Congressional conservatives who oppose the Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare as originally written hope to make history.
More often than not, when the president and party leadership really needs a bill, they get it. The right number of votes comes in at the last minute.
The American Health Care Act, the plan backed by President Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., is such a bill. Both think the Republican Party will suffer if it isn’t passed in some form.
Conservatives appeared to have defeated the Wall Street bailout in 2008, when it failed to win a majority in the House the first time around. It passed on a second vote and President George W. Bush signed it into law just a few days later.
House Republicans held the vote open for three hours as then-Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican nicknamed “The Hammer,” rammed through a massive deficit-financed Medicare prescription drug benefit over conservative objections.
President George H.W. Bush quelled a conservative rebellion to strike a deal with congressional Democrats that violated his “read my lips” pledge on tax increases in 1990. Two years later, he was defeated by Bill Clinton.
The House Freedom Caucus and their Senate allies are seeking a different outcome: they want to reshape the American Health Care Act and put full Obamacare repeal on Trump’s desk, even if there aren’t many precedents on their side.
These conservatives have been looking to strike a deal with a president who bills himself a consummate deal-maker since the beginning of this process. As Democratic leaders negotiated with their party’s moderates to pass Obamacare, they wanted Republican leaders to negotiate with their party’s conservatives.
Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., the group’s chairman, has repeatedly said that he wants to get to “yes” on the healthcare bill.
Heritage Action CEO Mike Needham has long cited the 2003 fight over the Medicare prescription drug benefit as a reason for conservatives to hold firm against a president many of them like over a bill they dislike.
Needham argued in an op-ed Wednesday that conservatives who voted against Medicare Part D weren’t marginalized, despite threats from the party establishment. In some cases, they actually thrived politically.
“Four of them — Jim DeMint, Jeff Flake, Jerry Moran, Pat Toomey — would later be elected to the United States Senate,” he wrote. “Twelve would serve at least three more House terms. Standing up to party leadership wasn’t fatal, and in many instances, these members were rewarded by voters for standing on principle.”
The biggest example: Vice President Mike Pence, then a Republican congressman from Indiana who became a conservative hero by voting against the bill and resisting other Bush-era big-government initiatives.
“House conservatives faced a difficult choice: oppose the president we love, or support the expansion of the big government we hate,” Pence later told the Conservative Political Action Conference.
Participating in conservative rebellions has helped make careers before. It is hard to imagine Newt Gingrich leapfrogging veteran House Republican Leader Bob Michel and eventually becoming the speaker of the House if he hadn’t led the fight against the Bush tax increase.
Several of the Republicans elected in the Tea Party wave election of 2010 won their primaries by using opponents’ votes for the Wall Street bailout against them.
Nevertheless, while the rebels succeeded personally their rebellions failed. And there are other ways to build a political career.
Paul Ryan is a policy entrepreneur who came out of the conservative movement, working for Jack Kemp’s think tank. He has championed entitlement reform and right-sizing the American welfare state to fit a tax burden more conducive to growth.
Ryan has also climbed the political ladder in a more traditional way than Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and others who have become famous for bucking the party leadership. Ryan voted for the Medicare prescription drug benefit, the first in a litany of offenses often recounted by his conservative critics.
Those Ryan detractors have often been criticized themselves. Other Republicans believe they vote “no” on bills to maintain their image of purity but hope “yes” will prevail. If Obamacare is never repealed or replaced, GOP fingers will point at these conservatives.
It’s a fight to possibly implement a new vision of healthcare reform. But it is also an old battle between conservative insurgents and Republican institutionalists, once again playing out on the biggest stage.
A conservative victory in this struggle might be the newest development of all.
