Senate Republicans are in denial that repeal without replacement is dead

He said their work to repeal the law is what has helped Republicans gain control of the presidency and Congress.

He added, “As I have always said, let ObamaCare fail and then come together and do a great healthcare plan”. It’s anyone’s guess. As Axios notes, the repeal wouldn’t be able to include “all of the insurance regulations conservatives say they hate”. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, had already disavowed the bill.

Appearing on Fox News as McConnell’s last-ditch effort collapsed around him, Utah Senator Mike Lee said, “I simply refuse to accept the suggestion that the votes wouldn’t be there”.

Another day, another excruciating setback for the Republican Party. That meant that at least four of the 52 GOP senators were ready to block the measure – two more than Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had to spare in the face of unanimous Democratic opposition.

“As I have said before, I did not come to Washington to hurt people”, Capito said in a statement. I can tell you the people back at home, your listeners, They don’t understand why we didn’t have a bill on the president’s desk on January 20 and quite frankly neither do I.

“They’re responsible for being unwilling to work with Republicans in any capacity to fix a system that they know is completely flawed and have publicly said so”.

What makes the ongoing legislative health care debacle more embarrassing and consequential than, for instance, President Trump’s uphill struggle to build a wall along the Mexican border, is that abolishing Obama’s signature piece of legislation – unlike the president’s border wall idea – was longstanding Republican policy.

“There’s an urgency here for OH, and the best approach I think is to continue to work with my colleagues in the hopes that we can come together around a replacement plan that actually works to address these problems”.

“The healthcare hurdle pushes everything in Trump’s agenda to 2018”, said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at Wunderlich Securities in NY.

In 2015, the Congressional Budget Office report on the repeal bill found that in just the first year after repeal, 18-19 million people would lose health coverage.

“We certainly can’t drop health care though”, Cotton said.

“I’m not going to own it”, Trump insisted. McConnell said this to a group of reporters after three Senate Republicans announced Tuesday morning that they would vote no to even start debate for a repeal plan.

Republicans had hoped to finish with healthcare before an upcoming August recess so they could tackle a wide-ranging rewrite of the USA tax code in September. But Republicans’ slim majority in the Senate isn’t going to get any bigger before the 2018 midterm elections, and it could get smaller after that.

The answer is shockingly simple: Republican voters do not actually want health-care reform – and these elected officials are just doing the bidding of their constituents.

“The door to bipartisanship is open right now, Republicans only need to walk through it”, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Tuesday on the Senate floor, according to a transcript of the speech prepared for delivery. Eliminating the deduction would raise about $1.3 trillion over the next decade, which could pay for a lot of other tax cuts.

Democrats have repeatedly slammed McConnell and other GOP leaders for crafting a healthcare plan in secret.

Rep. Leonard Lance, a five-term Republican from New Jersey, is leading the effort to keep the deduction.

Even then it was becoming apparent that the White House was out of the loop.