Rep. Peter Roskam explains how the failure of Obamacare repeal made tax reform possible

“The tax debate was completely formed by the failure of healthcare,” Roskam said in a Wednesday editorial board meeting with the Washington Examiner. “Said another way, it was the suffering that came about as a result of the healthcare failure that really shaped the tax debate.”

Roskam, who played a large role in crafting the tax reform bill, came to this realization during a retreat House Republicans referred to as “tax camp” last fall.

“This meeting was entirely different in terms of its tone and its disposition,” Roskam remembered, “and it was a real foreshadowing to me that we were onto something in terms of developing a consensus.”

“People came to the microphones, and their comments were honest critiques. It was fair criticism; it was ‘Have you looked at this? Have you considered that?’ It was the type of constructive criticism that makes a bill better,” the congressman reflected.

Roskam characterized the “subtext” members were communicating with their questions at the meeting as, “I’m going to vote for this bill. I need you to make this the best bill possible, but I’m going to vote for it.”

Rather than dwelling on internal differences, it was the party’s “forward leaning” approach to the tax reform bill that brought it across the finish line, according to Roskam.

“You can imagine the bill could have just been nickled and dimed to death by any member. I mean you can find things to criticize — it’s too this, it’s too that, and so forth,” conceded Roskam. “You can imagine any number of the coalition partners coming together and saying, ‘Oh, you know, not good enough on this, not good enough on that.'”

But that didn’t happen.

“Instead, people were very forward leaning, and had we done that work on healthcare, done that vetting work in the same way we had done a lot of this work on tax policy over the years, I think we would be in a better position,” said Roskam.

Asked directly whether the tax bill would have passed without the healthcare failure, Roskam hesitated.

“The healthcare failure was formative,” he said. “Maybe another pathway would have been created, but that failure was really formative for House Republicans that I was interacting with, who realized they had to get this done.”

Did that urgency stem from a sense of desperation to score a major legislative accomplishment before the end of the year?

“I wouldn’t characterize it as desperation,” Roskam said. “I would characterize it as learning from a failure.”