Senate GOP health law repeal delivers wins to party’s wings

Senate Republican leaders seem to have accomplished a balancing act in their drive to dismantle President Barack Obamas health care law and block Planned Parenthoods funding. If the House as expected sends the Senate bill to Obama, the measure will become the first of its kind to reach the White House and be vetoed, an act Republicans say will highlight GOP priorities for voters. The bill would also take away the federal dollars that Planned Parenthood receives.

The U.S. Senate voted 52-48 Thursday against providing funding for Planned Parenthood, less than a week after a deadly attack on a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

In the days leading up to the vote, Toomey said he would support the full Obamacare repeal package.

Planned Parenthood, a longtime target of anti-abortion forces, has come under fire after secretly recorded videos showed group officials discussing their provision of fetal tissue to scientists.

With their support, after four years of trying, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell could finally get a repeal bill through the Senate and to the president’s desk to be vetoed.

“Americans are living with the consequences of this broken law and its broken promises every day”, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on the Senate floor Thursday morning. Just as Democrats used the process of reconciliation to pass Obamacare back in 2010, Republicans alluded to using it during their winter meeting in Hershey, Pennsylvania in January.

The Obama administration has previously said that the president would veto any legislation that repeals Obamacare.

Democrats are planning to offer amendments to the bill related to Planned Parenthood and gun control, in the wake of two shootings- one that killed 3 people at a Planned Parenthood Clinic, and the other that recently occurred at a holiday party in California, which left 14 dead. “When you wipe out Planned Parenthood’s funding, you dramatically curb women’s access to services that have absolutely nothing to do with abortion”.

Even before the vote occurred, Democratic operatives seized on it as evidence that the GOP-led Congress is too extreme. “Mr. President, a few months ago I asked my Republican colleagues if they had fallen down, hit their heads and thought they woke up in the 1950s”, Warren said.

“I’m extremely disappointed that Kelly Ayotte has consistently put corporate special interests and her party’s leadership ahead of New Hampshire, and that she has vowed to vote yet again to repeal New Hampshire’s bipartisan Medicaid expansion plan and defund Planned Parenthood”, Hassan said in a statement blasted out on Thursday morning. The rules do not require the bill to do only one thing, although GOP leadership is very clear that repealing Obamacare is its primary objective.

So it hasn’t been exactly smooth sailing to win over 51 Republican votes.

“The message here is to clarify to Republican voters, ahead of the presidential election, that all they need to eliminate the ghastly scourge of expanded access to medical care is a new, conservative butt in the Oval Office swivel chair”, he writes.