Congressional Republicans on Wednesday are set to make good on a central campaign pledge from the 2014 midterms, delivering a bill repealing the healthcare reform law they loathe to President Obama's desk, forcing a certain veto.
The problem: Obamacare repeal vote is too little, too late for Republican voters across the country who dim views of Republican leaders in Washington and have flocked to outsider presidential candidate Donald Trump and Ben Carson. And House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, barely two months into his new role as GOP standard bearer, is faced with selling another symbolic vote - the latest in dozens of anti-Obamacare votes - as a significant step forward to frustrated conservatives.
Over the past month, Ryan has sought to strike a delicate balance between tempering expectations about what can be done while Obama is still in office and pledging to pursue a "bold alternative agenda" that will highlight the differences between Republicans and Democrats going into 2016. And in recent days, Ryan has portrayed the repeal vote as the first step in doing so.
"I mean, how many times have we been saying we want to put bills on his desk that say who we are and what we believe versus what he believes," Ryan told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Tuesday night. "We have to go on offense in 2016, and we have to offer a bold agenda to the country."
Wednesday's vote is a milestone in that Republicans have finally maneuvered past the Senate filibuster that left all the previous Obamacare repeal measures languished, using the arcane budget reconciliation process that was employed by Democrats in 2009 to pass Obama's signature domestic achievement.
While Republicans say the votes taken last month in the Senate and Wednesday in the House offer an important blueprint for repealing the law under a Republican president, the mere fact that the measure will go to Obama's desk also happen to be an occasion for GOP catharsis after a year when Senate Democrats successfully used the filibuster to bottle up all but a handful of Republican bills.
"The good news is, with this reconciliation bill, there will finally be some charity," Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) said Tuesday. "The president will very glibly veto it. But at least then it will be on him and everybody will know it."
But the bold agenda Ryan has promised awaits. In a speech delivered last month at the Library of Congress, Ryan pledged to put forth a "complete alternative to the left's agenda" but remained sketchy on what the agenda may address. The pitfalls for moving aggressively in an election year are numerous - not least of which is the potential for fouling the message of the party's eventual nominee. Ryan, notably, is crosswire with national front-runner Donald Trump on such major issues as immigration and entitlement reform.
Ryan is mindful about not getting too far ahead of the House Republican Conference in setting policy priorities, having made fulsome promises to adhere to a more bottom-up management style. One pledge that Ryan did make is to develop not only a plan to repeal Obamacare under a Republican president, but to replace it with a more free-market-oriented reform package. Republicans have shied away from floating detailed Obamacare replacements that could be subject to close analysis for financial and health care impacts.
Republicans are set to convene next week in Baltimore for their annual policy retreat, where much discussion is expected on the congressional GOP agenda for the coming year. But besides the policy questions, members say, there is a thirst to address the strategy and communications issues that have left so many GOP voters disillusioned with Congress.
"We're in a real conundrum right now," Franks said, referring to the alienation of the conservative base - a phenomenon he blames on the proliferation of Senate filibusters. "We have got to somehow help the American people understand what is really happening here, and the way that we can do that, I think, is to show them that when the Republicans are in control in the House, we have passed everything that the base has wanted."
Ryan has hinted that the solution to the conundrum is simple if daunting: "We need a new president; it's just that simple," he said in the Library of Congress speech.
The sitting president continues to confound Hill Republicans, as the congressional reaction Tuesday to Obama's executive orders on firearms sales showed. Future executive actions, not to mention events on the presidential campaign trail and the world at large, threaten to complicate Ryan's efforts to advance a coherent GOP agenda, as Ryan acknowledged Tuesday to Hannity.
"We're not going to take these distractions," he said. "We're going to deal with these issues in the smartest way we can think of dealing with them, but we need to win the election, and the best way to win the election is give people a choice."
Source: Washington Post
