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(Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

Senate Republicans all but admitted defeat Tuesday in their seven-year quest to overturn the Affordable Care Act, acknowledging that they lacked the votes to make good on their vow to repeal and replace President Barack Obamas signature legislative accomplishment.

Hours after GOP leaders abandoned a bill to overhaul the law known as Obamacare, their fallback plan a proposal to repeal major parts of the law without replacing them quickly collapsed. A trio of moderate Republicans quashed the idea, saying it would irresponsibly snatch insurance coverage from millions of Americans.

I did not come to Washington to hurt people, tweeted Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), who joined Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) in opposing immediate repeal.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who spent weeks trying to knit together his fractious caucus in support of the original GOP legislation, said he would nonetheless schedule a vote early next week on the repeal plan. But he appeared to acknowledge that it seemed doomed.

This has been a very, very challenging experience for all of us, McConnell told reporters. Its pretty obvious that we dont have 50 members who can agree on a replacement.

(Bastien Inzaurralde,Rhonda Colvin,Ashleigh Joplin/The Washington Post)

The collapse of the effort marks a devastating political defeat for congressional Republicans and for President Trump, who had pledged to roll back the Affordable Care Act on Day One of his presidency.

It also leaves millions of consumers who receive health insurance through the law in a kind of administrative limbo, wondering how their care will be affected now that the program is in the hands of government officials who have rooted openly for its demise.

On Tuesday, Trump told reporters in the White Houses Roosevelt Room that he now plans to let Obamacare fail. It will be a lot easier. That way, he said, his party would bear no political responsibility for the systems collapse.

Were not going to own it. Im not going to own it, the president said. I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it. Well let Obamacare fail, and then the Democrats are going to come to us to fix it.

But Trumps comments appeared to ignore the many Republican lawmakers who are anxious about depriving their constituents of federal benefits on which they now rely. The president invited all 52 Republican senators to join him for lunch Wednesday at the White House to try to get the repeal effort back on track.

Senate leaders have been struggling to devise a plan to overhaul Obamacare since the House passed its version of the legislation in May, a flawed bill that some House members openly invited the Senate to fix. With just 52 seats, McConnell could afford to lose the support of only two members of his caucus and even then would rely on Vice President Pence to break the tie.

The measure he produced would have scaled back key federal insurance regulations and slashed Medicaid deeply over time. But it did not go far enough for many conservative Republicans, who wanted to roll back more of the ACAs mandates on insurers.

And the bill went much too far for many moderates, especially Republicans from states that had taken advantage of the ACAs offer to expand Medicaid eligibility. The bill would have cut Medicaid funding and phased out its expansion in 31 states and the District of Columbia. Some senators worried that their states would be saddled with the unpalatable choice of cutting off peoples health coverage or shouldering a massive new financial burden.

This is the Senate. Leadership sets the agenda, but senators vote in the interests of their states, said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) offered a blunt assessment of why the effort fell short: We are so evenly divided, and weve got to have every Republican to make things work, and we didnt have every Republican, he said.

Two Republicans Collins, a moderate, and conservative Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) declared late last week that they could not support the latest version of the bill. Late Monday night, as six of their colleagues talked health-care strategy with Trump over dinner at the White House, conservative Sens. Mike Lee (Utah) and Jerry Moran (Kan.) announced that they, too, would oppose the bill, and the measure was dead.

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Tex.), whose job is to count votes, said he had no idea Lee was defecting until he left the White House meeting though he had gotten a heads up from Moran.

Key Republicans held out hope that the effort could be revived. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said Tuesday that he would like to see the Senate move on something to keep the repeal-and-replace process alive.

Pence, speaking at the National Retail Federations annual Retail Advocates Summit, lent his support to the repeal plan, challenging Congress to step up and repeal the current law so lawmakers could work on a new health-care plan that will start with a clean slate.

Republicans last voted on repeal in 2015. Every current GOP senator who was then in the Senate voted for it, except Collins. But it was a meaningless protest vote; Obama was president, and he quickly vetoed it. With Trump in the White House, a vote to repeal the law without replacing it could have far-reaching consequences.

Abolishing Obamacares central pillars such as the mandate that taxpayers buy coverage; federal subsidies for many consumers premiums; and Medicaid coverage for roughly 11 million Americans without replacing them could wreak havoc in the insurance market. In January, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that premiums in the individual insurance market would rise by as much as 25 percent next year and would roughly double by 2026.

