NATION
Wednesday, July 19, 2017
‘Let Obamacare fail,’ Trump
declares as GOP plan collapses
WASHINGTON (AP) — President
Donald Trump declared Tuesday it’s
time to “let Obamacare fail” after the
latest GOP health care plan crashed and
burned in the Senate, a stunning failure
for the president, Republican leader
Mitch McConnell and a party that has
vowed for years to abolish the law.
In a head-spinning series of devel-
opments, rank-and-file Republican
senators turned on McConnell and
Trump for the third time in a row,
denying the votes to move forward
with a plan for a straight-up repeal of
“Obamacare.” This time, it was three
GOP women — Susan Collins of
Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and
Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia
— who delivered the death blow.
All had been shut out of McCon-
nell’s initial all-male working group on
health care.
McConnell, who could afford to lose
only two votes in the narrowly divided
Senate, had turned to the repeal-only
bill after his earlier repeal-and-replace
measure was rejected on Monday. That
had followed the failure of an earlier
version of the bill last month.
The successive defeats made clear
that despite seven years of promises
to repeal former President Barack
Obama’s Affordable Care Act,
Republicans apparently cannot deliver.
Nonetheless, McConnell insisted he
would move forward with a vote on his
measure to repeal the law, effective in
two years, with a promise to work —
along with Democrats — to replace it
in the meantime.
The vote to move ahead to the
bill will take place early next week,
McConnell announced late Tuesday.
It appears doomed to fail, but GOP
leaders want to put lawmakers on
record on the issue and move on.
At the White House, Trump
appeared to recognize defeat, at least
for the moment, while insisting he bore
none of the blame.
“I think we’re probably in that posi-
tion where we’ll just let Obamacare
fail,” the president said. “We’re not
going to own it. I’m not going to own
it. I can tell you that the Republicans
are not going to own it. We’ll let
Obamacare fail and then the Democrats
are going to come to us and they’re
going to say, ‘How do we fix it?”’
White House press secretary Sean
Spicer said Tuesday night that all GOP
senators have been invited to the White
AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky., center, joined by, from
left, Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., Sen. Roy
Blunt, R-Mo., and Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas, speaks
during a news conference on Capitol Hill Tuesday.
House tomorrow for lunch to discuss
the way forward on health care.
Despite the current law’s problems,
most health care experts do not believe
it is at immediate risk of outright
failure, and Democratic cooperation to
adjust the law is far from assured.
Nor does it appear likely that Repub-
licans can escape owning the problems
with the law and the health care system
overall, now that they control the
House, Senate and White House, partly
on the strength of campaigning against
the law.
“They seem to have this notion that
they can be a majority party, and have
control of the White House, and not
be responsible for bringing down the
health care system,” said Democratic
Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois. “It doesn’t
work that way.”
Asked how he would justify the
GOP’s failure on health care to voters,
McConnell responded: “Well, we
have a new Supreme Court justice”
— suggesting inaction on health care
would be forgiven because of that
success along with some regulatory
roll-backs.
As the day began Tuesday,
McConnell was hunting for votes to
open debate on a revived version of
legislation Congress sent to Obama’s
desk in 2015 that would have repealed
major portions of Obamacare, with a
two-year delay built in. He had turned
to that approach after getting stunned
Monday night by defections by Sens.
Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of
Kansas on a repeal-and-replace bill.
Many Republicans support the
repeal-only approach, and they ques-
tioned how senators who voted for the
legislation two years ago could oppose
it now.
“We’re going to find out if there’s
hypocrisy in the United States Senate
in the next few days I’m afraid,” said
Sen. David Perdue, R-Georgia.
But for others, the implications
were too severe now that the bill could
actually become law with a Republican
president in the White House ready
to sign it. The Congressional Budget
Office has estimated that more than 30
million people would lose insurance
over a decade under the legislation.
Collins voted against the legislation
in 2015 while Murkowski and Capito
both supported it. Murkowski told
reporters Tuesday that repealing the
Affordable Care Act without the
promise of a replacement would cause
uncertainty and chaos.
“To just say repeal and ‘Trust us,
we’re going to fix it in a couple of
years,’ that’s not going to provide
comfort to the anxiety that a lot of
Alaskan families are feeling right
now,” she said.
Said Capito: “I did not come to
Washington to hurt people.”
East Oregonian
Page 7A
BRIEFLY
Trump had second
conversation with
Putin in Germany
WASHINGTON (AP)
— President Donald Trump
had another, previously
undisclosed conversation
with Russian President
Vladimir Putin at a summit
in Germany this month.
White House spokesman
Sean Spicer and National
Security Council spokesman
Michael Anton confirmed
that Trump and Putin spoke
at a dinner for world leaders
and their spouses at the
Group of 20 summit in
Hamburg, Germany.
The conversation
came hours after Trump
and Putin’s first official
face-to-face meeting on
July 7, which was originally
scheduled to last just half
an hour but stretched on
for more than two. The two
world leaders were also
captured on video shaking
hands and exchanging a few
words after they arrived at
the G-20 summit that day.
Anton would not
specify the duration of
the conversation. But
he said the discussion
was casual and should
not be characterized as a
“meeting.”
“A conversation over
dessert should not be
characterized as a meeting,”
he said.
The dinner, hosted
by German Chancellor
Angela Merkel, was open
only to world leaders and
their spouses, as well as
one translator per couple,
according to a senior
White House official who
described the event on
condition of anonymity.
The official stressed that
Trump spoke with many
leaders over the course
of the dinner and said he
spoke briefly with Putin,
who was seated next to first
lady Melania Trump, as
the event was concluding.
Trump spoke with Putin
using Russia’s translator,
since the American
translator did not speak
Russian.
But Ian Bremmer, who
said he spoke with two
people who attended the
dinner, said that Trump and
Putin spoke for nearly an
hour while sitting among
the other world leaders and
their spouses at the dinner.
Bremmer is a foreign affairs
columnist and the president
of the Eurasia Group, a
consulting firm.
Attendees described the
meeting as startling, said
Bremmer, who was told
Trump was very animated
as he spoke with Putin.
Trump to nominate
Huntsman as U.S.
ambassador to Russia
WASHINGTON (AP)
— President Donald Trump
announced his intention
Tuesday to nominate former
Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman
to be U.S. ambassador to
Russia.
If confirmed, the former
2012 GOP presidential
candidate would take over
a high-profile post amid
ongoing investigations into
Russian meddling in the
2016 election and potential
contacts between Russian
officials and the Trump
campaign.
Huntsman has twice
served as an ambassador.
He was the nation’s top
diplomat to Singapore
under President George
H.W. Bush and then served
in that role in China under
President Barack Obama
before returning to the U.S.
to run for president.
Huntsman was also
under consideration to be
Trump’s secretary of state.
The former governor, a
Mormon, had an up-and-
down relationship with
Trump during last year’s
campaign. He was slow to
endorse any candidate for
the Republican nomination
though he did back Trump
once he became the
presumptive nominee. But
Huntsman then called for
Trump to drop out after
the October release of a
2005 video in which Trump
was captured on a hot
microphone making lewd
comments about women.
OPEN HOUSE
July 20th, 4-7 PM
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