A moderate House Republican said it was “just another day in the office” when he was told by President Trump he was killing the party by not supporting the GOP plan to eliminate Obamacare.
Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Ohio, said on CNN that too many concessions were given to the House Freedom Caucus, a conservative group of lawmakers, that pushed moderates away from the legislation. That was a failed effort because those conservative lawmakers would never vote for the bill anyway, Dent said.
It’s a sign that not much has changed in the House under Speaker Paul Ryan from John Boehner’s time in the role.
“The very issues that drove John Boehner from the speaker’s job, the underlying dynamics, are still an issue today,” he said.
Dent said healthcare reform should still happen, but it can’t be done in the way Republican leadership tried to pass the American Health Care Act.
Instead, Democrats need to be brought into the process and a real effort at bipartisanship must be made, Dent said. If House Republicans try to do things on their own again, the reform effort will die in the Senate because at least eight Democrats will need to side with Republicans in order to do anything.
If Republicans don’t loop in the minority party, then they’ll end up failing as a governing party, he said.
“If we can’t get the fundamentals, the basics, then we can’t do things like healthcare and tax reform,” he said. “We need actual sustainable, but durable, reform.”
