More than one month ago, House Majority Whip Steve Scalise predicted his colleagues in the Senate would find themselves in the very predicament that’s imperiling their healthcare legislation right now, struggling to build a bill that bridges the gap between conservative and centrist Republicans.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner on May 24, Scalise, who is currently recovering from gunshot wounds sustained during the shooting at a congressional baseball practice earlier this month, predicted Senate leadership would “grapple with the same issues” that plagued the House’s reform efforts.
“Now, all along the way, I heard all these brilliant ideas from my colleagues in the Senate,” Scalise said. “And I wish them well when they say that they’re going to start over” from the bill the House passed. “What I would predict is that they’re going to grapple with the same issues we did, and probably end up in a very similar place.”
“Obviously, you cannot do full repeal of Obamacare without a 60 vote bill in the Senate,” Scalise said, “but you can surely gut the law and give people true healthcare freedom with 51 votes in the Senate.”
In one key exchange, the Louisiana Republican looked back on the challenges that lead to a vote on the first draft of the House bill being pulled at the last minute, detailing how leadership handled the tedious task of creating legislation that maintains enough support from both ends of his party’s philosophical spectrum to pass.
Here’s what Scalise told us at the time:
We went through a lot of back and forth with the Senate to find out the limits of reconciliation, and they’re not definitively known in the House because we cannot directly ask the Senate Parliamentarian. That’s the ultimate arbiter of what is and isn’t allowed in a reconciliation bill. So we had some parameters, but we also had internally different factions within our conference that wanted to go further and didn’t want to go that far. And so the challenge that I had was making sure that anything we did to the base of the bill didn’t lose us more votes, only gained us more votes.
We literally got in a spot in the last few weeks where we can’t lose a single person; we need to literally gain people, including some people that were vocally no votes, and we did that. Again, when the Senate— they’ve started this process already. McConnell had already put together a working group and that group has expanded over the last few weeks. But I’ve talked to a number of senators. I talked to Cornyn, my counterpart, the Senate Whip, but also a lot of senators who have been a part of this from all of their different factions. And, interestingly, they’re realizing a lot of the same challenges we did.
Though he expected his counterparts in the Senate to face the same hurdles that initially derailed the House bill, Scalise was not at all pessimistic about passing reform. “As long as they focus on lower premiums, putting patients back in charge of their healthcare decisions and protecting people with preexisting conditions … I think they can do it, and hopefully before the August recess,” he said. “But the most important thing is to get the policy right and to pass the bill that achieves those goals.”
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
