33 Republicans who would not budge from their decisions to vote “no” on the health care bill were key to causing its collapse. They can be divided into three broad categories:
15 Hard-liners
10 Moderates
8 Other Republicans
House Appropriations Chair Rodney Frelinghuysen Rebukes Speaker Paul Ryan: Obamacare 2.0 Is ‘Currently Unacceptable’
In a stunning rebuke to House Speaker Paul Ryan, House Appropriations Committee chairman Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ) announced his public opposition to Obamacare 2.0 on Friday morning.
.. The House Speaker almost never loses the Appropriations Chairman on major pieces of legislation. The fact Frelinghuysen is against the bill calls into question Ryan’s ability to lead the conference–including his own committee chairs–in the future on other pieces of legislation. It shows just how unpopular this legislation really is GOP-wide, and further demonstrates Ryan’s inability to bring together the different factions of the House Republican conference.
.. Now that Ryan has lost Frelinghuysen–the chairman of a powerful committee that controls government spending–it is highly unlikely Ryan will be able to deliver the votes on this. That means Ryan is delivering a loss to President Trump, after failing to control his members.
Report: Steve Bannon Says American Health Care Act ‘Written by the Insurance Industry’
White House chief strategist and former Breitbart News executive chairman Steve Bannon has privately expressed concern that the American Health Care Act (AHCA) betrays the populist voters who put Donald Trump in the White House.
And in the hall of mirrors that is Washington, the big winner to emerge out of the health-care debacle could be Steve Bannon. That’s because Bannon has been waging war against Ryan for years. For Bannon, Ryan is the embodiment of the “globalist-corporatist” Republican elite. A failed bill would be Bannon’s best chance yet to topple Ryan and advance his nationalist-populist economic agenda.
.. Bannon said that he’s unhappy with the Ryan bill because it “doesn’t drive down costs” and was “written by the insurance industry.” While the bill strips away many of Obamacare’s provisions, it does not go as far as Bannon would wish to “deconstruct the administrative state” in the realm of health care.
.. He’s told people that Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn — a West Wing rival — has run point on it.
Rep. Mo Brooks: ‘Obamacare 2.0’ Is a ‘Republican Welfare Program, the Worst Bill I’ve Ever Faced’
Obamacare 2.0 is the largest Republican welfare program in the history of the Republican Party. That has a lot of implications, cascading effects,” Brooks warned.
“By way of example, it undermines the work ethic. It encourages more and more Americans to live off the hard work of others. Obamacare 2.0, because of this welfare provision over time, is going to dramatically increase the need to raise taxes or borrow more money to pay for, if past experiences are any indication, what will be escalating welfare costs.
.. if this bill passes with this huge welfare program, all of a sudden, you are converting tens of millions of voters who now are self-reliant into welfare dependents – thus making elections about who can deliver the most welfare for me to help me with my health insurance premium,” he said.
“That’s going to have a huge electoral impact. That’s going to turn America over to the Bernie Sanders socialist wing of American society. Quite frankly, it may be the death knell for the free enterprise system that has helped make America the greatest economic power in the world,” he warned.
.. “We’re not doing what we were sent here to do: cut premium costs, make health care more affordable on the one hand, and on the other hand, to create a huge new welfare program that, in effect, duplicates the structure of Obamacare,”
.. Marlow noted that the bill is “overwhelmingly unpopular” with voters, scoring as low as 17 percent support in polls, but seems to enjoy vastly disproportionate support from the House Republican caucus.
.. “The simplest and smartest thing to do would have been to pull up the Obamacare repeal bill that passed the Republican House and passed the Republican Senate two years ago that was vetoed by President Obama,”