The CBO said repeal would cause the number of uninsured people to rise by 18 million next year and by 32 million by 2026.

For insurers, the worst possible outcome in this debate has always been a partial repeal with no replacement, which is exactly what Congress is about to take up, Larry Levitt, senior vice president for special initiatives at the Kaiser Family Foundation, wrote in an email. Insurance companies would be on the hook for covering people with preexisting conditions, but with no individual mandate or premium subsidies to get healthy people to sign up as well.

[Nevadas GOP governor resists the Senate health-care bill]

With the repeal effort foundering, White House officials seem to lack a clear road map for managing the law. Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla), who chairs the appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Health and Human Services Department, said Tuesday, Im not sure whats going on right now.

HHS Secretary Tom Price issued a news release Tuesday saying, The status quo is not acceptable or sustainable. But he offered no clues to what his agency plans to do in the coming weeks as insurers finalize rates for 2018 and decide whether to participate next year in the federal insurance marketplaces.

We will work tirelessly to get Washington out of the way, bring down the cost of coverage, expand healthcare choices, and strengthen the safety net for future generations, Price said.

[Analysis: Here are the 4 reasons McConnell couldnt get the Senate to replace Obamacare yet]

Several lawmakers and governors, meanwhile, said they would begin pushing for a bipartisan fix to shore up the ACA. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said in a statement that his panel would hold hearings to explore how to stabilize the individual market under the existing law.

A bipartisan group of 11 governors including Republicans Charlie Baker (Mass.), Larry Hogan (Md.), John Kasich (Ohio), Brian Sandoval (Nev.) and Phil Scott (Vt.) said they stand ready to work with lawmakers in an open, bipartisan way to provide better insurance for all Americans.

Asked if he would be willing to work with Democrats, McConnell said that well have to see what happens with next weeks vote.

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) renewed their calls for Republicans to work with Democrats.

It should be crystal clear to everyone on the other side of the aisle that the core of the bill is unworkable, Schumer said. The door to bipartisanship is open now. Republicans only need to walk through it.

As Schumer spoke on the Senate floor, Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), one of the few in the chamber who has tried to be a bipartisan broker on health care, was placing calls to fellow senators who, like him, are former governors a total of 11 senators including Alexander, John Hoeven (R-N.D.), Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), Angus King (I-Maine), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Margaret Wood Hassan (D-N.H.).

Aides said Manchin was presenting nothing specific yet to his colleagues, just a plea to sit down and start bipartisan talking.

While the path forward remained uncertain, consumers and health industry players continued to reach out to lawmakers. On Monday, two members of the American Cancer Societys Cancer Action Network journeyed from West Virginia, and one of them spoke with a Capito aide about an 18-month-old girl who had developed cancer while her mother was working part-time at a bank. After the woman lost her job, both she and the little girl went on Medicaid, allowing the child to receive treatment.

A lot of times people assume anyone on Medicaid is too lazy to work, the childs grandmother Lora Wilkerson told the aide, handing her a photo of the girl bald, with a teddy bear in her arms.

Can you please ask Ms. Capito to look at this picture when she casts her vote? Wilkerson said.

The aide, according to Capitos spokeswoman, made sure the senator saw it.

Mike DeBonis and Kelsey Snell contributed to this report.

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Senate Republicans effort to repeal and replace ...

If you've clicked on this article(thank you), you're probably thinking: Wait. I thought Republicans' attempts to repeal Obamacare crashed and burned a few days ago.

You would be correct. It died earlier this week. But in the past 24hours, it kind of came back to life, mostly on President Trump's insistence.

And Thursday, thanks to yet another Congressional Budget Office analysis, we get news that further ensured its demise: Republicans can't write a bill that won't leave millions uninsured, which means Republicans can't write a bill that will get approved by 50 of 52 of their ideologically diverse members, which means Republicans have no health-care bill.

This isn't for lack of effort. Republicans have spent the past couple of months trying to come to a consensus, piecing together a couple of different versions of the same bill.

The latest CBO estimate is their third report on a Senate version of legislation, and its predictionis similar to the last two: Senate Republicans' plan would leave 22 million more people uninsured over the next decade than if Obamacare remained law, and it would raise premiums on the most vulnerable.

