Taking a third stab at repealing Obamacare, the Republican party performed a hat-trick failing once again.
Facing assured defeat, Republican leaders decided Tuesday not to even hold a vote on the GOP’s latest attempt to repeal the Obama health care law aka Obamacare, surrendering on their last-gasp effort to deliver on the party’s banner campaign promise.
Leaving a lunch of Republican senators who’d gathered to discuss their next steps on the Obamacare issue, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and other leaders decided that “the votes are not there, not to have the vote.” Another lawmaker leaving the gathering, Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., shook his head and said, “No,” when asked if a roll call would occur.
The decision marked the latest defeat on the issue for President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. In July, the Republican-controlled Senate rejected three similar GOP measures, a failure that infuriated conservatives and prompted Trump to spend much of his summer tweeting criticism at McConnell for falling short.
One of the measure’s sponsors, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said the GOP fight to erase President Barack Obama’s 2010 health care overhaul would continue.
“We’re going to get there,” he said. “We’re going to fulfill our promise.”
Rejection became all but inevitable on Monday after Maine GOP Sen. Susan Collins announced she opposed the legislation to repeal Obamacare. She joined Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Texas’ Ted Cruz who’d already said they opposed the measure. Cruz aides said he was seeking changes that would let him vote yes.
Because of their narrow majority and unified Democratic opposition, Republicans can lose just two GOP votes and still push the legislation through the Senate. A vote or a decision by McConnell, R-Ky., to forego a roll call was needed this week because procedural protections against a bill-killing filibuster by Democrats expire Sunday.
In choosing whether to hold the roll call, McConnell had to pick between some Republicans arguing that lawmakers can’t be seen as abandoning a pledge that Trump and countless GOP have run on, and others challenging the value of shining a fresh spotlight on their inability to pass the repeal Obamacare bill.
The abandoned bill would transform much of “Obamacare’s” spending into grants that states could spend on health programs with few constraints.
Donald Trump Creates Fake Twitter News
When President Donald Trump tweeted on Saturday that Iran had “just test-fired” a missile, he seemed to know something the rest of the government did not. It turns out, he did not.
Iran just test-fired a Ballistic Missile capable of reaching Israel.They are also working with North Korea.Not much of an agreement we have!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 23, 2017
There was no Iranian ballistic missile launch, three U.S. officials said Tuesday.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard had used a military parade on Friday to display its Khoramshahr medium-range ballistic missile, which is capable of reaching Israel and much of the Middle East. That same day, video of the test firing of a Khoramshahr aired on Iranian state TV. The time or location of the test was not mentioned in the report, and it appears that the video footage was from a failed Iranian missile test earlier this year.
Twitter cited President Donald Trump’s “newsworthiness” and the public interest as reasons why it declined to remove a tweet that added to the fiery rhetoric between the United States and North Korea.
Trump tweeted Saturday : “Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at U.N. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won’t be around much longer!” On Monday, North Korea’s top diplomat called the tweet a declaration of war. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders responded by calling the suggestion of such a declaration “absurd.”
Twitter’s rules state users “may not make threats of violence or promote violence, including threatening or promoting terrorism.” This includes direct as well as indirect threats.
The company responded to questions about why Trump’s tweet wasn’t removed Monday by posting in a series of messages on its public policy account that “newsworthiness” is one of the factors it considers in determining if a tweet breaks the platform’s rules.
“This has long been internal policy and we’ll soon update our public-facing rules to reflect it,” one message read. “We need to do better on this, and will.”
The company also stated it is “committed to transparency and keeping people informed about what’s happening in the world.”
Calls for Twitter to curtail Trump’s use of the platform are not new . The company has said in the past that it doesn’t comment on individual accounts, but it has cited the importance of hearing from leaders in order to hold people accountable.
Trump’s account wasn’t affected in July, when Twitter announced that it was taking action, including suspensions, on 10 times the number of abusive accounts than it did a year before.
Keeping the president on the service also makes business sense: Trump’s tweets are constantly in headlines, calling attention to Twitter and, ideally for the company, getting more users to sign up.