House Speaker Paul Ryan and President Trump, as well as members of the latter’s administration, were scrambling until the last minute to get the votes they needed for the Obamacare repeal bill. Now that Ryan has informed Trump that the votes aren’t there, and now that the fence-sitters are jumping ship, it’s likely that retribution will be meted out toward the conservatives at the heart of the effort opposing it.
The Trump administration is already reportedly putting together an excrement list of Republicans who show their disloyalty by voting no.
Maybe they deserve it. The Freedom Caucus and their ilk have arguably cut off their own noses to spite their faces. Perhaps they deserve blame for Obamacare’s persistence in law, the likely result of today’s procedure. But this bill would have had a better chance if prominent moderates, including the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, hadn’t come out against it. Will Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., lose his king-of-the-hill post over the debacle to which he contributed? Will his demand to bring back earmarks go to the back of the line as a result of this? Don’t bet on it.
We already knew that Ryan couldn’t tame the conservatives in the House. And in some ways, that’s better than the olden days, when members’ arms could be twisted off until they’d vote for whatever was put in front of them. But this is also a commentary on Trump’s leadership and dealmaking ability, which in its first big legislative test appears to be overrated.
One lesson is that, as much as some conservative voters thought they were overthrowing the establishment by getting behind Trump in the primaries, they basically threw themselves behind a new establishment that works much like the old one. They chose a presidential candidate who demonstrably, every time he discussed health care, wasn’t terribly interested in or committed to the issue.
One Freedom Caucus source told The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, after hearing Trump discuss the bill behind closed doors, that Trump “seems neither to get the politics nor the policy of this.” The person in question found this “astonishing.” But what’s so astonishing about it?
