Republicans Are Still Seven Votes Shy On Health Care

Perry Bacon Jr. wrote this article for FiveThirtyEight as part of a series chronicling the attempted repeal of the Affordable Care Act in 2017.

Republicans appear to be at least seven votes short of the 50 they need to get a health care bill through the Senate, which is basically where they were when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell unveiled a draft bill more than two weeks ago.

Soon after the draft bill’s release, one bloc of GOP senators (Ted Cruz of Texas, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky) argued that the bill was insufficiently conservative and did not repeal enough of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

A separate bloc of more moderate Republican senators (Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Susan Collins of Maine, Dean Heller of Nevada and Rob Portman of Ohio) said the bill was too conservative. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, another more moderate Republican, has been noncommittal about backing the bill.

There are 52 Republicans in the Senate — the bill has no support from non-GOP senators — so leadership can afford to lose only two in a vote (with Vice President Mike Pence as the tiebreaker to push the tally to 51). If this process were going well for Republicans, by now some of the hesitant members would have proposed changes to the bill, McConnell would have said he is adopting those changes, and these members would say they were voting for the bill, pending those changes. That full cycle has not happened yet with any of these nine members. Some have publicly proposed ideas that McConnell has not yet said he will adopt, presumably because he knows those ideas won’t fly with other members. Others have not, at least publicly, given any kind of wish list, suggesting that they would like the bill to die.

I would say Republicans are stuck in neutral, except that they might be moving backward, adding opponents to the legislation. Two stalwart Republican senators (North Dakota’s John Hoeven and Kansas’s Jerry Moran) criticized the McConnell bill last week, although I’m skeptical that either would be a “no” if the legislation moved to a vote.