Trump has threatened that if the AHCA doesn’t pass now, then we’ll be stuck with the ACA indefinitely. Congressmen reportedly are scrambling to try to pass it today (Friday Mar 24) against steep odds.
I don’t get this. Since when does the president dictate what bills the legislature can work on? What’s keeping Congress from saying “to heck with this pitiful attempt, let’s spend some time to craft a better bill and then pass it” and then doing so?
The President is, I believe, threatening to veto any future legislation, should it pass.
Additionally, while it’s not an explicit power of the President, the President usually sets the agenda as one of the louder voices in government and one of the unifying forces of the House and Senate. It’s easier to get behind a single leader than a committee.
Nothing I read mentioned a veto. I can see where that would do it.
If he said it explicitly he’d have to do it. Being vague gives him more options, while insinuating the worst.
I don’t really see a specific factual question in the OP. Off to GD.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Dunno about that. There are a bunch of things that he’s explicitly said he would do that he hasn’t done. Show his taxes, for one thing.
(Since we’re out of GQ…) I assume that Ryan wouldn’t have pulled the Bill from consideration if he hadn’t discussed with Trump and determined that it really was all or nothing. It’s probably a safe bet that the bill will come back at some point.
Ideally, they’ll try to move it towards the middle and reach across the aisle to get the numbers they need (if they really think it’s broken).
Seems the bill is a dead duck.
Trump can’t keep Congress from passing a bill. He could veto it, but realistically, it seems pretty unlikely he’d actually stop a repeal bill that passed through Congress.
But Trump is also the head of the GOP, which doesn’t come with any explicit powers, but generally means his party in Congress follows his lead on legislation. Indeed, I think you can argue that when his party controls Congress, the Presidents informal power as leader of the party is greater than that he gets from being President, at least domestically.
So Trump is saying he is going to move on to pushing for other legislative priorities, and leave ACA alone. In theory Ryan or McConnel could just ignore him, but they won’t. There’s just a really strong bias for Congressional leaders to follow the Presidents lead*.
*(indeed, you saw this malfunction earlier, when during the beginning of Trumps Presidency, the GOP basically hung around waiting for him to take the lead on healthcare, encouraged by Trumps repeated pronouncements that he was just about to release such a plan. When no plan was forthcoming, the House leadership scrambled to cobble one togheather, leading eventually to the brilliant legislative strategy we saw play out today)
Trump has the ultimate say on any legislation - he can veto it. (Unless congress can get a 66% majority to re-pass it).
Basically, he’s being petulant and a bully - “do what I say or I will take my baseball and go home and you guys can’t play”. The threat is if they don’t do it his way, in two years congress will go for re-election and all their supporters will say “you promised to repeal Obamacare and reneged on that!”
Congress is like a dog that chases cars. Now that they finally caught one, what do they do with it? they’ve assumed for years they just remove the Obamacare legislation and things go back to the way they were. However, there are people getting Medicaid that weren’t before. There are people getting (subsidized) health care from Exchanges that didn’t get it before. (When you read that premiums went up 25%, 60% or more - many of the people on those exchanges are subsidized because the cost of health care exceeds X% of their income - therefore it only goes up 5% for them, and the government pays the rest.)
Trump was chasing a bunch of fanatics. The “Freedom” caucus does not believe in any government-mandated requirements, so anything he produced that satisfied them would be essentially removing health care options from those 24 million people who are currently covered - mostly poorer people. Open season on pre-existing conditions, no mandatory coverage for emergencies, maternity benefits, prescriptions. No mandatory sign-up. No requirements for employers to provide health care. Get rid of the taxes that pay for Obamacare.
The normal Republicans would like to clean up some of the negatives of Obamacare but not take away too many of the things that are seen as gains from Obamacare - no pre-existing conditions, coverage for children up to 26, subsidies for poor, etc.
He needed 215 votes. Without the “Freedom” wing, he would have to get votes from Democrats. How would he do that? Remove Medicaid expansion? Remove subsidies? Give tax breaks to really rich people? Jack up premiums for older workers? …probably not.
It’s not hard to see that the choices that would persuade Democrats to support a new health care measure are not much different from what’s already in the ACA. The democrats aren’t motivated to support a significant weakening of the current health care laws.
So you have 3 factions that want 3 completely different things and need 2 of them to pass anything. None of them will compromise. The Freebies won’t give, they are fanatics. The other Republicans won’t vote for something that will be held against them badly next election. The Democrats know they are needed to pass anything, so they know they can hold out … and meanwhile what they have stays.
Who will give in first?
I see 2 scenarios:
-admit defeat and call it a victory; pass Obamacare lite, call it repeal.
-pass a really really bigly bad law like the current proposal, but closer to the next election so it doesn’t hurt anyone until after the 2018 election and hope they don’t notice until after the elction and forget by 2020.
Politics used to work by compromise - what can both sides hold their nose and agree on? Unfortunately, politics, like the world, has descended into a mess of people in echo chambers. The Right, particularly, can listen to Fox and Breitbart and chat with each other on their won internet chats and ignore the fact that there are contrary viewpoints. The left is not much better. The politicians who used to compromise are driven out in primaries, where the echo chamber minions organize a minority of like-minded voters to ignore compromise and vote for fanatic candidates, exacerbating the problem - so the compromise-minded types have to adopt a hard-line stance to avoid being replaced.
