On Monday afternoon, President Donald Trump spoke at a White House event about American manufacturing. But he eventually wended his way to the pending health-care legislation in Congress. “I think we’re going to surprise a lot of people,” Trump said. “But they’re pushing very hard. The Republican senators are great people, but they have a lot of different states. Some states need this, some states need that, but we’re getting it together, and it’s going to happen.”
Trump turned behind him, where the vice president stood alone. “Right, Mike?” Trump said. “I think.” Mike Pence responded with an unconvincing round of applause.
There were plenty of other signs the Senate version of the Republican Obamacare repeal-and-replace legislation is doomed. The slim margin Republicans had to work with in a conference that runs from Susan Collins to Rand Paul was tricky enough. And the Senate’s procedural hurdles limited what Republicans alone could repeal. Then there’s the bill itself: A recent poll found just 17 percent of Americans supported the Better Care Reconciliation Act. Good luck trying to get politicians to vote for such an unpopular piece of legislation. The unwillingness of Senate Republican leadership to make a rhetorical case for free-market health-care reforms meant the GOP was ceding the argument from the get-go. And none of the conservative leaders in the Senate, like Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, or Ben Sasse, attempted to pen their own comprehensive health-care legislation.
But what has most frustrated Republican efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare has been the president himself.
President Trump has given no public speeches devoted to selling his health-care agenda. According to senators who have met with him over recent weeks and months, he has “little apparent understanding of the basic principles of the reforms and virtually no understanding of the details.” Trump’s efforts to twist arms and put pressure on lawmakers have been a day late and a dollar short. On Monday night a handful of Republican senators who were considered locks for supporting the BCRA dined with Trump at the White House—while Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas were announcing their opposition to the bill.
Trump has an able legislative affairs team, led by Pence and White House aide Marc Short. And perhaps in the same way the House version of Obamacare repeal was declared dead in March only to be revived and pass in May, Republicans could rewrite the bill to find consensus in the Senate conference. Pence and the legislative affairs team could redouble their efforts to find the votes, and some kind of Obamacare replacement could pass and get signed into law. Maybe.
But without a fully-conceived vision for health care and an interest in pushing hard for it, the president has left his party without the necessary leadership to pass a complex and difficult bit of legislation.
And tweets like this one late Monday night only underscore the problem.
Administration Certifies Iran Is Meeting the Terms of the Nuclear Deal
The State Department now confirms what THE WEEKLY STANDARD reported last week was likely to happen: The Trump administration has certified that Iran is complying with the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka the nuclear deal.
“I can confirm that the State Department has transmitted the letters signed by Secretary Tillerson to Congress,” says a State Department spokesperson. Here’s more on the decision from the Washington Post:
President Trump was displeased with the arguments, made primarily by Rex Tillerson at a meeting last Wednesday, that recertifying the deal was necessary to give the administration time to finish its new strategy on Iran without antagonizing our European allies, who are signatories to the deal. “If we just blow it up and everybody’s pissed off at us, then what are the chances we can go get better terms?” is how one administration aide characterized the argument.
Trump begrudgingly accepted recertification only after being reassured by Tillerson and others on Monday that the administration would pursue renegotiation—something the administration has already quietly started to plot out. Several European partners have told Trump administration officials in bilateral meetings that they are open to toughening the deal.
DHS Approves More Visas for Migrant Workers
The Department of Homeland Security announced Monday morning it would issue 15,000 additional H-2B temporary visas to migrant workers, arguing the move was necessary to save U.S. companies from “irreparable harm” due to a lack of available temporary American employees.
The annual cap for the H-2B program is 66,000 visas, a limit set by Congress. In May, however, Congress delegated to DHS its authority to temporarily increase the number of visas through September 30.
“Congress gave me the discretionary authority to provide temporary relief to American businesses at risk of significant harm due to a lack of available seasonal workers,” DHS secretary John Kelly said in a statement. “As a demonstration of the administration’s commitment to supporting American businesses, DHS is providing this one-time increase to the congressionally set annual cap.”
A senior DHS official told reporters Monday the policy would not have an adverse effect on American workers, who are apparently uninterested in the jobs the H-2B visas are intended to fill.
“Again, we’re talking about American businesses that are at risk of suffering irreparable harm, so we do think that fits into the America First focus of the administration,” the official said. “We’re asking these businesses to attest that if they do not get additional workers, they will be harmed. So this does help with American businesses continuing to prosper.”
Labor unions have often spoken out against expanding the H-2B program. In a June 23 open letter, the AFL-CIO called H-2B “a broken guestworker program that lacks adequate labor and wage protections for U.S. workers (both native and immigrant workers) and guestworkers alike.”
Michelle Mittelstadt of the Migration Policy Institute told THE WEEKLY STANDARD that the 15,000 visas is less than the number of additional visas the administration could have issued.
Mittelstadt said the law “could have allowed the administration to add as many as 89,000 visas to the annual allotment of 66,000, as the peak between capped and exempt visas has been estimated to have reached around 155,000.”
“As it can take employers anywhere from several weeks to several months to secure an H-2B visa and there are just two and a half months left in the fiscal year, it’s unclear which employers are most likely to benefit,” Mittelstadt added. “Applying for an H-2B visa is a complicated process.”
The DHS official said that the rule change came late in the fiscal year as a result of the lateness of the omnibus bill that authorized the change. For an extra fee of $1,225, the DHS can give an application “premium processing,” adjudicating the application within 15 calendar days rather than the ordinary window of one to two months.
“I really think that in this situation premium processing would probably be the best way to go,” the official said.
