Early Tuesday afternoon, a senior GOP House aide mapped out a short path through the House for the American Health Care Act (legislation that repeals and replaces parts of Obamacare): Due to the snowstorm on the East Coast, the Budget committee hearing would be pushed back from Wednesday to Thursday. After it passes out of the Budget committee, where two bills that already passed Energy & Commerce and Ways & Means will be stitched together, the AHCA will make one final stop at the Rules committee “early next week” where it could get some final changes before it hits the House floor.
The aide said that a formal whip count hasn’t been conducted but was confident that as of Tuesday a majority of representatives still backed the bill “despite all of the really, really loud noise that they’re facing right now from conservative media and mainstream media.” “This is a plan that incorporated a lot of members’ priorities, so I think that’s why you’re seeing them stick together,” the aide told THE WEEKLY STANDARD. “Now will that shift in the next week? Maybe. I’m not predicting any vote count out of Budget, or Rules, or the floor.”
Ohio congressman Jim Jordan, a member of the House Freedom Caucus and one of the loudest opponents of the AHCA, painted a bleaker picture for the legislation. “The opposition is strong right now,” Jordan told TWS on Tuesday. “I think right now it doesn’t have the votes in either body.”
So will it pass the House or not? That remains unclear. Jordan too declined to share a whip count of where House Freedom Caucus members stand on the bill.
But later in the day on Tuesday, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a veteran GOP House member who represents a district that voted for Hillary Clinton, dealt a blow to the bill when she announced on Twitter that she wouldn’t vote for it. “I plan to vote NO on the current #AHCA bill. As written the plan leaves too many from my #SoFla district uninsured,” the Florida congresswoman tweeted. “As #AHCA stands, it will cut much needed help for #SoFla’s poor + elderly populations. Need a plan that will do more to protect them.”
Ros-Lehtinen’s announcement came within 24 hours of a CBO analysis that claimed 24 million fewer people would be insured under the GOP plan compared to Obamacare. Most of those people would choose not to purchase insurance in the absence of the individual mandate, but the CBO also found the GOP plan would make insurance cost-prohibitive for some lower-income Americans.
House GOP leaders can only lose 21 House Republicans and still pass the AHCA. And according to The Hill‘s whip count, there are now 13 “no” votes against the GOP bill, and and another 20 members who are “uncertain or unclear” about voting for the bill. Rep. Leonard Lance of New Jersey, one of The Hill‘s uncertain Republicans, told CNN on Tuesday: “I do not want to vote on a bill that has no chance of passing over in the Senate…. The CBO score has modified the dynamics.”