Going back to the opening post. I highlighted the clear question that the moderator judged to be other than a question, because I think it can be answered.
The answer is “since never.” The President CAN NOT “dictate” what bills the legislature can work on. And Trump DID NOT do so here. He merely made a (rather petulant) political rant. Should the Republican controlled Congress decide to continue with the debate on Health they can certainly do so.
I don’t think they will, since they COULD have been working on it for the last EIGHT YEARS OF WHINING, and decided not to do so AT ALL. Plus, they appear to see a political advantage for themselves to drop the hot topic they CLEARLY never wanted to deal with (other than tricking millions of people into voting them into power over it) to begin with.
But again, the President can’t, and hasn’t DICTATED to the Congress.
The echo-chamber effect is bad, but I think what is worse is that the parties have discovered the power that lies in monolithicity. By voting as a single, indivisible bloc, the parties leverage their power to the maximum.
For decades, the right has seen “compromise” as failure, weakness, even treason. Now the left has, in self-defense, taken up the same strategy.
We used to have a spectrum, within each party, of liberals, moderates, and conservatives. Now, we (almost) have a system where each party votes as a party.
It actually astonishes me to see the internal dissent on the part of the Republicans: I had thought their indivisibility would have been far closer to absolute than the Democrats’. This is a classic case of “The perfect being the enemy to the good,” from their own point of view. The extremists insisted on having it 100% their way…and thus got 0% of what they wanted.
(Hey, guys, that’s my party’s m.o.!)
Obviously the President can’t actually “withdraw” legislation from Congress. Congress can pass a bill, or not, and all the President can do is veto the bill or sign it. So the President can’t control Congress.
However, the President really can do a lot to twist arms and sweeten deals for particular wavering legislators. If the President calls you up and tells you that you’ve got to support this bill or you’re going to go on his enemies list, you’ve got to listen to that. And so when Trump says he’s done with health care for now, what he means is that he’s not going to be making any calls or holding any meetings to try to whip the wavering Republicans into shape.
And without that, the whole thing falls apart, because there are not 218 representatives who will vote for a health care bill. There are plenty of people who want change, but there are not 218 people willing to vote for the same change. Obviously the Democrats are out. That leaves 237 Republicans. But they can’t find 218 Republicans to vote for the Ryan plan. So the Ryan plan is dead. Of course they were calling it TrumpCare, but this is Ryan’s plan, Trump doesn’t give a shit about this sort of thing, and had no input into crafting this. All Trump cared about was repealing Obamacare, and what care after that didn’t interest him.
He can’t actually withdraw it, no. But the threat of a veto, especially within your own party, is enough to make continued deliberation pointless. It’s just like how the filibuster works. You could still actually bring the law up for a vote, but the filibuster will prevent any actual vote on it.
Of course, as I said, he didn’t actually threaten a veto, as he didn’t want to go on record with that. Yes, he has lied in the past, but, seeing as his trustworthiness is the only thing that would make his threats credible, he’d be very pressured to follow through to maintain his own self-interest.
Sure, Trump could not realize that, but his administration likely does see the issue, and could probably dumb it down enough for Trump to understand.
Well, Trump now claims that it was his idea to pull the bill because he “didn’t want to take a vote” or “lose” on it.
This news is from Talking Points Memo (TPM) which quotes an interview that Trump gave to the Financial Times (FT).
I don’t have a subscription to the FT so can’t get the full context of Trump’s thoughts on the healthcare bill as he expressed them in this FT interview (not that seeing his actual words would add clarity to Trump’s thoughts anyway), but TPM has these two further quotes:
“You know that we didn’t take a vote,” Trump said in an interview with the Financial Times. “I didn’t want to take a vote. It was my idea. I said why should I take a vote,”
and
“Yeah, I don’t lose. I don’t like to lose,” Trump told the Financial Times. “But that wasn’t a definitive day. They are negotiating as we speak. I don’t know if you know. They are negotiating right now. There was no reason to take a vote.”
What???!!!??? You mean Trump was LYING, all those times he said he was going to repeal and replace the ACA with something much better and cheaper???!!?? Oh my! I’m shocked ! Shocked, I tell you!
As for not holding a vote that you know you’re going to lose, that’s just standard operating procedure. Obviously in most cases you don’t hold the vote and count each one and go down to defeat, since you know the vote count ahead of time.
In some rare cases the house leadership brings a doomed bill to a floor vote, because they want to use the vote against the bill as a campaign issue in the election, either the primary or the general. “Representative Smith voted against the puppies and kittens bill. Representative Smith: bad for puppies and kittens, bad for America.”
The problem in this case is that the Republicans who voted to repeal Obamacare would have that used as a campaign issue against them, rather than the other way around. There’s no political upside in repealing Obamacare, the only reason the Republicans want to is so they can pass revenue-neutral tax cuts for the rich. If they could actually pass tax cuts for the Republican donor class it would be worth it to take the hit from repealing Obamacare, but without that there’s no point.