Sen. Mike Enzi said on Wednesday Republicans aren’t listening to Democrats in their quest to partially appeal to Obamacare, since Democrats didn’t listen the first time around.
“We’re not trying to give the impression that we’re going to listen to them. They never listened to us,” he told the Washington Examiner.
In his position as Budget Committee chairman, the Wyoming Republican has been among the few senators working with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on the chamber’s version of the healthcare overhaul passed by Republicans in the House last month. But Enzi is unique: Eight years ago, he was one of three Republican senators involved in bipartisan negotiations on the proposal that ultimately became Obamacare.
Those talks ended without compromise, leading to President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act clearing both chambers without any Republican votes.
But unlike the Senate GOP package that McConnell is to unveil Thursday, Obamacare was subject to the “gang of six” attempt at dealmaking, plus multiple committee hearings in the House and Senate, after which Republicans still complained that the bill was a jammed-through, backroom deal.
“I remember the last meeting that the gang of six had, it followed the night before, where during prime time, President Obama gave a speech on what was going to be in Obamacare and I kept a list of the things that he promised and the next day I brought those up and said: ‘We don’t have this in there, and this in there and this in there.’ I brought up six different things and they said, ‘we’re not going to talk about those,’ and that ended the gang of six — and they didn’t wind up in the bill.”
Enzi explained how going through the process using reconciliation is faster than standard committee markups.
“The Democrats have promised they’re going to slow everything down and you can see that in the nomination process,” he said. “And, if [the Senate healthcare bill] were to go through committees, some of us are on all of the pertinent committees, so [the bill markups] would have to be done separately, so that we could vote in each of the committees, and I don’t know that it could be completed this year.
“The reconciliation process is an open amendment process, there’s a vote-a-rama involved. So, anybody that wants to put forward an amendment can put forward an amendment. So, they’ll all have the opportunity, they just won’t have the opportunity multiple times with the same amendment.”
Enzi said that he’s been “working with the pieces” of the Senate GOP proposal throughout the whole process in his capacity as Budget Committee chairman, and said he was optimistic that it would be well-received despite concerns on the Right that it would leave too much of Obamacare in place, and concerns from centrist Republicans that it would repeal too much of current law.
“We have to make sure that it’s in budget language in order to meet reconciliation [rules],” he said. “I think there will be a lot of agreement on it, there will be some questions because it is a very difficult thing with a lot of moving pieces. But I also think you’re going to see a lot of outside groups that are going to say, yes, they got it. With something this big you are never done with it. They call that comprehensive — there’s no way to cover in one bill everything that needs to be one, particularly if it’s under reconciliation. But hopefully [Democrats] will join us on making some other corrections that need to be done, a step at a time, until we do get it right.”
