Why Is the GOP Just Sitting Around on Repealing Obamacare After Winning the Impossible?

In other news, Congress has said it plans to debate repealing Obamacare, maybe sometime end of February, and “hopes” to have a bill end of March. Maybe not … the GOP could just keep stalling.

How many times have Republicans voted to repeal Obamacare in the last six years? Twenty, 30, 40 times? MSNBC claims it’s around 62. In 2015, Congress actually put a repeal bill on President Obama’s desk.
And now that Republicans control every lever of power in the legislative process, suddenly the task to repeal has become monumental. Not so when the GOP was in the minority.

It is not easy to name a member of Congress — or any GOP elected official — who has not run on repealing Obamacare. Certainly every House Republican worth his or her salt is already on record voting for a full repeal — that is, back when there was no danger of those bills seeing daylight. As one member recently phrased it: “We’re playing with live rounds this time.”

The prospect of making a difference has resulted in schoolboy stage fright. The chance to win has made our guys terrified of facing the other team’s fans in the parking lot.

Campaign pledges to do away with the Affordable Care Act were not always, nor even often, married to specific replacement plans. It was widely acknowledged from the start that repealing the law would leave room for debate over the best market-based solutions. Well, Republicans got their chance. Voters believed them. And within five weeks, the repeal movement has smashed up against barriers erected by the very members who ran and won on the promise of ACTION.

A repeal bill would not pit the country against the party — that is only what the opposition wants us to believe. What is certain to damage the party, perhaps irreparably, is a stalled Congress, an impotent executive, and a surviving health care law that continues to wreak havoc on a country that has stridently rejected it. Leave the law where it is, and the GOP flushes its mandate. There are too many other things to accomplish — and such little time to see them through — for this party to squander its credibility on the one issue it can wipe out with a two-page bill.

In the age of Trevor Noah, Lena Dunham, and John Oliver, elected Republicans have my sympathies. Liberal elites control the levers of culture, and as such, it is hard not to believe that after the non-stop bombardment from liberal media, even when in power, that one is governing in direct opposition to the wishes of a hostile electorate. But it is an illusion. Trump won because he saw the illusion for what it was. He ignored the ache of bad press, shaking off the weight on his shoulders intensified by a media-biased bubble. He proved that if you simply press on and do what you told the voters you would do, the voters will keep up their end. They will show their appreciation by showing up for you.

Republicans must learn this lesson, if no other. (For more from the author of “Why Is the GOP Just Sitting Around on Repealing Obamacare After Winning the Impossible?” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.