On Monday night, two more Republican senators announced their opposition to their party’s overhaul of the healthcare system and vowed to vote against the bill. Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas announced their shocking news last night.
“We should not put our stamp of approval on bad policy,” said Sen. Moran in his statement, the Senate needs to ‘start fresh’ and open up the legislative process.
This development dismantles the health care bill passing in its current form as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell could only lose two votes on the bill for it to still pass but Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Kentucky’s Rand Paul have already announced their opposition to the Obamacare repeal bill.
“Regretfully, it is now apparent that the effort to repeal and immediately replace the failure of Obamacare will not be successful,” McConnell said.
President Trump took to Twitter to voice his thoughts, unsurprisingly:
Republicans should just REPEAL failing ObamaCare now & work on a new Healthcare Plan that will start from a clean slate. Dems will join in!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 18, 2017
CNN Politics reports that Trump and other GOP Leaders dined with ‘reliably conservative rank and filers’ to support and vote for the bill. This obviously proved futile as Sens. Moran and Lee were working on how to announce their opposition. Though they joined together to share the heat they would receive, it is clear that they respectively found issue with different aspects of the bill. An aide of the Senate GOP possessing direct knowledge of the disruption said that it is likely that Lee and Moran are just the first of many to announce that they oppose the bill.
“More senators are ready to jump,” the aide said. “This wasn’t done without that knowledge.”
Before the bill sank, the preferred idea of action was to hold a vote when Sen. John McCain returned to Washington from recovering from his surgery. After news broke last night of the bill’s failure, McCain issued a statement: “The Congress must now return to regular order, hold hearings, receive input from members of both parties, and heed the recommendations of our nation’s governors so that we can produce a bill that finally provides Americans with access to quality and affordable health care,”
Amidst Republican turmoil, Democrats celebrated. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said that the “second failure of Trumpcare is proof positive that the core of this bill is unworkable.”
It is hard to ascertain that the bill is truly dead, this bill has been postponed and pulled in its various forms over the past few months and may well overcome this obstacle in the road and triumph.
