‘Embarrassing’ Health-Bill Defeat Casts Doubt on GOP’s Can-Do Pledge, by Janet Hook.
The collapse of Republicans’ drive to repeal the Affordable Care Act is prompting a wave of GOP anger and anxiety across the country, as the defeat has widened divisions within the party and emboldened Democrats hoping for major gains in the 2018 midterm elections.
The implosion of legislation to remake the U.S. health-care system has Republicans worried not just because they have failed to deliver on a marquee campaign pledge, but because it casts doubt on the broader promise to be a can-do governing party after years in the opposition. …
Republicans split and angry:
The party splintered and turned on itself in the hours after the predawn Senate vote rejecting a last-ditch GOP health-care bill. House Republicans grumbled about their Senate counterparts. Conservatives complained about centrists who cast the deciding votes. And the chasm between congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump, who has threatened to help mount primary challenges to wayward Republicans, widened.
“The anger is palpable,” said Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, who said she got 200 emails from irate conservatives within hours of the vote. …
Mr. Trump said in aTwitter message that Congress should now let the health-care system fall into disarray, and hope that will drive Democrats to compromise. Congressional Republicans aren’t happy with that approach, and worry that the problems of the health-care system will weigh on their electoral prospects. …
“The GOP base won’t stand for being lied to for seven years,” said [GOP pollster Chris Wilson]. “The GOP has to do something that they can defend next fall. ‘We tried and failed, now re-elect us’ isn’t going to work.” …
Democrats appear to have won the health issue for now:
But many Republicans saw the Senate vote as the death knell for the party’s seven-year-old promise to repeal the Obama-era health law. It was a triumph for the Democratic Party and the anti-Trump “resistance” movement, whose demonstrations supporting the Affordable Care Act at congressional town-hall meetings pressured Republicans and helped boost the public’s once-tepid support for the law.
The GOP has no common vision about the future, because it is split between an establishment that goes along with the left (the B-team of PC progressiveness, the A-team being the Democrats) and the Tea Party that rejects PC.
It seems to be as bad as the British Tories or European right parties such as the Swedish Alliance, the French conservative parties, or the CDU in Germany.
The socialist – internationalist bureaucracies always have a long term vision of an unelected world government, and are steering the West — increasingly over the wishes of the electorate.