The second version of the bill pours millions more into health insurance subsidies and Medicaid and opioid funding. But the CBO wasn't convinced that would make any difference on the insurance rate, said Paul Ginsburg, a health policy expert and director of theUSC Brookings-Schaeffer Initiative.

So leaders made the second versionless tenable for conservatives, and it did nothing to assuage moderates' concerns.

Here's a reminder of what CBO found in its estimate on the first version of the bill.

From the first to the second version, there is no significant change to how many people will be covered under their plan and, thus, no change to who votes for it. And, thus, no deal.

So far, Republican leadership and the White House haven't found a piece of health-care legislation that can get 51 votes, said Alex Conant, a GOP strategist whose public affairsfirm represents health-care clients.

Perhaps most telling: Senate Republican leaders have already given up on trying to get this legislation passed.

While President Trump was dining with supporters of the legislation on Tuesday, two conservatives, Sens. Mike Lee (Utah) and Jerry Moran (Kan.), threw a grenade at the legislation by becoming the third and fourth GOP senators to oppose it.

In frustration, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) decided to let the Senate vote on a straight repeal of Obamacare, even though policy experts said itwould be disastrous to the insurance markets and, potentially, Republicans' political future. That plan died a couple hours later, felled by three female GOP lawmakerswho had been left out of an all-male negotiating process: Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.) and Susan Collins (Maine). It is unclear when Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who announced he has been diagnosed with brain cancer, will return, leaving McConnell with one fewer possible vote in favor of repeal.

(Also not helping senators go to the mat for this: It's historically unpopular.)

But, politics. Before McCain's announcement, Trump got everyone together for a photo op on Wednesday and vaguely told the Senate to figure something out while vaguely threatening some of the senators who have opposed this legislation. GOP senators then huddled Wednesday night and afterward vaguely said theyhad figured something out.

As he hosted Senate Republicans for a health-care meeting at the White House, July 19, President Trump said "most of the people in this room never saw" the GOP health-care bill that collapsed on July 17. (The Washington Post)

The plan is to have a vote Tuesday on the House-passed version of the bill, and there was a faint possibility that enough senators had agreed to amend it in a way that could pass by the skin of its teeth.

Failure, after all, is a powerful motivator.

And then, the CBO score was released, reminding the senators who hated the House bill (which CBO estimated would leave 23 million more uninsured over the next decade) why they hate this Senate bill.

Bottom line: Health-care experts and political analysts say if a bill that could pass the Senate as the Senate stands now, it probably would have already manifested.

I don't think it can pass, said Alice Rivlin with the Brookings Institution. And they will have to at some point just say: 'Okay, we tried. And we're moving on.'

Republican senators could always come back to this later. In Congress, phoenixes have been known to rise from the ashes.

But that requires a little lot of magic. And this CBO score isn't going to help create any.

See the original post here:
Republicans' health-care overhaul is even deader now - Washington Post

Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate have introduced bills calling for the repeal of a just-announced regulation that would make it easier for consumers to bring class-action lawsuits against banks.

The rule unveiled last week by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would ban banks and other financial institutions from using arbitration clauses to block customers from bringing or joining class-action suits. Republicans had immediately pledged to unwind the rule before it takes effect next year.

On Thursday, GOP members of the House Financial Services Committee and Senate Banking Committee introduced resolutions that would do just that. The resolutions call for using the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to new regulations created by federal agencies.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), chairman of the House committee and a vocal opponent of the CFPB, said the rule is anti-consumer and should be thoroughly rejected by Congress.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), one of the sponsors of the Senate bill, called the CFPB a rogue agency and said theres no need for this anti-arbitration, anti-business rule.

Banks and other companies often include language in consumer contracts that forces customers to resolve disputes in private arbitration rather than in court. The CFPB rule would allow that practice to continue, but would ban arbitration clauses that also ban consumers from bringing class-action suits.

Such suits, CFPB Director Richard Cordray said last week in introducing the new regulation, allow consumers who have suffered relatively minor harms to join together to hold a big bank accountable and to bring bad practices to light.

Wells Fargo successfully used its arbitration clause to stymie consumer lawsuits over its creation of unauthorized accounts. The bank ultimately agreed to settle nearly a dozen class-action lawsuits for $142 million after its practices created a scandal. But consumer advocates argued that if an arbitration clause had not been in place the banks practices might have been uncovered sooner.

