After big promises, Republicans run into Obamacare repeal reality

WASHINGTON — Republicans last week absorbed a bruising lesson: Governing is hard.

After years of symbolic votes to undo the Affordable Care Act, the GOP, with control of the White House, Senate, and House, has struggled to scrap the health law when it actually counted, leaving a defining campaign pledge on the brink of failure.

"The ground shifted the moment President Trump was elected, but there's a whole lot of members that haven't caught up with that," said Josh Holmes, former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.).

It's a new experience for many Republicans.

Of the 52 Republican senators, only 21 had ever worked in the Senate with a Republican president before this year. An additional 28 had only served in the Senate with Barack Obama at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, and three joined the chamber just this January.

"You've got a whole bunch of members that are basically trained, or at least have been experiencing gratification, from a base constituency by saying everything's not good enough," Holmes said.

The question is whether the stuttering health push foreshadows debilitating dysfunction as Republicans try to make good on other priorities and show that they can handle the power that voters have given them.

GOP senators are still trying to scratch together a last-ditch effort on health care, planning a procedural vote early this week as a summer recess looms with no major legislative achievements. Meanwhile, in the House, Republicans are at odds over critical spending bills, as a series of fiscal deadlines looms this fall, and the party is eyeing another complex push, overhauling the tax code.

If failure on health care bleeds into those efforts, Holmes warned, the party could face dire consequences.

"It will hurt to not get health care done," he said. "It will be a huge problem if you enter midterms with a very real perception that the party cannot govern."

The false starts, of course, could become footnotes if the GOP eventually reaches it goals. But either way, the first six months of the Trump administration have served up a reminder of the gap between opposing laws and proposing them, of attacking other people's plans and trying to enact your own, with all the resulting real-world impacts.

"It's far easier to be against something than to be for something and to amalgamate all the different interests that exist to try to get a majority for something," said Sen. Robert Menendez (D., N.J.), who in more than 20 years in Congress has spent time both pressing to pass legislation in the majority and fighting against it in the minority.

It was "easy to have the rhetorical flourish of 'repeal and replace,' " Menendez said. "Now they have the reality that in fact somebody will sign something they send to them," and the policies enacted will affect real people.

So even though Republicans voted overwhelmingly in 2015 to repeal the health law commonly called Obamacare – knowing it would be vetoed by Obama – a handful of GOP senators who supported that move have balked in recent weeks, worried about the now-tangible implications for many thousands in their states that have gained health insurance.

"As the minority, you have the luxury of voting no on anything you want to vote no on, you have the luxury of complaining about the majority and its leadership not getting things done because nobody wants to include you as part of the solution," said Jim Gerlach, a former Republican congressman from Chester County. "When you take on the majority status, you really do have a responsibility to find ways to move the ball down the field and make things happen. And I happen to believe that sometimes means you have to work with the other side of the aisle."

The House provides some hope for Senate Republicans. There, the GOP also fell flat in its first repeal attempt, but succeeded on a second try.

"Moving from an opposition party to a governing party comes with growing pains," Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) said in March after the initial failure.

In part, the challenge facing Republicans is the perennial problem for politicians who make bold promises while campaigning only to run into the gritty realities in office of building coalitions, policy trade-offs, competing priorities, and a limited window for action.

"Governing in a democracy that's roughly split between two parties is hard work," said Rep. Tom MacArthur (R., N.J.), who helped revive the House plan.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) recently said it was "a valid criticism" to question why the GOP wasn't more prepared. In part, he said, it's because Republicans didn't think they'd have all this power.

"I didn't expect Donald Trump to win, I think most of my colleagues didn't, so we didn't expect to be in this situation," he said in a televised question-and-answer session earlier this month.

Other Republicans downplayed the idea that they were learning on the job.

The very nature of a majority means having a broad conference with disparate views from different regions and sections of the political spectrum.

"You've got 52 people from different states," said Sen. Bob Corker (R., Tenn.). "The bulk of people are ready to go, so you've got a small group having some issues and hopefully we can get them resolved."

And health care is a hugely complex issue – one that has long defied easy solutions for either party. Democrats wrangled for months to pass the ACA, even with total control in Washington.

"It's unique to health care, because this is a very personal issue," said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.).

He said the problem was trying to push an unpopular bill.

But they will keep trying. Another health vote is planned for this week, and others have raised hopes that tax reform may be easier as Republicans try to show they can turn promises into action.