Republican loss on 'Trumpcare' can't be spun, and is now the opening for a civilized health system even for the United States of America...
Despite the feeble attempts by President Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan to spin the major defeat they have suffered in their inability to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act (also know as Obamacare) in a way the fight has just begun to get a civilized health care system in place for the majority of citizens and people in the United States. No sooner had Trumpcare lost on March 23, 2017, than the fight began for "single payer" health insurance -- or "Medicare for all" -- in the USA.
One of the many clear reports on the March 24 defeat came from the Daily Beast:
TRUMPFAIL, Republicans Pull the Plug on Trumpcare
GOP leadership and the White House were unable to convince conservatives to back its repeal-and-replace bill; and Trump’s first major legislative effort came tumbling down.
BY JACKIE KUCINICH, ASAWIN SUEBSAENG, AND ANDREW DESIDERIO Daily Beast, 03.24.17 3:45 PM ET
Facing certain defeat on their increasingly doomed health-care bill, Republican leaders chose to pull it from the floor Friday afternoon rather than watch it die on live television.
“We just pulled it,” President Donald Trump called to tell Washington Post reporter Robert Costa around 3:30 p.m. ET on Friday. “We had no votes from the Democrats,” Trump said later in remarks to press. “They weren’t going to give us a single vote so it’s a very difficult thing to do…I think what will happen is Obamacare, unfortunately, will explode. It’s going to have a bad year.”
Republicans never sought any Democratic votes, and Trump has previously floated the idea of trying to let the Affordable Care Act cave in on itself rather than repeal it this early in his presidency.
Just minutes after the bill was pulled, a somber-looking House Speaker Paul Ryan emerged at a hastily called news conference to lament the new GOP governing coalition’s "growing pains." He refused to “sugarcoat” his party's major legislative defeat, and acknowledge he could not reach a consensus with hardline conservative members of the House Freedom Caucus.
“I spoke to the president just a little while ago and I told him that the best thing I think to do is to pull this bill, and he agreed with that decision,” Ryan said at a press conference following the decision.
"Moving from an opposition party to a governing party comes with growing pains and, well, we're feeling those growing pains today," the speaker said. "This is a disappointing day for us. Doing big things is hard.”
He added, bluntly: "This is a setback—no two ways about it."
"We're going to be living with Obamacare for the foreseeable future," Ryan admitted, signaling a shift toward other items on the GOP's legislative agenda, including tax reform and border security.
A late Thursday rally — which brought White House advisers to the Hill to try to convince holdouts to back the American Health Care Act (AHCA) — gave Republicans some hope that they might be able to squeak by.
But that good will had faded as the sun rose over Capitol Hill, because apparently after a good night’s sleep those holdouts were still “no” votes.
At a vote on Friday morning, Majority Whip Steve Scalise moved around the House floor trying to stem the bleeding. From the seats above the House gallery, Scalise could be seen talking to “no”-leaners Rep. Warren Davidson, who holds Speaker John Boehner’s old House seat in Ohio, and New Jersey’s Chris Smith.
But as Scalise nodded and wrote down Smith’s comments, another member of the New Jersey delegation — House Appropriations Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen — announced his opposition. Hours after Scalise’s conversation with Davidson, his fellow Ohioan Rep. David Joyce announced his vote would be a no.
Meanwhile, House Freedom Caucus members seemed to dig in further. Upon hearing that White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon and President Trump were compiling a “shit list” of those who opposed the bill, an aide working for the hardline conservative caucus responded, “Meh.”
When asked by The Daily Beast if he was at all concerned about potentially making the White House “hit list” for his staunch opposition from the beginning to the American Health Care Act, Freedom Caucus member Rep. Justin Amash just smiled, laughed, and replied, “What do you think?”
"That champagne that wasn't popped [by Democrats] last November might be utilized [this week]," Republican congressman Mark Walker told reporters on Friday afternoon, roughly an hour before this week’s Trumpcare-Ryancare hard-sell finally imploded on itself.
Just before everything officially collapsed, The Daily Beast asked a House Republican aide about the current state of affairs on the AHCA. The aide messaged back, "I have a song to explain," and then sent along a YouTube link to a song by hip-hop artist T.I. titled, “Dead and Gone.”
