House Speaker Paul Ryan and his team plan on beginning the committee work on their Trumpcare legislation Wednesday, planning to jam it through even before it's been scored by the Congressional Budget Office. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is fine with that: "I hope to call it up when we receive it from the House," he said Tuesday morning. That means no hearings, no committee work in the Senate. Contrast with this:
In considering the Affordable Care Act in 2009 and 2010, the House held 79 hearings over the course of a year, heard from 181 witnesses and accepted 121 amendments. The current House leadership hopes to get the repeal and replacement legislation through the House in three weeks. The Senate adopted the Affordable Care Act only after approximately 100 hearings, roundtables, walkthroughs and other meetings, and after 25 consecutive days in continuous session debating the bill.
They want to jam it through as quickly as possible for any number of reasons. One could be that they are dealing with a self-inflicted crisis a day from popular vote loser Donald Trump, and need to get this done before he completely unravels. Or before he figures out that the legislation breaks all the promises he made on the campaign. Primarily, though, they probably want to jam it through before the opposition can really get organized. On that front, they're probably too late.
Let's start with the external organization. The Koch brothers' Freedom Works calls it "Obamacarelite." They don't mean that in a positive way. Heritage Action says it is "bad politics and, more importantly, bad policy." Even Gov. Paul LePage (R-are you kidding me, Maine?) says House leadership needs to "rethink what they're doing" on this. CATO, the libertarian think tank that hates Obamacare calls it "Obamacare-lite—or worse."
But what about the Republican votes? A staff memo for the 170-member conservative Republican Study Committee calls it "a Republican welfare entitlement." It goes on to say that "Writing checks to individuals to purchase insurance is, in principle, Obamacare." Freedom Caucus founder and former chairman Rep. Jim Jordan is not impressed. "I don't see any significant changes here. […] It's significantly the same thing to me so it sort of doesn't change my position, but we'll talk to our guys tomorrow night. My guess is this bill looks a lot like the last one, and we didn't like the last one." Other maniac caucus are calling it Obamacare 2.0.
On the Senate side of things, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has slammed it and declared "It will not pass." He's going to be having a press conference with the House maniacs this afternoon presumably to announce their opposition. On the less extreme end of the spectrum, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) predicts that "it may not be a plan that gets a majority votes." As if to emphasize that point, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says leadership needs to slow down. "I've always been concerned that the public needs to absorb this. We're not going to be judged by when we did it but how we did it." He adds, "I'm worried about doing it right."
There are also the four Republican senators who have gone on the record to say Medicaid expansion has to be preserved, and this bill only does that for a few years. Now, they might be craven enough to accept that as a win, but if there's enough opposition from other factions in the Senate, they can freely oppose the bill. One of those four—Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)—is also on the record (along with Susan Collins (R-ME)) as saying she won't vote for a bill that defunds Planned Parenthood, as this one does.
Which means this rush to push the repeal through is likely going to backfire, in a pretty big way. And with Republican groups already lined up in opposition, the other big plan of GOP leadership—blaming its eventual failure on Democrats—isn't going to work either.