Republican committee chairmen projected a sense of GOP unity on Friday after meeting with President Trump about the Obamacare replacement plan currently working its way through their committees.
“If you hear nothing else I say today, this is the most important one: there is so much more that unites Republicans than divides Republicans on this issue,” Rep. Kevin Brady, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said at the White House after the meeting.
“We’ll continue to listen, we’ll continue to make improvements where we can, but there’s no question that this is the bill, at the end of the day, that will come to the president’s desk,” Brady added.
Rep. Greg Walden, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said he was heartened to see the “unified votes” that advanced the Obamacare reform plan out of his committee and the House Ways and Means Committee.
Rep. Diane Black, chairman of the House Budget Committee, said Republicans will continue to back the healthcare legislation, which was introduced by House leadership on Monday. “We are unified in what will be coming out of bringing together those two bills,” Black said.
The budget committee next week will take up the bills that moved this week through the Ways and Means Committee and the Energy and Commerce Committee.
A number of conservative lawmakers have raised objections to the GOP plan, arguing it does not go far enough to repeal the Obamacare framework.
But Trump has encouraged Republicans to support the bill this week by inviting some of the legislation’s most vocal critics to meet with him privately at the White House. His outreach included a dinner Wednesday evening with Sen. Ted Cruz, who had said hours earlier that he did not believe the bill would survive in the Senate as written, and a bowling session on Thursday night with members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.