Failure this week to even get a floor vote on Trump and Ryan’s repeal-and-replace effort belies Trump’s self-promoted reputation as a “closer” and as an expert dealmaker. The White House had been claiming for days that there would be a vote and that it would get done this week. The White House aggressively courted Freedom Caucus members in a bid for a deal that would pacify the caucus’s members.
All those plans, and pitches and concessions that came from the president himself, amounted to a setback at best, and humiliation at worst. Trump’s ultimatums and targeted threats didn’t move the needle enough in his direction, either.
“We’re taking [Trumpcare] down,” a House Freedom Caucus aide told The Daily Beast on Tuesday morning. Later that day, Congressman Rod Blum, a member of the Freedom Caucus, said that Ryan and co. simply “don’t have the votes,” and that he and other hardliners were playing a game of chicken with House GOP leadership.
“Let’s see who blinks first,” Blum said.
On Friday afternoon, the other guys blinked first.
Newsweek had fun noting that Trump's feeble attempts to spin this major defeat were not going anywhere:
OPINION... WHY TRUMP CAN'T SPIN HIS HEALTHCARE DEFEAT
BY MATTHEW COOPER, NEWSWEEK, ON 3/24/17 AT 6:29 PM
Don’t buy any of the president’s spin: Trumpcare's defeat is a huge blow to the White House. It doesn’t mean the Republicans can’t hold both chambers in next year’s midterm elections or that the president’s popularity will plummet. It does, however, mean his hyperbole about his negotiating and dealmaking—“you’re going to get so tired of winning’—will elicit many more sneers.
Healthcare was no mere item on the Republican agenda. It’s been the item at least since the passage of Obamacare in 2010 and the GOP triumph in the midterms later that year. For seven years Republicans have vowed to repeal it once they gained control of the House, Senate and White House. On Friday, they couldn’t even get it out of the House where the GOP has its largest majority since the 1920s.
Of course, repealing Obamacare was never going to be easy. But the House Republicans are less ideologically diverse than at anytime in more than a generation. It’s certainly more cohesive than when it was divided between Rockefeller and Goldwater wings. Now Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan have failed. To his credit, Ryan accepted responsibility. Trump oddly described the defeat as a good outcome that would lead to a much better bipartisan bill. He portrayed House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as the real losers. Ryan had the good sense not to go there.
About the only thing that can be said about Trump’s defeat is that he didn’t completely devolve into churlishness and crazed accusations — at least not against his own party. Speaking in the Oval Office, moments after the healthcare vote was canceled, Trump spoke kindly of Ryan and Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price calling them “amazing” and “fantastic.” He didn’t go negative on the super conservative Freedom Caucus that kept demanding more and more concessions. He kept his cool, which was both surprising and probably reassuring. We’ll see if it lasts.
Both Ryan and Trump have said that they want to press ahead with tax reform and put repealing Obamacare on the back burner for awhile. But tax reform is likely to be much, much harder. It’s been 31 years since Ronald Reagan signed a major bipartisan tax bill that repealed deductions and lowered rates. In the generation since then, loopholes have been added and interest groups stand ready to defend them. Try and roll back the carried interest deduction and a million lobbyists will bite you. The same goes for solar tax credits or depreciation allowances. Things aren’t about to get easier for the Trump administration. Quite the opposite.
Presidents usually learn from their mistakes.
Bill Clinton took the health care loss of 1994 and came back with an agenda that could pass.
George W. Bush had the good sense to pull his Social Security privatization scheme shortly after he unveiled it.
The best presidents are the ones who are constantly adapting and learning. We’re going to find out if Trump is able to grow in office. Can he do a better job wrangling interest groups? (Lots of the big medical groups like the AARP and the American Medical Association opposed the healthcare bill.) Can he build a coalition from the center instead of desperately trying to appease the far right? Infrastructure is high on the president’s list and Democrats have sounded some encouraging notes. If the builder can’t find a way to speed up government-sponsored construction of bridges and roads, then he’s really lost
