House Republicans struggled Tuesday to revive legislation to repeal Obamacare but were no closer to bridging the intraparty differences that killed the initiative just days earlier.
The American Health Care Act collapsed Friday when House GOP factions and President Trump failed to reach a deal — and Republicans conceded that nothing had materially changed since then.
But, stung by charges that they are incapable of governing and broke their campaign promise to repeal former President Barack Obama’s health care law, Republicans resolved to give it another try.
“It’s too soon to be extremely optimistic, but it is [also] too soon to suggest that it’s time to put a fork in it and say it’s done,” Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., chairman of the Freedom Caucus, the group of conservative insurgents that helped sink the AHCA, told reporters.
Informal conversations were set to resume to see if a compromise could be reached that satisfied the competing concerns of the Freedom Caucus insurgents, and moderates that coalesce as the Tuesday Group.
The two sides clashed, with Freedom Caucus conservatives demanding a repeal bill that aggressively dismantled the Affordable Care Act regulatory regime and moderates insisting that Americans who obtained coverage guarantees and insurance through the law’s Medicaid expansion not lose benefits.
House Republican leadership and the White House, both of which sought to resolve the three-week debate over the AHCA, offered no timeline or parameters for these fresh talks. Many Republicans were dismissive.
They view factional policy differences — a chasm that even Trump couldn’t bridge — as intractable. Others fingered the Freedom Caucus as unwilling to compromise, and untrustworthy in negotiations.
“I’m hearing some rumors that there’s an effort by the ‘no caucus’ to come up with a path, but I’ll believe it when it happens,” Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., said.
It might not matter in any event. Senate Republicans have little appetite for AHCA.
The original plan, developed jointly by Republican leaders in the House and Senate, was for the House to pass the bill on Friday and for the Senate to consider it this week in a marathon debate known as a “vote-a-rama” that would allow for the consideration of the hundreds of amendments.
Now, after watching the breakdown in the House and seeing how poorly the bill was received by voters in public opinion polls, Senate Republicans are asking for a deliberative process. They want policy committees and stakeholder working groups to participate in the legislative process.
“That was a flawed process and it was it was unrealistic and never should have been proposed,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis.
Even if House Republicans have an unexpected breakthrough in the coming days and are able to pass the AHCA, the soonest Senate Republicans would process the bill is May. Senate Majority Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., encouraged House Republicans not to bother.
“I think where we are on Obamacare, regretfully — at the moment — is where the Democrats want us to be, which is the status quo,” McConnell told reporters during his weekly news conference.
Republicans — from the White House to House GOP leadership to factions of conservatives and centrists — agreed Tuesday that health care reform was too important to drop because of Friday’s debacle.
But beyond that, it was unclear that any of the major intraparty differences leading to the demise of their health care bill were in a better position to be resolved than they had been over the past three weeks.
Some Republicans blamed the death of the AHCA on miscommunication in the previous round of talks, and members aligned with competing factions pledged to listen to each other more.
Yet they were still dug in on policy, offered no indication that they saw a way out of the impasse, and they lacked an essential ingredient required to find a way to an deal: trust.
“If you have members of your own team who are unwilling to work with — whether it’s the other members of the team, the elected leadership of that team, and even the president of the United States that’s part of that team, if that remains that way, we’re in for some very difficult times,” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., said.
