Two more Republican Senators announced that they would oppose the latest attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare, killing the measure.
What about just trying to repeal Obamacare, which has been floated as plan B? Enough Republicans have said that they will oppose that too, so that proposal is dead in the water.
Republicans say that they want to do away with Obamacare. But they are unable to do anything about it, even though they control the House, the Senate, and the Presidency.
I suspect part of the problem is that the proposed replacements are not that different from Obamacare in the first place, so that Republicans don’t want to be blamed for the next unpopular health care plan.
But repealing the Affordable Care Act and going back to the way it was before is also going to be unpopular, since entitlement programs are almost impossible to take back once they are passed.
Then again, the Republican majority seems incapable of passing any substantive program. This is reportedly the least productive legislature in 164 years.
Why do you think the Republicans are having such trouble governing?
From Alan Fram and Erica Werner, Health care bill collapse leaves divided GOP at crossroads, Associated Press:
The implosion of the Senate Republican health care bill leaves a divided GOP with its flagship legislative priority in tatters and confronts a wounded President Donald Trump and congressional leaders with dicey decisions about addressing their perhaps unattainable seven-year-old promise of repealing President Barack Obama’s law.
Two GOP senators — Utah’s Mike Lee and Jerry Moran of Kansas — sealed the measure’s doom late Monday when each announced they would vote “no” in an initial, critical vote that had been expected as soon as next week. Their startling, tandem announcement meant that at least four of the 52 GOP senators were ready to block the measure — two more than Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had to spare in the face of a wall of Democratic opposition.
“Regretfully, it is now apparent that the effort to repeal and immediately replace the failure of Obamacare will not be successful,” McConnell said in a late evening statement that essentially waved a white flag.
It was the second stinging setback on the issue in three weeks for McConnell, whose reputation as a legislative mastermind has been marred as he’s failed to unite his chamber’s Republicans behind a health overhaul package that’s highlighted jagged divides between conservatives and moderates. In late June, he abandoned an initial package after he lacked enough GOP support to pass.
The episode has also been jarring for Trump, whose intermittent lobbying and nebulous, often contradictory descriptions of what he’s wanted have shown he has limited clout with senators. That despite a determination by Trump, McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to demonstrate that a GOP running the White House and Congress can govern effectively.
Photograph: Obama’s health care speech before joint session of Congress by Lawrence Jackson (whitehouse.gov) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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