Another day with the same big and frustrating story for the Trump administration: The effort to repeal and replace Obamacare is not going well. The House bill continues to lose supporters publicly, and not just from the far-right Freedom Caucus.
Florida moderate Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is the latest to say she will not vote for the bill, which is backed by House speaker Paul Ryan and President Trump, as written. It’s likely the less-than-stellar score of the American Health Care Act by the Congressional Budget Office (which has its own problems scoring things properly) has spooked plenty of Republicans of the Ros-Lehtinen variety. Perhaps so have reports that Trump is trying to attract conservatives by urging Ryan to move the bill rightward.
The point is that the AHCA looks further away from passage, not closer, since it was released more than a week ago. House leadership expects a floor vote on the bill sometime next week. But even if Ryan can push it through the House, the bill will still have to go through an extensive rewrite if it has a prayer to pass the Senate.
What Can Get Through?
To that end, members of the Republican Senate steering committee had a meeting at the White House Tuesday afternoon. The senators included Ted Cruz, James Lankford, Ben Sasse, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Ron Johnson, Luther Strange, Pat Toomey, and Jim Risch. They met with three members of the White House policy team—Rick Dearborn, Paul Winfree, and Andrew Bremberg—to discuss how the health care bill might get through the Senate.
“The senators in the meeting provided clarity to the White House about what can and cannot be done in reconciliation, including the fact that much of the House bill would never survive the Byrd Rule,” a senior senate aide who was at the meeting said.
The Byrd Rule refers to how the Senate parliamentarian determines what is considered “budget-related” to be passed in a simple majority during the reconciliation process.
CAFE Standards
President Trump travels to Detroit Wednesday for a listening session with auto executives followed by an address to workers. There, he will be announcing the administration will be pulling back from proposed Environmental Protection Agency emissions standards. The rule on corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards came as a surprise to automakers when it was announced in January. The car manufacturers had been assured earlier in the year that the EPA would follow through on its promise for a “midterm review” of the standards in 2018 before extending them through 2025.
But after the election and just before Trump was inaugurated, Obama EPA director Gina McCarthy announced the rule, which would affect new models from 2022 to 2025, anyway. McCarthy’s determination was that the previous CAFE standards adopted in 2012, which mandated new cars be engineered to reach 36 miles per gallon, should be continued.
But according to a senior Trump administration official, the January determination was not placed in the federal registry and so it is a “non-final” rule. The EPA will withdraw the rule and, in the administration’s explanation, allow the process to continue as planned.
A Personnel Fight at the National Security Council
President Trump’s new national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, has been rebuffed by Stephen Bannon and Jared Kushner over a personnel decision. Politico broke the story Tuesday night:
Song of the Day
“The Safe Café,” the Eagles.