Rep. Maxine Waters of Los Angeles, the ranking Democrat on the House committee, called Thursdays action an outrageous move that would harm consumers.

Republicans should think twice before taking away consumers rights to be heard in a court of law, she said.

Republicans, business groups and attorneys for the finance industry have said that the new CFPB rule would result in a bevy of frivolous class-action litigation. They also argue that, if banks cant use arbitration to block class-actions, they will likely drop arbitration programs, which would mean that bank customers would have to go to court to settle even minor, individual disputes.

Theyll say, If a customer has a claim against us and it doesnt get resolved informally, let them sue us, said Alan Kaplinsky, a finance attorney who pioneered the use of arbitration clauses.

The challenge from Republican lawmakers is just one of the ways the arbitration rule could be scrapped or delayed. Keith Noreika, acting head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a key bank regulator, has said the rule should be put off while his agency studies whether it could harm the banking system.

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Experience Los Angeles 2049 at the Blade Runner 2049 Experience, only at Comic-Con.

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Republicans introduce bills to scrap new bank arbitration rule - Los Angeles Times

Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

After a 12-hour slog of deliberations on Wednesday, the House Republican budget looked readyto make it out of committee. It would be a minor victory for Republicans on a day when very little had gone right and the Senate's Obamacare repeal had gone spectacularly wrong.

Then Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.)spoke up, sayinghe had a most ungentlemanly request:Id like to offer an amendment.

This wasn't supposed to happen. As Sanford himself noted, Republicans had a gentleman's agreement to pass the budget out of committee without any fuss and without any amendments.

But he broke the deal anyway,anothersign of how much disagreement there is in the GOP, even over taxes and spending. It's a big part of the reason that President Trump is six months into his presidency and has zero major legislative achievements.

Sanford's amendment would forbid Republicans from enactingthe controversialborderadjustment tax (BAT), a proposal totax U.S. importers and give tax breaks to U.S. exporters.

The BAT is supposed to encourage companies to make more stuff in the United States (and hopefully hire more American workers). It would also raise about $1 trillion over the next decade, according to the Tax Foundation, a think tank.

Big retailers are lobbying hard against the BAT, as companies like Walmart that are major importers would be forced to pay the tax, likely passing the added costs on to consumers.

On the flip side, companies that export a lot such as Boeing and Caterpillarlikethe BAT. So do many small manufacturers who want to see Trump take action to make goods from overseas more expensive. Supporters point out that most other countries, including China, Germany and Canada, have a BAT or something very similar to it.

Rep.Diane Black (R-Tenn.), chair of the budget committee, grimaced as Sanford was speaking. She jumped in quickly to remind him, in a stern tone, his amendment wasn't preapproved and thus wouldn't be voted on.

Black has spent months carefullycrafting the 2018 budget blueprint so it would satisfy the moderate wing of her party that didn't want dramatic cuts to programs that benefit seniors and the poor and the Freedom Caucus, which wants deep spending reductions to pay for tax cuts for businesses and individuals.

Sanford is a member of the Freedom Caucus. He's also a former South Carolina governor andrepresents the city of Charleston, a major U.S. port that is thriving because of goods arrivingon ships from Europe, China and elsewhere.

I have a range of concerns about the BAT, Sanford said. This amounts to a $1.2 trillion tax that ultimately would be borne by the consumer.

Black refused to allow the amendment to be considered, shooting it down on a technicality. She got her wish and the House Republican budget did pass out of her committee last night (Sanford voted yes).

But the BAT spatisn't over.It's just headedto a bigger arena: the full House of Representatives.

The budget does not explicitly mention the BAT. But it also doesn't rule it out. The language in the tax section is purposefully vague.Republicans need money for their tax cuts. The BAT is one way to get it, and several GOP leaders, including House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, like the idea.

Trump has promised large tax cuts (the biggest in U.S. history, he claimed). But House Republicans insist that any tax cuts won't add trillions to America's debt. They want deficit neutral tax reform.

The only way to make that math work is massive reductions in spending or finding new ways to generate massive amounts of new revenue including, possibly, viathe BAT.

