If Trump was hoping to at least vote on Obamacare repeal before his first 100 days are up, he was up for more disappointment.
Late on Thursday night, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy confirmed that, as expected, the GOP leadership would not bring up a revised ObamaCare repeal bill to the floor this week, after it became clear Thursday night that the 216 GOP votes needed to pass the healthcare bill had not materialized. At least 21 Republicans had come out against the bill, with many more undecided. Leaders can only afford 22 GOP defections.
After a two-hour meeting in Speaker Paul Ryan office in the Capitol, McCarthy told reporters that the GOP had again failed to whip enough support for the bill: “we are not voting on healthcare tomorrow or Sunday.”
He promptly then downplayed the adverse healthcare development, saying leaders had been discussing the short-term stopgap funding bill to avert a government shutdown. “We’ve been making great progress, and when we have the votes we’ll vote on it.”
Just not yet.
So yes, another embarrassing failure for the President and House speaker. But what makes this one unique is that as Bloomberg notes, House republicans appear to be getting wise to the Senate’s trickery:
Several moderate Republicans are visibly frustrated about the renewed push to pass the bill after leaders made changes aimed at winning over conservatives.
“We’ve been through this before,” Republican Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania said Thursday. “The business model around here is to load the bill up, make it as conservative as possible, send it to the Senate and have the Senate clean it up and send it back, and the very people who are placated on the first launch won’t be there on the final. And that dog ain’t hunting anymore.”
Meanwhile, the House is expected to pass a one-week continuing resolution (CR) on Friday, buying bipartisan negotiators more time to pass a bill to fund the government for the rest of the 2017 fiscal year. If for whatever reason it fails, the government will be shut as of midnight tonight.
via http://ift.tt/2oSc0oI Tyler Durden