Shifting Goalposts
Weeks ago, the conventional wisdom had been that the GOP did not want to drag out its work on health care reform. When the Senate took up health care reform in late June, for instance, there was talk that Paul Ryan would keep the House in session to pass whatever bill emerged from the Senate’s deliberations before July 4. The goal was to rip off the Band-Aid, so to speak, and move on to other items on the GOP agenda.
Now, the talk is instead that the Senate just needs to pass a bill, any bill, to get to conference, meaning that the goalposts have moved substantially. But why would the Senate and House’s joint negotiators be able to thread a needle that has eluded Mitch McConnell for the past few months? It’s certainly possible that proximity to final passage will give the GOP momentum — and that once key members have cast a vote to repeal Obamacare, they’ll want to see the policy through to enactment. But it’s not a sure thing. Negotiations on the repeal efforts have been described as a Rubik’s Cube or a whack-a-mole game, where any one solution generates a new problem elsewhere. That dynamic is unlikely to get any easier during a negotiation across chambers. The GOP — both its leadership and key swing votes — has a strong incentive to bring these repeal efforts to a close. The fact that they are now talking about punting to a conference committee indicates both how committed they are to repeal and how hard coalescing around any specific proposal has become.