With Utah Sen. Mike Lee’s announcement Tuesday that he would oppose a procedural move to begin the process of bring the health care bill to a vote, the chances of the legislation passing before Thursday continue to dip.
Lee is the sixth Republican senator to voice opposition to the bill in its current form, according to CNN’s latest whip count. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell can only afford to lose two GOP votes — and even that would require Vice President Mike Pence to cast the deciding vote in a 50-50 tie.
With the math looking not-so-good, there are already rumbles that McConnell should push the vote until after the July 4 congressional recess. (The Senate is gone from the 3rd through the 7th.)
McConnell has held firm. Ditto for Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the second ranking Republican who told CNN’s intrepid Manu Raju this on Tuesday:
“I think we should vote this week. We’ve been debating this issue for seven years and I think it’s time for us to vote. And my hope and expectation is that we will pass a bill which will protect the American people and provide them something better than they have now…. We’ve got — we’ve had a lot of debates internally and heard from a lot of people on the outside. We kind of know the subject and we know what the choices are, and so I’d much prefer for us to have this vote here in the next couple of days.”
He’s 100% right.
There’s a tendency when it comes to controversial legislation — and this health care bill is very much that — to believe that delay is a good thing. We’ll make the bill better! We’ll convince more people! Time is our friend!
It never works. The longer a bill sits out without a vote, the bigger pinata it becomes to its detractors, who find new and different things to object to it. And while the idea of more time allowing wavering members to be convinced sounds like capital “D” democracy, usually the members wavering have mostly made up their minds.
To me, saying something like “I could vote for the bill if it radically changes to exactly what I want” is not really being on the fence. “I could agree with your view if you would totally change it and agree with me” isn’t exactly “open to persuasion.” (Rand Paul, I am looking at you.)
The bill as written is, basically, the bill. Yes, Senate Republicans may add a chunk of money to deal with opioid addiction epidemic or try to find a way to make Medicaid cuts less tough. But there’s no way the bill is going to suddenly insure more people than the Affordable Care Act does. Or even 10 million fewer. (The Congressional Budget Office estimate is that the Senate bill would insure 22 million fewer people.)
If there was a simple or elegant solution available to Republicans on health care, they would have already taken it! The reason health care is so difficult to change is because there are no good or easy answers. You can’t simultaneously insure everyone, get rid of the individual mandate, lower premiums, lower deductibles and cut the deficit. It just doesn’t add up — or come close to adding up.
In short: Delaying a vote on the bill doesn’t change the basic political dynamics of the bill. The problems that Lee or Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) have with the health care legislation on June 27 are the same problems they will have on July 8 or August 8.
This was always going to be a hard vote for Senate Republicans — just like it was a hard vote for House Republicans. (They had to try twice before they got it passed in the House.) The best thing to do on hard votes is either take them or move on. Kicking a hard vote down the road a week or a month just means that that week or month will be dominated by talk of the hard vote even though none of the underlying difficulties are likely to be resolved.
McConnell and Cornyn knows this. A delay in the heath care vote — or, more accurately at the moment, a delay in a decision not to hold a vote — will likely accomplish very little other than to block up any and all other legislative action on matters not related to health care. Time is not on Senate Republicans’ side.