Rick Klein: “If this was a make-or-break moment, what the break part looks like can lead to all sorts of directions. It’s easy enough to imagine enough GOP tweaks and goodies to get to 50 Senate votes in a few weeks, with the conservative holdouts getting just enough of what they want to get health care passed. It’s also easy to foresee a restless, angry summer of town halls that makes it unlikely that anyone budges, leaving a tense status quo where presidential tweets stir the pot but not any action. But is it ridiculous to suggest there might be a moment for actual governing? Probably, but it doesn’t have to be that way.”
“With Democrats’ still backing Obamacare, and Republicans in the still-unfamiliar position of governing, every political leader has a stake in the health care laws, just as all their constituents did already. There are changes – even major ones – that could pass with supermajorities if slogans are just filtered out of the congressional water. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is talking about it as a backup option, though he’s making his declaration – ‘we’ll have to sit down withSchumer’ – sound more like a threat than a roadmap.”
First Read: “Under any other Senate GOP leader, we’d say that the Republican health care effort is dead. But Mitch McConnell isn’t any other GOP leader, and if someone can find a way to bridge the Rand Pauls/Mike Lees/Ted Cruzes with the Susan Collinses/Dean Hellers/Lisa Murkowskis, it’s McConnell. All of that said, time isn’t on McConnell’s side. As a Senate Republican crafting the legislation told us, more time doesn’t make passage easier. That’s why McConnell tried to ram through the legislation this week.”
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