Senate Does Not Have Votes To Repeal Obama Care
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is CNN breaking news.</s>DON LEMON, CNN TONIGHT NEWS SHOW HOST: Breaking news, the move to repeal Obamacare collapses. This is CNN tonight". I'm Don Lemon. The senate does not have the votes to pass a health care bill. Tonight President Trump reacting on Twitter, calling on Republicans to repeal Obamacare now and just start from a clean slate, can that happen? We'll discuss now. I want to begin this hour with CNN White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins and political commentator David Swerdlick. Good evening to both of you both. This is from the senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. He said regretfully, it is now an apparent that the effort to repeal and immediately replace the failure of Obamacare will not be successful. He said the next move will be in the coming days the senate will vote to take up the house bill with the first amendment in order being what a majority of the senate has already supported in 2015 and that was vetoed by then President Obama. A repeal of Obamacare with a two-year delay to provide for a stable transition position to a patient-centered health care system that gives Americans access to quality affordable care. What do you make of his statement?</s>KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, we're seeing Mitch McConnell throw in the towel on repeal and replace which is really surprising, because this is something that Republicans have promised for several years. And now with the President's tweet also calling for repeal and replace sounds a lot different than what he was saying in January when he said that the Obamacare would be repealed and replaced immediately within hours. Now we're looking at a whole new thing that didn't have a lot of support in January when it was first broached. We're not thinking it's going to have a lot of support now, but they want to at least say had he tried, because this is something they've promised hair constituents for years.</s>LEMON: So David, so replace it with what? It sounds like he is saying there is some interim way that it can go from one thing, they can repeal it and work with something in the interim till they come up with something better. Explain that.</s>DAVID SWERDLICK, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Don, can I take a step back and say the Republicans in congress and President Trump have the same problem they had going all the way back to inauguration day and before. President Obama passed a bill that was basically Mitt Romney's health care plan that at one time was a Republican health care plan. If Democrats had done something that was more liberal, if they had done Medicare for all, Republicans would probably be trying to replace it right now with what is now Obamacare. That is problem one. Problem number two for the Republicans is Republicans didn't expect to be in the position they're in and so they've talked a lot over the last however many years about getting rid of Obamacare, repeal and replace without having that alternative plan and problem number three is that the President's natural position, Don, is to actually favor health coverage for more people. He has said going back to 2000, 17 years ago, he wrote in his book "the America we deserve," that he was a conservative on most issues but he was a liberal on this one. He wanted to cover more people. Now he is leading a party though that has a bill that essentially will shrink care according to the CBO. So it's an unnatural position for the President and he has not campaigned forcefully for it. That is where we are right now.</s>LEMON: Kaitlan, will they have the votes if Mitch McConnell wants to do, will they have the votes for a straight repeal.</s>COLLINS: It's not likely. It will give them the chance to say they tried. Tonight as these Senators, Mike Leann Jerry Moran said they were not going to support this bill, Donald Trump and Mike Pence were hosting other Senators at the White House in hopes of getting more support for the bill. They're really starting over here. These Senators said they weren't going to support any kind of changes to this bill and they wanted to start from scratch. Mitch McConnell definitely has his hands full with this.</s>LEMON: David, how do you repeal something? He says what he wanted to do. He wants to do -- the first amendment in order of being what a majority of the senate has already supported in 2015 that was vetoed by then President Obama. So this is something they tried in 2015. That was vetoed by President Obama. A repeal of Obamacare with a two- year delay to provide for a stable transition period, a patient centered health care system that gives Americans access to quality affordable care. You're going to replace it with something you don't know what it is. How is that going to fly among their constituents? How do they go back home and say we don't know what to replace it but we're definitely going to repeal it and that is good enough?</s>SWERDLICK: That is what the two year delay is for to get them past the 2018 midterms to soften the blow of having to explain that to constituents out there. You have a Republican constituency that is still as Selena said in your large segment largely with the President who has been conditioned to think of Obamacare as terrible. It has a lot of problems, we know, but the problem is without having that replacement for it and potentially repealing it and upsetting insurance markets is what Republicans are trying to avoid and at the same time, keeping the promise to their base that they were going to get rid of Obamacare because Obamacare was so bad.</s>LEMON: The President talked about repealing Obamacare just this afternoon. I want you to take a listen to this.