Last week we cited poll results in Repeal and replace took a big hit -- poll says 71% want Republicans to work with Democrats to improve Obamacare. The prediction in that post was that the Obamacare project in the Senate would likely fail with that poll in the minds of Senators. Sure enough, it happened -- there weren't enough Senators who favored a motion to proceed.
What comes next? Reps and Dems working together on it. What are the odds?
Hugh Hewitt may have been reading the same tea leaves. Here he is in Why Ryan and McConnell should go for a big deal with Democrats:
A “watch it fail” approach to Obamacare, when the crisis is real and the consequences for poor children are so enormous, is not just bad politics; it is also immoral.
The alternative to waiting for 2019 is a bipartisan approach — if Democrats will have it. A health-care deal could be done, leaving the fringes of both party caucuses on the outside looking in. ...
The GOP Congress has failed. Unless there’s a Lazarus-like resurrection of the health-care bill, the session is effectively over.
He concludes with this:
The 2018 prospects look bad for both parties: The GOP lacks policy victories, thanks to imprudent Freedom Caucus members and scared moderates. The Democrats are lost in Trump hatred to the point where a large part of the country thinks that they and the mainstream media are deranged. Both parties have cause for concern. We are at a crisis point where citizens are giving up on representative government en masse. So why not swing for the fences?
They'll end up doing whatever their internal polling leads them to do.
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9:00 AM 7/19/2017
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