(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Forget for a moment that on Tuesday afternoon, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell delayed until after the July 4th recess a Senate vote to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Focus instead on this: Republicans’ ability to bring their health-care legislation to within a hairsbreadth of passage marks an underappreciated advance in the party’s ability to adapt to Donald Trump.
In the early months of Trump’s presidency, the unending chaos, drama, and scandal that the president produced was widely lamented by members of his party and almost universally blamed for inhibiting the Republicans’ legislative agenda. McConnell’s innovation was to use Trumpian chaos as a distraction while he secretly advanced an unpopular health-care bill that under normal circumstances would have been front-page news—and thus more difficult to pass.
Ordinarily, major legislation is introduced and debated in open committee for all to see. The Affordable Care Act is a good example. The Senate began debating its bill on Nov. 21, 2009, and didn’t pass the final version until the following December. During that time, according to the White House, “the Senate spent over 160 hours on the Senate floor considering health insurance reform legislation.” That public process exacted a toll, however, because it gave Republicans ample opportunity to demonize “Obamacare.”
McConnell, by contrast, took steps at every stage of the process to discourage attention. After the House passed its unpopular health-care bill in May, McConnell announced that the Senate would “start from scratch” (it didn’t). In the weeks that followed, he insisted that the path forward was unclear. Instead of an open committee process, he assigned a group of senators to write a bill in private.
And although the emerging Senate bill generated broad opposition among interest groups whose members stood to be affected by it—Republican governors, doctors, hospitals, and patient advocacy groups all criticized the effort, many of them because of its deep cuts to Medicaid—their concerns received scant attention until last week, when the bill was finally unveiled to the public. Instead, Trump’s attacks on James Comey, Robert Mueller, the media, and those criticizing him over the Russia scandal served as a political blast shield that allowed McConnell’s efforts to proceed out of the public eye.
Keeping the bill hidden from the glare of media coverage had a secondary benefit, too. It kept Trump, an inveterate cable-news addict, from reacting unhelpfully and thereby focusing attention on the legislation. Asked at the Koch brothers’ retreat in Colorado Springs on Sunday if Trump was doing enough to lobby senators to support the health-care bill, Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the second-ranking Republican, replied with admirable candor, “We're trying to hold him back a little bit.”
Of course, keeping Trump bottled up forever was never going to be possible. On Saturday he unleashed a characteristically menacing tweet: “I cannot imagine that these very fine Republican Senators would allow the American people to suffer a broken ObamaCare any longer!” That may have marked the high point of McConnell’s legislative efforts—at least for now. Three days after Trump’s tweet, McConnell was standing in front of the microphones announcing the vote’s delay.
But if Republicans don’t manage to repeal Obamacare, the fault won’t lie with Trump. As I wrote last week, the GOP was—and remains—hopelessly divided. Trump’s presidency often overshadows this fact, but it doesn’t change it.
As McConnell, who is Washington’s savviest operator, surely knows, a bill that appears dead can sometimes be resurrected and passed. That’s exactly what happened in the House. To get health care through the Senate, though, McConnell will need to engage in some delicate negotiating, a job that’s much tougher under the glare of the spotlight. That’s why an outburst from Trump—so long as it’s not over health care—would not be a disaster for McConnell at all, but rather his best chance to finish the job.
To contact the columnist of this story: Joshua Green in Washington at jgreen120@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Matthew Philips at mphilips3@bloomberg.net.
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