GOP
Lawmakers Now Admit Years of Obamacare Repeal
Votes Were a Sham
By Lee
Fang
March
31, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "The
Intercept"
- It is hard to overestimate the role of the
Affordable Care Act in the Republican
resurgence.
Over the last seven years, the GOP has won
successive elections by highlighting problems
with Obamacare, airing more than $235
million in
negative ads slamming the law, and staging more
than 50 high-profile repeal votes. In
2016 every
major Republican presidential candidate,
including Donald Trump, campaigned on
a pledge to quickly get rid of it.
Now in
total control of Congress and the White House,
some GOP legislators are saying that the
political assault on Obamacare was an exercise
in cynical politics, and that an outright repeal
was never on the table.
“We
have Republicans who do not want to repeal
Obamacare,” said Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., on
Sirius XM Patriot on Wednesday.
“They
may have campaigned that way, they may have
voted that way a couple of years ago when it
didn’t make any difference,” Brooks continued.
“But now that it makes a difference, there seems
to not be the majority support that we need to
pass legislation that we passed 50 or 60 times
over five or six years.”
Listen
to Rep. Brooks’s comments below:
Likewise, Rep. Pat Meehan, R-Pa., one of the
lawmakers who came into power by riding the
anti-ACA Tea Party wave in 2010, and who once
elected pledged
to “repeal, defund, delay, and dismantle
Obamacare,” recently conceded in a candid
interview with the Delaware County Daily Times
that previous repeal efforts were a sham.
Asked
if the years of votes against the ACA were
simply “ceremonial,” since Republicans knew that
any serious repeal bill would be vetoed by
President Barack Obama, Meehan responded “yes.”
“I
don’t think anyone would quarrel with the idea
that they were largely position votes,” Meehan
continued. “They were as political as they were
anything else because there was a recognition
that those were unlikely to be moved.”
Republicans expected Hillary Clinton to win the
election last year, and had not planned for
being in a position to actually pass a repeal
effort this year, said Meehan. But after Trump’s
victory, the GOP leadership thought something
had to be done on their campaign promises, and
that’s why they attempted to move forward with
the American Health Care Act.
Listen
to Rep. Meehan’s comments below:
Other
Republican lawmakers have made similar remarks
in recent days.
“You know, I think maybe its easier to run on
these platitudes, run on a platform like this,”
said Rep. Don
Bacon, R-Neb., when asked by local radio station
News Talk 1290 if Republicans ran on repeal
“simply to get elected or re-elected.”
Bacon,
admitting that he supports provisions of the
law, including coverage for pre-existing
conditions, noted that governing can be very
different from campaigning. “Sometimes things
sound easier when you’re running,” Bacon added.
Another candid comment came from Rep. Joe
Barton, R-Texas, who told reporters last Friday
that the dozens of repeal votes were cast in the
past without any plan for viable legislation.
“Sometimes you’re playing fantasy football and
sometimes you’re in the real game,” Barton
told Talking
Points Memo.
“We
knew the president, if we could get a repeal
bill to his desk, would almost certainly veto
it. This time we knew if it got to the
president’s desk it would be signed.”
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Even
House Speaker Paul Ryan, shortly after his
legislation to overhaul the health care system
was pulled from a vote, said that Republicans
weren’t ready to meet promises on repealing and
replacing Obamacare — an implicit concession
that previous repeal votes were merely symbolic.
“We
were a 10-year opposition party, where being
against things was easy to do,” Ryan
said, adding
that his party wasn’t prepared to be the
“governing party.”
“We will
get there,” Ryan added, “but we weren’t there
today.”
After the defeat of Ryan’s legislation last
week, the speaker
called
Obamacare the “law of the land” that will remain
“for the foreseeable future.”
Following the embarrassing admission,
conservative donors and some White House
officials have
mounted a
campaign to revive a repeal effort, though there
are few details about the type of repeal effort
would muster support among the hard-right
conservatives and moderates who sank the last
attempt.
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
