Trump Threatens to Torch More Republicans
Having set aside health care to get to the easy win of tax reform, the White House has now seemingly set aside the not-so-easy tax reform to go back to health care. Now the President is threatening that he’ll withhold something called CSR payments to sabotage the Obamacare exchanges and in so doing force Democrats to the bargaining table.
These aren’t the subsidies that go directly to purchasers of insurance. They’re something called cost sharing reduction payments that support insurers directly. House Republicans had sued to block these payments under Obama but now appear to have decided they’re a good idea as long as they’re not going to be able to repeal Obamacare any time soon. “I don’t want people to get hurt,” said President Trump. “What I think should happen—and will happen—is the Democrats will start calling me and negotiating.”
Setting aside the moral calculus (where there’s little reason to have high expectations), what’s striking is the political calculus, or rather Trump’s inability to grasp the current political calculus. The upshot of the repeal debacle was that Republicans realized that they would take a big political hit if people lost what they’d gained under Obamacare. Everybody focused on the so-called “Freedom Caucus”. The truth is that it was really GOP moderates who killed repeal – certainly when you figure in both the House and the Senate. In many cases, these weren’t really moderates. They were folks like Sen. Tom Cotton, pretty diehard conservatives, who were nonetheless opposing the repeal bill from the left.