Nine months after seizing the Senate majority, Republicans in Congress are finally ready to try ditching President Obama’s healthcare law by using a special legislative procedure.
Obama could find a bill repealing major parts of his signature Affordable Care Act on his desk this month, once Congress approves the legislation using what is known as budget reconciliation rules. Three House panels have approved their pieces of the bill, and the House Budget Committee is slated to consider the legislation next week.
The strategy won’t ultimately work, as Obama is certain to veto the bill. But it will be the furthest Republicans have ever gotten in their five-year quest to get rid of the sweeping legislation and will be the first time the president is forced to veto a bill bludgeoning his healthcare law.
“This bill is our best shot at getting it to the president’s desk,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan said this week. “We can finally confront the president with the reality confronting working families every single day. We would take this debate out of the realm of the abstraction.”
All year, Republicans had been discussing using the budget reconciliation strategy, which requires just 51 votes to pass the Senate instead of the typical 60, an option that suddenly opened up to them after they won Senate majority in the last election. But things kept getting in the way of moving forward with the plan, aides and lobbyists say.
“I wouldn’t say they’ve ‘waited,’ but rather that they’ve spent more of the year trying to get to this point,” said David Schnittger, who served as House Speaker John Boehner’s deputy chief of staff until January.
First, Congress had to pass a budget resolution with instructions for reconciliation, which lawmakers did in April. Then, their efforts were put on hold as Republicans awaited the Supreme Court’s King v. Burwell ruling in June.
When the justices upheld a big part of the law providing insurance subsidies to low-income Americans, GOP leaders were forced to re-assess their Obamacare strategy, since they had hoped the ruling would put a big dent in the law they so despise.
For a time, persistent divisions among Republicans made it appear less likely Congress would end up using reconciliation rules after all, and leading senators downplayed the possibility.
Then everything was interrupted again in mid-July, when the first in a series of videos targeting Planned Parenthood was released, sparking a major government shutdown battle pushed by House conservatives who wanted to block the women’s health and abortion provider from receiving federal funds.
Congress left for a month-long recess in August. By the time they returned, more videos had been released, keeping all the focus on Planned Parenthood.
“The timing makes a lot of sense when you think not just about the overall timeframe for the calendar, but the major legislative and political events of this year,” a House Republican aide said.
Republican leaders didn’t want to force a government shutdown by insisting on defunding Planned Parenthood, and Boehner ultimately avoided that outcome by striking a funding deal with Democrats this week.
But that meant GOP leaders had to start over again convincing Republicans that trying instead to defund Planned Parenthood and simultaneously block the healthcare law through reconciliation was a good strategy.
“Congressional leaders had to devote most of August and September trying to educate members about why it made sense to use reconciliation to address the healthcare law and Planned Parenthood,” Schnittger said.