</s>DONALD TRUMP, THE 45TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We do have to repeal Obamacare. And we will end up replacing it with something that is going to be outstanding, far, far better than failing Obamacare. The Republican Senators are great people. But they have a lot of different states. Some states need this. Some states need that. But we're getting it together and it's going to happen. Right, Mike?</s>MIKE PENCE, VICE PRESIDENTIAL-ELECT OF THE UNITED STATES: Yes, sir. I think.</s>LEMON: Yeah. Right, Mike? Yes, sir. Okay, I think. Republicans -- what did you make that have moment? They promised to repeal Obamacare for seven years now.</s>SWERDLICK: Yeah, Don and lets me give you one number from our ABC/"Washington Post" poll out today. That is that by 50 to 24, Americans are saying they prefer the current affordable care act to whatever the sort of unknown Republican replacement is. There are 25 percent who are saying they don't want either. I think it's fair to say over the last however many years, Obamacare is unpopular and has a lot of problems and needs fixes, even Democrats will tell you that. The problem is when you look at that clip from President Trump, you just don't see exactly what had he want to replace it with.</s>LEMON: Tonight the President tweeted saying I think they should just repeal it and then the Democrats will come along. Come along. Let's bring our panel in. More of our players, CNN political commentator Peter Beinart, Bakari Sellers and Scott Jennings joins us as well, Margaret Hoover. The failure of repeal and replace in the senate and what will come next. Peter?</s>PETER BEINART, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I think this is really a historic moment. It shows that the Republican assault on Obamacare playing out since it got passed probably will never end up succeeding in destroying it. And the question was why Republicans didn't see the writing on wall earlier. This has been incredibly unpopular from the beginning and not what Donald Trump ran on. I mean, if there was a message for Republicans in Donald Trump's primary campaign it's that what the Republican's Party's own voters were motivated by were issues like immigration and not an effort to repeal a health care bill that for all its flaws is actually benefiting a lot of them.</s>LEMON: Margaret?</s>MARGARET HOOVER, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: The only place I push back on that is certainly Trump voters may have different motivations for voting for Trump than traditional Republicans. Remember, 90 percent of Republicans voted ford Donald Trump. Even though this man professed everybody knew -- but just as many Republicans have in the Republican Party voted for a free market solution to health care for fixing Obamacare. I mean all the other candidates ---</s>BEINART: He was the primary guy who said I'm not going to touch Medicare or Medicaid.</s>HOOVER: The Republican Party is divided.</s>BEINART: That is the problem.</s>HOOVER: That is exactly why we're here in this moment. That is frankly, this is a deeply tragic moment from the perspective of a center right person who believes we should have as close to universal health care as possible through the free market and free market solutions. And that fixing some of the problems with Obamacare was necessary but ultimately, reorganizing the incentive structure, the transparency in the health care system, and the ability to be able to truly purchase and have freedom in had your health care rather than moving closer and closer to single payer which we have in a third of our economy when you consider veterans and veterans affairs and Medicare and Medicaid.</s>LEMON: Bakari it, sounds like if we can't get this, now we're going to do this. Now we're going to do this. We have to do something. Is that what's going on here?</s>BAKARI SELLERS, FORMER HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES: I think most Democrats people part of the resistance are probably popping champagne and celebrating. I would warn them and guard them against that because this is not a moment to celebrate. I mean, I know that the Republican Party has had seven years to come up with some idea and all they have been the Party of no, the opposition Party. And they haven't been able to come up with some policy that they can pass. However, right now, if the Republican Party is successful in simply repealing Obamacare, I guarantee you our markets Obama markets are going to further be destabilized, economic markets destabilized and we're going to have a problem. I know that Corker, Alexander, and Cotton voted against this and a few of moderates voted against this repeal before. I expect that to be the same way. Just maybe something that Margaret has been looking for, something I have been looking for a very long period of time, Democrats and Republicans will come together in a bipartisan fashion and begin to work ways to fix Obamacare. Obamacare is not going anywhere. It's here to stay. It helps too many people. And unless we come together and start thinking about a transparent process which we can fix Obamacare, then Republicans will continue to fail.</s>LEMON: Scott?</s>SCOTT JENNINGS, POLITICAL ANALYST: I'm thinking about the grassroots conservatives who wrote checks to and voted for Republican members of congress all over this country on a simple promise to repeal and replace Obamacare and the fact that the United States senate couldn't even get to a place where they could open up the floor to debate and amend and have a free-wheeling discussion of this bill is going to disappoint a lot of them. There are now new plans in the water tonight that are unsure. We're unsure if the votes to do that. So I just, I think about seven years of elections where Republicans went to the polls thinking they were voting for people who wanted to repeal and replace Obamacare and they must be thinking tonight are they serious about this or not right now, I'm not sure they are.