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All eyes are on moderates as to whether they'll support a health care amendment
Several high profile moderates have come out against the bill
Health care is back!!!
That’s the narrative the White House and Republican leaders are selling, at least.
What we know is that the bulk of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, which opposed the first attempt to reform and replace the Affordable Care Act, is now on board with the revised, slightly more conservative version.
What we don’t know is whether there GOP moderates, who had urged Rep. Tom MacArthur, a co-chair of the Tuesday Group, not to negotiate with the Freedom Caucus, will stay on board with the revised bill.
And there are reasons to suspect they won’t. Let’s list them.
2. David Young
4. The American Medical Association
5. The Congressional Budget Office
It’s of course possible that Herrera Beutler and Young are some of only a few Tuesday Group members who wind up as “no’s” on the new health care bill. But I very much doubt it. MacArthur appears to have been negotiating with Mark Meadows of the Freedom Caucus entirely on his own and without buy-in from the broader group of moderates. And he doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job of winning his ideological friends over at the moment.
What it looks like is House Republican leadership and the White House have traded one problem for another equally large problem.
They can’t lose any more than 22 Republican votes. There are roughly 30 members of the Freedom Caucus. There are 50-ish members of the Tuesday Group. Lose half of that group – and House Republicans look well on their way to doing that – and the bill doesn’t have the votes. Again.
Republicans love to brag that they have the “big tent” party. The problem with that is in moments like this health care fight, when they just can’t seem to find a way to get enough people under that tent to do much of anything.