Thursday, May 18, 2017

House May Be Forced to Vote Again on Obamacare Repeal Bill

This really is a circus act.

House Speaker Paul Ryan hasn’t yet sent the bill to the Senate, according to Bloomberg,  because there’s a chance that parts of it may need to be redone, depending on how the Congressional Budget Office estimates its effects.

House leaders want to make sure the bill conforms with Senate rules for reconciliation, a mechanism that allows Senate Republicans to pass the bill with a simple majority.

The first vote was rushed and take before the CBO had scored it.

The CBO is expected to release an updated estimate next week.

But leadership has been keeping members in the dark.

From Bloomberg:
:"Unaware," said Representative Jeff Denham of California, with noticeable surprise Thursday, when advised that his party leaders still hadn’t sent the bill over to the Senate. Denham was one of the House Republicans who ended up voting for the measure, after earlier in the week opposing it.
"I am on the whip team and we have a lot of conversations, but we have not had that one. So I am going to look into it," said Denham, a member of the party’s vote-counting team. 
   And the details:

 According to several aides and other procedural experts, if Republicans send the bill to the Senate now and the CBO later concludes it doesn’t save at least $2 billion, it would doom the bill and Republicans would have to start their repeal effort all over with a new budget resolution. Congressional rules would likely prevent Republicans from fixing the bill after it’s in the Senate, the aides said.

If Republican leaders hold onto the bill until the CBO report is released, then Ryan and his team could still redo it if necessary. That would require at least one more House vote of some sort.

That vote could be cloaked in some kind of arcane procedural move, but it would still be depicted as a proxy for yet another vote on the same bill -- and reluctant Republicans will once again be forced to decide whether to back it. Only this time, they would also be saddled with the CBO’s latest findings about the bill’s costs and impacts.
  -RW 

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