Trump
blames Democrats for stunning failure to repeal Obamacare
Weeks
of negotiations over American Health Care Act fail to build a GOP
consensus, forcing president to pull legislation from House vote
Ben Jacobs and David
Smith in Washington
Saturday 25 March
2017 01.36 GMT First published on Friday 24 March 2017 19.41 GMT
Donald Trump
suffered a major legislative reversal on Friday as Republicans were
forced to pull their repeal of the Affordable Care Act from the House
floor.
After weeks of
contentious negotiations over the American Health Care Act (AHCA),
Republicans had to admit defeat as they could not gain sufficient
support from their own side for the plan to overhaul US health
insurance.
Speaking afterward
in the Oval Office, Trump blamed Democrats for the failure of a bill
to repeal the signature achievement of Barack Obama. “If
[Democrats] got together with us, and got us a real healthcare bill,
I’d be totally OK with that. The losers are Nancy Pelosi and Chuck
Schumer, because they own Obamacare. They 100% own it,” he said.
Trump refused to
bash the House speaker, Paul Ryan, but declined to answer a question
about policy changes he would like to see in health reform. Instead,
he said he was ready to move on to tax reform, saying: “We’re
probably going to start going very strongly on big tax cuts. Tax
reform that will be next.”
He added: “We all
learned a lot. We learned a lot about loyalty.”
Earlier on Friday,
as it became clear that Republican resistance to the bill was
hardening, Ryan went to the White House to tell Trump in person that
he did not have the votes to pass the bill.
The White House
press secretary, Sean Spicer, had insisted the vote would go ahead at
3.30pm ET. “Has the team put everything out there, have we left
everything on the field? Absolutely,” he told reporters at his
daily briefing. “But at the end of the day this isn’t a
dictatorship and we’ve got to expect members to ultimately vote how
they will according to what they think.”
President ‘pulled
out every stop’ to pass healthcare bill, Spicer says
However, Spicer’s
imagined 3.30pm deadline slid by, ignored by Republicans on Capitol
Hill, and the first reports emerged that Trump had asked for the vote
to be pulled. Minutes later House Republicans, short of votes, had
withdrawn the health bill.
At a press
conference soon afterward, Ryan admitted: “Moving from an
opposition party to a governing party comes with growing pains and,
well, we’re feeling those growing pains today. I will not sugarcoat
this: this is a disappointing day for us.”
He said “doing big
things is hard” and conceded that after almost a decade of saying
no to everything in opposition, the Republicans had failed to come
together and agree on something they have opposed for seven years.
“We are going to be living with Obamacare for the foreseeable
future,” he said.
Ryan said he had
recommended the bill be pulled when he realized the votes were
lacking. But he praised Trump’s role in the negotiations, adding:
“The president gave his all in this effort; he’s really been
fantastic. Still, we’ve got to do better and we will.”
Asked how Republican
members could now go back to their constituents having failed to keep
their promise, Ryan replied: “That’s a really good question. I
wish I had a better answer for you.”
Separately, a
Washington Post reporter described a call with Trump in which he said
the bill would not return any time soon.
Ryan also conceded
that Republicans would now move on to other priorities – securing
the border, rebuilding the military and tax reform. “Now we’re
going on to move on with the rest of our agenda because we have big,
ambitious plans to improve people’s lives in this country.”
Although speculation
had grown on Friday afternoon that the bill would be pulled, the
announcement came as a surprise to Republican members.
An emergency meeting
of the House Republican Caucus was called shortly before the
scheduled vote. As it was announced, the House went to recess, with
Democrats shouting in a taunting manner, “Vote, vote, vote”,
daring Republicans to bring the bill up. They did not.
In a short meeting,
Ryan announced that the bill was being pulled from the floor in a
terse statement to members.
Many moderates in
swing districts were wary of supporting the legislation, which
included major cuts to Medicaid and was estimated by the non-partisan
Congressional Budget Office to lead to 24 million fewer Americans
having health insurance over the next 10 years.
Conservatives also
objected to the legislation for keeping too much of the architecture
of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), frequently referred to as
Obamacare. Although the Republican leadership made a major concession
to them on Thursday by removing the federal mandate that health
insurance plans cover “essential health benefits” such as
maternity care and mental healthcare, this was not enough to win them
over.
As the Nevada
Republican Mark Amodei put it, the GOP caucus “didn’t spend a lot
talking about a unified Republican vision for what we should do with
healthcare in the House”. Paul Gosar, a member of the hard-right
Freedom Caucus, which was instrumental in this setback, pointed a
finger at White House staff.
The result is a
major political blow to Paul Ryan, a healthcare policy specialist who
led the effort in pushing the AHCA. It also leaves Trump in a
vulnerable position. The president ran on a platform of repealing the
“disaster” of Obamacare and replacing it with “something
terrific”. However, Trump, author of the Art of the Deal, failed to
accomplish that goal in his first major attempt to negotiate on
Capitol Hill.
Nancy Pelosi, the
House minority leader, called Friday “a great day for our country”,
adding: “What happened on the floor was a victory for the American
people.”
The Senate
Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, said in a statement: “Ultimately,
the Trumpcare bill failed because of two traits that have plagued the
Trump presidency since he took office: incompetence and broken
promises. In my life, I have never seen an administration as
incompetent as the one occupying the White House today.
“They can’t
write policy that actually makes sense, they can’t implement the
policies they do manage to write, they can’t get their stories
straight, and today we’ve learned that they can’t close a deal,
and they can’t count votes.
“So much for The
Art of the Deal.”
Members of the
Republican caucus took different lessons from the failure to even
bring the AHCA to the vote.
Louie Gohmert of
Texas, an arch-conservative who was opposed to the bill, pointed
fingers at House leadership, which he implied had left both rank and
file and Trump boxed in with no alternative.
“The president
didn’t really get involved until after they created this bill and
he was fighting for it,” Gohmert said.
Bradley Byrne, a
loyal Republican from southern Alabama, expressed his readiness to
still vote for the AHCA after it was pulled. He mourned the fact that
House Republicans fell just short, in his opinion. “There were 200
plus ... ready to do whatever it takes and ... with that group of
people we can do a lot,” said Byrne. He didn’t blame anyone for
the setback, praising both Ryan and Trump, who he described as doing
a “great job”.
Republicans wondered
whether this doomed any hope of healthcare reform. Gohmert seemed to
sympathize with Trump’s desire to move on to tax reform, adding:
“If I were president, I wouldn’t deal with healthcare any more,
but as a legislator it is a problem and we should pick it back up and
do it right.”
Speaking before the
bill was pulled, the North Carolina congressman Mark Walker, chair of
the Republican Study Committee, told reporters: “I can’t pretend
that this is a win for us. I’m sure our friends on the left, this
is a good moment for them. In fact, probably that champagne that
wasn’t popped back in November may be utilized this evening.”
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