</s>SWERDLICK: I was going to say, this whole conversation is pointing out the fundamental tension for Republicans. Margaret is right. 90 percent of Republican voters voted for President Trump in your "Washington Post" poll, 82 percent of Republicans are still with the President. And but the problem is, President Trump didn't campaign on a conservative policy platform, because he is not a conservative. What Scott is saying is right. You have members of congress who did campaign on a smaller government, let's get rid of Obamacare platform and these two things are not quite meshing up to get them to the 50 votes that they need in the senate and then a bill that they can merge with the house bill which was probably more conservative.</s>HOOVER: I think that analysis is right, but the pain problem is that the reason this failed wasn't because of the tension between Trump and the conservatives. This failed because of conservatives and moderates. There isn't a Trump health care policy that is vying for ink at the table here. The problem is Trump was absent. There was no bully pulpit in the presidency pushing this policy through. He was hand writing tonight with three Senators at the White House but he needed to do that, two weeks ago instead of attacking MSNBC anchors. He should have been driving his agenda and trying to force Senators to feel they had to go along with the Republican health care policy.</s>BEINART: Why did Trump take this on to begin with? Given that he has no enthusiasm for it? And you know if --</s>LEMON: It was great campaign rhetoric. We'll do it on day one, repeal and replace.</s>BEINART: But if Donald Trump, again, it's a little bit like Bill Clinton. When Bill Clinton, if Donald Trump had pushed infrastructure, right, he could have created a different kind of coalition with his voters and maybe some Democrats as well. Instead, he had enthusiasm for this, if he understood it, if it was Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio but this isn't who Donald Trump is.</s>SELLERS: That is the major point. Margaret and Peter both hit the nail on the head. I always think back to 2009 when Barack Obama went to the press conference, he stood in the well and he sat there and deliberated and talked and answered questions for 50 minutes on what was in Obamacare. What was in the affordable care act? There is no Republican that is leading this charge. You have Mike Leann Ted Cruz out here on a limb, Senator McConnell doing his own thing, Paul Ryan doing his own thing. There's no force there driving the Party. Barack Obama was that force and that is why the affordable care act got passed. Donald Trump, I mean, with all due respect in his ability to speak to the common man does not have any idea about health care policy. That is an apparent and because he doesn't know or that knowledge base, it's not necessarily an indictment against him. It's not his bailiwick. But to start off with that first piece of major legislation, you have to be a drum major for something. They're a banded with no drum majors. That is the Republican Party.</s>LEMON: Do you want to respond to that, Scott? Because you know, they're saying that you're saying that the voter, the conservative voter who voted for Donald Trump thought they were going to repeal and replace. Might they have not understood that Donald Trump didn't have a passion for this or maybe he didn't understand exactly how health care works, would and maybe they didn't understand how Obamacare, would. If you look what's happening now according to this poll this "Washington Post" ABC poll, Obamacare is more popular than ever. It is 50 percent for Obamacare, 24 percent prefer the GOP plan.</s>JENNINGS: If Obamacare is so popular. I don't understand how Republicans took control of the congress, won the White House. If Obamacare was as popular as people want us to believe, Democrats ought to be in charge of the entire federal government because Republicans made a staple of their campaigns for the last seven years we're going to repeal and replace Obamacare.</s>LEMON: You just made the point. Might they have not, that I asked you? Might they have not understood exactly what was in Obamacare and how tough it might be to repeal and replace it and they voted on a campaign slogan, of repeal and replace, not necessarily understanding how this really works.</s>JENNINGS: Yeah, it's a good question and a good point. I think the slogan worked. I do think maybe we oversimplified it as a Republican Party. We told people it was going to be easy to repeal and replace Obamacare. Obviously, it's not that easy. But that doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't be done. I think that is where the disappointment among the grassroots conservatives will lie. Whether it's easy or hard, they didn't vote for people to come back and say well, we tried. Sorry. They vote for people to go and solve problems and make major changes in Washington no matter how arduous it is. I think that is the real impact on the 2018 midterm. If the Republican Party doesn't figure out how to get this done, then are the grassroots conservatives, the base conservatives who they depend on in the midterm elections will they turn out? Because there's going to be a level of disappointment here that is really high. I think people are underestimating just how high the disappointment is going to be among people who want to see this happen.</s>LEMON: Everyone, hold your thoughts. We have another segment with you guys. Stay with me everyone. When we come right back, the White House can't get its story straight on Donald Trump Jr., his meeting with that Russian lawyer before the election year and a blistering editorial from a conservative newspaper with a warning for the White House. Come clean or else.