Senate Republicans are moving swiftly to partially repeal Obamacare, driven by political pressure from an impatient conservative base that is outweighing concerns about transparency and process.
“We’ve been discussing this for months and months and months,” Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, said. “We’ve got lots of information and the Leader’s in charge of putting a ribbon around the whole thing and bringing it together.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is expected to unveil a draft of the Senate bill on Thursday, after spending weeks in secret writing an alternative to the House-passed legislation — a process that has excluded most Republicans.
Amid some complaining, they’re largely supportive of McConnell’s approach.
Republicans have endured heavy criticism at home for dragging their feet on Obamacare repeal. Conceding that rushed, opaque legislating isn’t ideal, they’re anxious to quell voter unrest and deliver on a major campaign promise.
“There’s a time sensitivity to it,” Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., said. “There’s a balance between sitting here and debating this for another six months and getting every little detail worked out, versus trying to get something now to stabilize the market.”
House Republicans moved their bill, the American Health Care Act, through multiple policy committees, under regular order, then requested a score from the Congressional Budget Office.
The open negotiations offered opponents and skeptics ample opportunity to pick the AHCA apart, and they did. A combination of GOP infighting, media exposes and Democratic attacks nearly derailed the bill.
McConnell, determined to avoid similar problems, moved the writing of the Senate bill into his office, involving only the chairmen whose committees would have had jurisdiction under regular order that could have run through the end of the year.
Others were consulted only on a need-to-know basis, regarding specific parts of the package of concern to the states they represent. McConnell made another key decision in the hopes of smoothing passage of the Senate bill.
Rather than send the completed product to the CBO, he had Congress’ nonpartisan legislative analyst score components of the bill throughout the drafting, so that problematic results could be dealt with and surprises could be minimized.
Senate Republicans hope to pass their bill by the end of next week, and say the speed at which the healthcare system under the Affordable Care Act is collapsing justifies their accelerated timetable.
On Wednesday, Anthem announced it was exiting the Obamacare marketplaces in Indiana and Wisconsin, just the latest in a string of pullouts by insurers that is leaving Americans in the lurch.
But Democrats are crying hypocrisy, and so are some Republicans.
They say that McConnell is doing the same thing he accused Democrats and President Barack Obama of doing in 2009 and 2010: jamming through a major healthcare overhaul that Americans don’t understand because if they did, they would surely oppose it.
McConnell leveled the charge during the Obamacare debate even though it took more than a year and included multiple House and Senate committee hearings and months of ultimately failed negotiations by a bipartisan group of senators known as the “gang of six.”
Senate Budget Chairman Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., who was a member of the gang of six, told the Washington Examiner that Republicans are simply being more honest about their intentions than were Obama and the Democrats eight years ago. Then, Enzi said, Democrats led Republicans to believe they wanted to compromise, but never had any intention of doing so.
Republicans have no such illusions about Democrats participating in the dismantling of Obama’s signature legislative achievement, a beloved accomplishment on the Left. Plus, Enzi said, running the Senate GOP bill through committee would probably ensure that its passage is delayed until 2018, a timeline most Republicans would find unacceptable.
“We’re not trying to give the impression that we’re going to listen to them. They never listened to us,” said Enzi, who as chairman is a part of the inner circle that had already seen the draft, about which 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.'”
Enzi might have been referring to Heritage Action for America, which has panned McConnell for how he handled the development of the Senate bill.
“Conservatives are rightly frustrated with the process of repealing and replacing Obamacare that has played out this year. It is clear that significant portions of the Republican Party have no intention of actually repealing Obamacare despite campaigning on that objective for years,” Heritage Action CEO Michael A. Needham said in a statement.
It remains unclear that McConnell will be able to line up the votes for the Senate bill, which is being run under reconciliation rules to sidestep a Democratic filibuster. Still, with Democrats likely to be unanimously opposed, he can afford to lose only two votes.
The final CBO score, to come as early as Friday, could be a factor. Under reconciliation, there is a “vote-a-rama” during which senators from both parties are allowed to offer hundreds of amendments to the bill.
