Republicans should have no trouble repealing the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. They can invoke the procedure known as reconciliation, which means only 51 votes in the Senate will be needed to kill the unpopular health insurance plan. Since there will be 52 Republicans in the new Senate in 2017 and a Republican in the White House, repeal is a safe bet.
As for Obamacare itself, Republicans won’t waste their time negotiating over saving any of it. Senate Democrats want to keep the entire program alive by tinkering with its parts and bailing it out with billions in new funding. Forget that. Republicans are committed to a total replacement that emphasizes free-market incentives and patient choice. Both of those features are anathema to Democrats.
But Senate passage of a replacement is far from assured. It will take a second vote in which reconciliation will not apply. With Democrats all but certain to stage a filibuster, Republicans will need 60 votes to enact an alternate health plan. Assuming all 52 Republicans vote for it, they will still need 8 Democrats.
And that’s where President Trump comes in. Passing an Obamacare replacement is likely to require the use of the bully pulpit by Trump. And not because he’s a bully. The bully pulpit was President Teddy Roosevelt’s name for exploiting the White House as a platform to advocate a proposal or an agenda or simply making a large point.
Trump is well equipped to use his new platform. His 17-month campaign consisted mostly of speeches at rallies—as many as six a day in the final weeks of the presidential race. While he did poorly in three debates with Hillary Clinton, the speeches in which he exhorted large crowds to vote for him were effective. They were Trump the candidate at his best.
His bully pulpit style will be different from those of other presidents. President Reagan relied on persuasion. In two nationally televised speeches in 1981, he motivated millions of Americans to urge their representatives in Washington to back his spending reductions and tax cuts.
President Obama tends to lecture. He didn’t need the bully pulpit in his first two years because Democrats had large majorities in the Senate and House. Later, when he exhorted the country to support gun control, he failed. His approval rating dipped, and gun control went nowhere.
Trump is neither a persuader nor a lecturer. He is a salesman. At rallies, his speeches were like sales pitches for real estate. They were filled with exaggerations and superlatives about himself and his chief issues, illegal immigration and the defects of trade treaties. But he won the argument on those issues and propelled himself to the White House.
The bully pulpit offers many options for exerting political pressure and selling his agenda. Like Reagan, he can address the nation on TV. He can speak in the home states of Democratic senators. He can invite them to the White House and pressure them in person. He can tweet his message with the expectation his followers will retweet it.
He will have an advantage in selling a new health insurance plan: It’s bound to be an improvement over Obamacare and more popular as well. Obamacare was put together, hastily and sloppily, in secret in the office of then-Senate majority leader Harry Reid in late 2009. Republicans were offered no role, much less any concessions or compromises. Democrats took sole ownership of Obamacare and still have it.
Trump’s initial targets are the five Democratic senators up for reelection in 2018 in states he won easily (by 19 percentage points or more): Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Jon Tester of Montana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
Four other Democratic senators face reelection in states Trump won by small margins. Republicans believe they can beat Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin in 2018 but doubt she will abandon Obamacare. Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, who got special treatment for aging Floridians in exchange for his vote for Obamacare, will face a strong challenge if Republican governor Rick Scott decides to run against him. (He must be rooting for Scott to get a cabinet post in the Trump administration.) Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania are tougher targets.
Even without Trump’s intervention, these senators should have figured out that Obamacare is ruinous for their party and a gift to Republicans. It was chiefly responsible for the landslide in 2010 that turned the House over to Republicans. And it was an effective GOP issue in 2014 when Republicans won nine Democratic seats and control of the Senate. It worked again this year for Trump.
Ward Baker, who runs the GOP’s Senate campaign committee, says Democrats in Trump states “should be terrified.” The mere threat of losing in 2018 may prompt vulnerable Democrats to back at least some of the Republican agenda. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell told reporters that Democrats from Republican states are “going to want to be cooperative with us on a variety of different things.”
Obamacare is first on the list. After its removal, Republicans intend to move quickly on border security, tax reform, and regulatory relief. Trump will have to use the bully pulpit to win on those issues too.
It will be harder to win across the board than Trump suspects. Democrats may be unhappy, but Minority Leader Chuck Schumer will try to enforce as much party discipline as possible. He will encourage filibusters.
“I think they’ll unite in opposition to things we support and side with him on things we don’t,” a Republican official says. “So Trump may end up attacking us as much as them.” But using the bully pulpit against his own party—President Trump would never do that, would he? ¨
Fred Barnes is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.
