Donald Trump grinned and posed and bragged in the White House Rose Garden after House Republicans passed a vicious bill that would strip access to health care from 24 million people if it became law … but his own top officials not only say that’s a very big if, they’re pressuring Senate Republicans to change the bill dramatically.
"The bill that passed out of the House is most likely not going to be the bill that is put in front of the president," Mick Mulvaney, head of the Office of Management and Budget, said Sunday. [...]
Priebus told Fox News that President Donald Trump expects the Senate to make “improvements,” which would then have to be hashed out with the House before the president could sign a bill into law.
So was all that posturing last Thursday really just to make Trump feel like he got a win? With one chamber of Congress passing a wildly unpopular bill that his staff fully expects the Senate to change until it’s hardly recognizable as the same bill? They started off with a popular vote loser with record-breaking unfavorables, and it’s still pathetic if this is what a win looks like to these people.
Although since Senate Republicans have made it clear that they’re not passing the House bill, this may all be further posturing to make it look like Trump is getting a win when the Senate comes up with a whole new bill.
Either way, the House bill was as bad as it was because that’s what was required to get enough votes out of House Republicans. How is it going to play out when a very much changed bill goes back to the House? Priebus thinks he has the answer to that:
… he said he was optimistic because lawmakers face a “binary choice” between keeping Obamacare and gutting it.
Maybe. Possibly. But it took a very public failure and a lot of work for House Republicans to get to this point. It’s going to take weeks or even months for the Senate to fight it out. By then, voters will have had that many more weeks to learn how Trumpcare would hurt them, Trump may well have become still less popular, and House Republicans in swing districts will have faced anger from their constituents. In other words, time is not necessarily on the Republicans’ side on this one.