The failure of the Republican health care plan makes the math even more complex. House Republicans were already counting the reduced costs from slashing Medicaid in their budget. Now they have to plug that hole as well.

Expect a lot more ungentlemanly battles.

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Republicans got 'most ungentlemanly' with each other over the budget last night - Washington Post

Some Republican senators, like Dean Heller of Nevada, should be gearing up for fights with Democratic challengers next year, but instead are trying to duck primary threats inspired at least in part by a president of their own party.

The professional deficits have been topped with dejecting personal tragedies. Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who has spent the better part of the last six months racing around the world defending a generation of American international positions, announced Wednesday night that he had brain cancer. The third-most-powerful House Republican, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, lingers in a hospital bed, recovering from gunshot wounds sustained during a mass assassination attempt this summer.

Instead of preparing for a month at home of crowing about the accomplishments of a unified government, Republicans have been diminished to trying to confirm relatively minor nominees Democrats are stalling them and getting a spending bill or two passed. They have been forced to cut their August recess short, all because they have nothing particularly positive to celebrate.

Even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who was seen gliding through the Capitol on Thursday, normally loquacious on all matters of party strategy, politics and the possibilities of moon colonization, had nothing to say. He started straight ahead when asked about Republican woes.

Things are starting to feel incoherent, said Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, reflecting on the health care efforts, which have turned many Republican senators against one another as efforts to negotiate the future of the Medicaid program have caused large rifts.

With no small measure of understatement, Mr. Corker conceded, Theres just not a lot of progress happening.

While Congressional Republicans problems stem largely from the chaos at the White House, many reflect fissures within their party over government spending, social issues, immigration and the role of America in the broader international order.

And once again, rather than trying to forge bipartisan alliances with moderate Democrats, Republican leaders appear determined to go it alone with one-party bills that must unite the hard right with the center right.

For example, a spending bill passed by House appropriators that would provide millions of dollars for Mr. Trumps proposed wall on the Mexican border sets up a potential fight on the floor with Republicans in the Senate, who earlier this year rejected a similar effort.

A nearly $700 billion appropriations bill that would fund the Pentagon faces an impending battle over an amendment, championed by Representative Vicky Hartzler, Republican of Missouri, that would end the Obama-era practice of requiring the Pentagon to pay for medical treatment related to gender transition. (Transgender service members have been permitted to serve openly in the military since last year.)

The same measure narrowly failed on a broader defense policy bill passed recently by the House, as some Republicans joined Democrats to reject it.

Some members of the House Freedom Caucus, many of whom won their original elections on a platform of reigned-in federal spending, have said they will not vote for a bill that does not include substantial wall funding, as well as the transgender amendment, drawing fault lines around Mr. Trump within the party.

What we havent been able to figure out is how to meld people with such different policy positions together to get the consensus, the majority it takes to pass bills, Representative Bradley Byrne, Republican of Alabama, said.

Republicans blame Democrats for many of their woes: for slowing down nominations with procedural tricks because of their ire over health care, for not helping them to repeal the Affordable Care Act and for passing it in the first place. But increasingly, Republican senators are suggesting it would be better to work with the minority party to fix the laws flaws.

Even in the House, Republicans and Democrats joined, at least momentarily, over the issue of Congressional approval for authorizing war. The effort was led by Representative Scott Taylor, Republican of Virginia and a former Navy SEAL, who joined forces with Representative Barbara Lee, Democrat of California, demonstrating that foreign policy in the Trump era has provoked even more desire for a legislative role.

I feel very strongly that Congress is handing over its war making authority to the executive branch, said Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma. It did so under Obama, and it is doing so under Trump. In their desire to spare their members from tough votes, the leadership of both parties have weakened the power of Congress. This belief is widely shared by the rank and file in both parties.

Appropriators in the Senate are also working in a friendly and bipartisan manner on bills, but it remains to be seen how the process will play out on legislation that will require 60 votes to pass. Still, some Republicans are using optimism as oxygen as they head home after yet another week of chaos and disappointment.

We will continue to focus on the priorities that restore hope and create opportunities for the economically vulnerable, Senator Tim Scott, the ever-buoyant Republican from South Carolina, said. Our focus, not as Republicans or Democrats but as Americans, is our future.

Read more:
In a Cruel Summer for the GOP, 'Things Are Starting to Feel Incoherent' - New York Times