 2024, a move that would resurrect a fight that Republicans had waged for nearly a decade, then largely abandoned in 2018.

In an interview that aired Monday morning on Breitbart News Radio, Johnson (R-Wis.) said the GOP’s main goal was to obstruct President Biden and Democrats’ agenda until, he hoped, Republicans could win the majorities in the House and Senate in the midterm elections this year. If Republicans also won the White House in 2024, he added, that would be when they could “actually make good on what we established as our priorities.”

“For example, if we’re going to repeal and replace Obamacare — I still think we need to fix our health-care system — we need to have the plan ahead of time so that once we get in office, we can implement it immediately, not knock around like we did last time and fail,” Johnson said, referring to the signature legislation passed under President Barack Obama.

To claim he is pushing a plan to repeal Obamacare after the midterms is a blatantly false mischaracterization of what Johnson was saying during the Breitbart News interview—and every honest broker in politics knows it. What Johnson was saying during the interview—which focused more broadly on the efforts by Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) to introduce an agenda that Scott had just rolled, a plan to “rescue” America—was that if Republicans are going to attempt any big-picture legislative goals in a new majority next year, they need to begin planning now so they do not screw it up like they did when they screwed up repealing Obamacare at the beginning of President Donald Trump’s administration.

There is no doubt that the GOP blew it when Trump came to power with a GOP House and Senate, spending most of the first year trying to repeal Obamacare—and ultimately failing in the Senate. There is also no doubt that this came after years of Republicans promising to do this, and ultimately, it was because of a lack of a serious plan or thought-through course of action.

Johnson is 100 percent correct to note this, and the point he was making in the interview was that Republicans need to be better prepared next time for whatever the major issues are that they intend to tackle. Nonetheless, many throughout establishment media—particularly the Post’s Wang, but others also—and many top Democrats such as Pelosi and Biden, in particular, have deliberately mischaracterized what the senator was saying in what appears to be an effort to create a campaign wedge issue to drive out Democrat turnout in what is shaping up to be a red wave year.

Johnson, for his part, even issued a statement making all of this clear, that he and Republicans do not have some secretive nonexistent plan to repeal Obamacare, but that he was explaining the GOP needs to be better prepared for this issue when they get the majorities back.

Johnson said in the follow-up statement:

Since President Biden was inaugurated, Democrats have pursued an agenda that has only weakened America through rampant inflation, rising crime, open borders, and a higher cost of living for all Americans. Senator Rick Scott put forward his proposal that opposes reckless federal spending and intrusive government overreach and supports conservative goals like local control of education, election integrity, religious liberty, and an improved health care system. I think it’s important for elected officials to tell their constituents what they are for, and I support Senator Scott for doing so.

He went on to state:

During a radio interview I used our failure to repeal and replace Obamacare as an example of how we need to be prepared to deliver on whatever agenda items we decide to run on. I was not suggesting repealing and replacing Obamacare should be one of those priorities. Even when we tried and failed, I consistently said our effort should focus on repairing the damage done by Obamacare and transitioning to a health system that works. I reiterated the necessity to fix our healthcare system in that interview and COVID-19 has exacerbated these failures. We have all seen disastrous results of President Biden’s policies which include his pointless and divisive vaccine mandates, forced firings that caused worker shortages, and the lasting damage to our healthcare system and nation.

Today’s false attacks against me are just more desperate attempts by President Biden, Speaker Pelosi and their allies in the media to distract from the failures of their governance. As usual, they are falsely claiming I made statements I didn’t make and the liberal media are dishonestly reporting their false claims. It’s hard to keep track of all of their lies. I intend to focus on issues that most people are concerned about and will continue to expose the failures of Democratic governance and the harm they are causing Wisconsinites.

Not shockingly, that has not stopped some dishonest brokers in media—and, more importantly, top Democrats in office—from continuing to misrepresent the senator’s comments to try to change the subject to health care off of Biden failures. A Johnson aide even told Breitbart News that the Post refused to change the false article and headline after publication, despite a series of phone calls and emails with the newspaper’s staff.

It should come, then, as no surprise that Democrats, to stem the tide of a brewing red wave heading into the midterms, would invent an imaginary nonexistent plan to repeal Obamacare from a senator who has no such plans devised—probably because every other issue shows Democrats and Biden, in particular, polling net negatively. From Biden’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic to what he has done to damage the economy to how he shut down American energy production to the wide-open border and more, Biden’s issue set is a complete disaster—and Democrats are desperate to change the subject to something far less damaging for their political prospects in the midterms.

That is partially why Democrats have leaned into the whole Ukraine war: they saw initial neutrality in polling when Russia’s Vladimir Putin invaded, but that seems to be fading now as voters disapprove more and more of Biden’s handling of that—and why they are now dishonestly changing the subject to the healthcare issue again. Look for more and more of this type of behavior from Democrats as the year goes on, too, a virulent effort to use the bully pulpit of the presidency and their weak majorities in Congress to force the conversation onto issues they think will help them—or at least not hurt them—politically in the November elections.