The speaker’s gavel hasn’t been much of a hammer for House Republican leaders. President Trump is.
The leadership has long been frustrated by a stubborn minority of insurgent conservatives. This group, impervious to pressure from Speaker Paul Ryan, and John Boehner before him, has blocked consensus legislation without consequence.
But House Republican leaders, laboring to pass the party’s proposal to repeal and replace Obamacare, are learning to utilize a new tool that is proving capable of intimidating conservative holdouts: Trump.
The president has a strong political connection to the Republican voters who live in the ruby red districts represented by conservative opponents of the American Health Care Act.
And Republican leaders believe that influence — and fear of challenging it — is helping to assemble the votes they need to pass the bill and succeeding where they otherwise would have fallen short.
That’s why, as a scheduled Thursday vote looms, House GOP leaders are retreating from the foreground, and subtly but unmistakably transferring ownership of their health care bill to the president.
“The success of the president will have everything to do with passage,” House Rules Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, said. “It’s critical, it’s essential; the president has his name on it — he’s touched it.”
Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, the group of insurgent conservatives driving the opposition to the AHCA, conceded in a brief interview that is harder for members of his group to say “no” to Trump than to Ryan. “Certainly, I want to get to ‘yes.’ I’m working to get to ‘yes.'”
The majority of House Republicans support the AHCA, though the whip count is still short of the 216 votes needed for passage. Democrats are expected to vote against the bill unanimously.
Republican members are optimistic that the AHCA will cross the finish line because they have confidence in Trump to close the deal with skeptical moderates and conservatives.
Faith in Trump’s unique ability to move intractable conservatives, in particular, from “no” to “yes” was behind the Republican leadership’s deliberate effort, accelerated at the end of last week, to elevate Trump’s public role in selling the health care bill.
From the AHCA’s introduction on March 6, Trump was active behind the scenes in trying to forge consensus, with Ryan and his leadership team handling the bulk of the marketing to Republican voters and conservative media.
On Friday, as negotiations with opponents bogged down, criticism from conservative outlets grew, and complaints about Trump’s low public profile bubbled up among nervous Republicans, leadership shifted their approach.
They began to refer to the president as “the closer” and described the choice ahead not just as whether they would fulfill or break their years-long promise to repeal Obamacare, but as victory or defeat for Trump and his (and their) entire agenda.
“That was always something that we planned on,” a senior Republican House aide said. “He’s going to close; that’s what he does.”
Trump still has work to do and was engaged in one-on-one meetings with Republican opponents of the bill late Tuesday, along with Vice President Mike Pence and other senior administration officials.
House Republican leaders, plus the majority of the conference that does support the AHCA, emerged from a closed-door session with Trump on Tuesday as confident as ever their health care proposal would pass.
That’s because, according to Republicans present for the meeting, the president made an aggressive pitch for the legislation and threatened members who oppose it with political retribution in 2018 — from the voters and from him.
