White House Preparing to Blame Ryan If Health Bill Fails, Official Says

“Our Founders established a government that strives toward compromise, and I applaud President Trump and Speaker Ryan on all of their hard work to strike that compromise”.

Ultimately, the votes never came together for a fractured GOP caucus, and Ryan traveled to the White House to tell Trump he was pulling the bill.

Update: The House pulled the bill from consideration Friday before a vote.

Democrats in the House are dead set against the bill, and it was unclear late last night whether Republican leaders had enough support from their own members to pass it, despite a series of last-minute sweeteners meant to broaden its appeal.

Republicans had hoped success in their long-held goal of repealing the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, would generate momentum and team spirit that would carry over into other fights.

Trump falsely claimed that ObamaCare “will soon explode”, and said, “I think the losers are Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, this is not Republican health care, this is Democrat health care”. “You don’t know where he’s going to be from day to day”.

Hurd’s quandary encapsulates the broader dilemma that Republican leadership has faced this week as they have attempted to reach a consensus on the bill.

“D-O-N-E done. This bill is dead”, said Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., who heads the House Energy and Commerce Committee. We need an open, transparent, and deliberate process. “The stakes for all Americans are simply too high”.

Democrats in New Mexico delegation have voiced their opposition to the bill, while Rep. Steve Pearce, a Republican, is uncommitted but has raised concerns about the legislation.

“With no Democrat support we couldn’t quite get there”, he told reporters in the Oval Office. We had no votes from the Democrats.

That’s all the “No” votes Ryan can afford from his Republican colleagues, and the outlook is pessimistic so far. “I think it’s a statement, not just about him and the administration, but about the Republican Party and where we’re headed”. But why, then, would the White House have agreed to support Ryan’s bill in the first place?

Ryan pulled the bill rather than go through with an embarrassing defeat.

The way Trump’s effort failed raises a larger question with consequences for the rest of his agenda: Does the president understand his own job description? It was the latest in a string of major setbacks to have hit his two-month-old presidency. It won’t be. Passage of a bill that’s polling at 56-17 against even before it’s begun taking health insurance from people isn’t a victory, it’s a devastating, possibly legacy-defining, loss in the making. There’s not much you can do to help it.

In the battles of the past – over the Export-Import Bank, over the debt ceiling and even over Obamacare funding – it was nearly always the heavyweight Wall Street-driven wing of the party that was crowned victorious in the internecine fight du jour within the GOP.

The Congressional Budget Office warned senators on Friday that recalculating the rewritten House bill could take a week or more to produce, said several officials familiar with the discussions, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

“Obamacare is in a death spiral and desperately needs to be repealed”, Rep. Jason Chaffetz said. And while we’re feeling those growing pains today, we came really close today.

It’s a delicate balancing act, but there’s still time left, and Trump’s gamble in leveling a pass-this-now-or-you’ll-get-Obamacare-forever ultimatum might have unseated some of the remaining fence-sitters. The status quo is not sustainable. “I will continue to work to ensure Americans have the best healthcare available another way”.

The drive represented the GOP’s first genuine opportunity to repeal Obama’s statute. The legislative stalemate endangers Trump’s and the GOP’s agenda and casts a cloud over the legislative path forward after an election waged nearly entirely as the antithesis to a progressive agenda enacted by former President Barack Obama, Trump’s predecessor.