Congress

The last time the party tried to get rid of Obamacare, it cost them control of the House and several state capitols.

President Donald Trump says the GOP is now the “party of health care.” But Republicans have no real plan to deliver on that.

Trump’s unexpected demand that Republicans take another crack at replacing Obamacare came on the heels of his Justice Department backing a lawsuit intended to gut the entire law. The last time the party tried to get rid of Obamacare, it cost them control of the House and several state capitols.

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Those lessons aren’t lost on Republicans. They know the more they talk about repealing Obamacare, the more likely it is that the battle over the health law and the popular protections for people with pre-existing conditions drags right into the 2020 elections, damaging vulnerable Republicans. They’d rather slow-walk the issue while sticking to health care topics that have appeal on both sides of the aisle.

“We’re going to be involved in health but most of it is going to be very, very bipartisan, unlike the issue you’re bringing up, which would not be very bipartisan,” said Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the leader of the Senate Finance Committee.

That could include addressing “surprise” medical bills that hit insured people who end up with an out-of-network doctor even when they’ve chosen an in-network hospital, as well as more steps to address high drug costs and opioids.

His counterpart on the Health, Education, Labor and Education Committee, Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) was singing a similar tune on Wednesday, telling reporters: “We’re working in a bipartisan way.” Alexander has recently turned his focus to health care costs, rather than repeal.

Indeed, Republican senators and GOP aides said not to expect a sweeping new Republican plan in the months ahead, and said that aside from the narrower policy pushes, party leadership will focus on their longstanding message that Obamacare has “failed” and that Democrats’ Medicare-for-All proposals pose a threat to the current system. Democrats control the House now, and the GOP’s vision of replacing Obamacare with block grants or other conservative proposals – ideas they couldn’t enact even when they controlled both chambers — appear now to be a pipe dream.

And if Trump wants them to move forward with larger changes, they said, the president needs to propose them himself.

“The president makes very clear that he understands the importance of health care and that he wants the Republican Party to be the party of health care,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), whose opposition to repeal efforts in 2017 was critical in stopping the effort. “In order to do that, he has to have a detailed plan that is going to be an improvement over the ACA.”

Even the lawmakers closest to Trump, including Freedom Caucus Chair Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), acknowledged to reporters that Republicans, still recovering from the toxic fallout from failed repeal attempts in 2017, would be better off tackling more manageable goals like drug pricing reform going into 2020.

“I’ve been through the wars and I have a Ph. D in health care policy now that was never on my bucket list,” Meadows said. “It’s very difficult to find anything that brings everybody together. But I do think there’s real consensus that could be found on prescription drug prices — in fact, if there’s a sweet spot to be found, it’s that.”

Most Republicans don’t want to openly defy Trump, but many are privately complaining about the president ordering them back in the Obamacare minefield.

“We need a plan and right now we don’t have one,” said one frustrated Republican senator, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “I’m not going to just throw this to the whims of our creativity.”

Other lawmakers have tried and failed in the last few days to steer Trump away from the idea, telling him the anti-ACA push is bad for his own reelection campaign.

“[Trump] knows that he made a mistake, but he’s dug in now,” said person close to the president.

The Trump administration sent lawmakers scrambling this week when the Justice Department abruptly announced that they’re back a lawsuit led by Texas seeking to throw out all of Obamacare, reversing a far narrower legal strategy.

That case is now pending before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and it may well end up before the Supreme Court. Trump told Congress he wants a plan at the ready to replace Obamacare if the court voids the law — but Republicans generally expect the legal battle to last another year or so, giving them some breathing room. Grassley, for instance, played down the need for quick action on an Obamacare replacement, saying “we won’t know for months, and it could go well into next year” what the courts do. The Supreme Court has upheld Obamacare twice before, and even many conservative legal experts predict this assault on the law will ultimately fail.

The administration’s move in the court case came just after Trump declared vindication in the Mueller investigation — an odd bit of timing that changed the subject from triumphant “exoneration” to pre-existing conditions, an issue that has been a consistent winner for the Democrats, particularly in the House races in November.

As a second Republican senator put it: ““Why would the president do this after the release of the Mueller report?”

“Covering preexisting conditions was always the political knockout blow,” GOP strategist Rick Wilson told POLITICO. “No matter how much Republicans think people hate Obamacare, they’re much more likely to fear the impact of their dad getting denied cancer treatment because he had an illness once before. Trump’s move now allows Democrats to campaign on a message of ‘We’re the ones who will keep you from being thrown to the wolves.’”

Lawmakers and aides said the White House’s decision puts much more pressure on Senate Republicans, who remain in the majority, to craft legislation in response to Trump’s demands. Discussions have begun between the President’s team and Senate leadership, but have yielded no breakthroughs, leaving Republicans arguing over whether they should revive one of the bills they failed to pass in 2017 or cut their losses, ignore Trump, and move on.

“We’ve got a new slate. The slates been wiped clean,” said Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.). “When the slate’s been wiped clean that leaves two things: Go back and do again what you’ve already done that didn’t work or find something that does.”

Other Republicans suggested they focus on strategies to stop the lawsuit itself in its tracks.

“You could probably moot the case if you deleted the individual mandate from the law, since that’s what it all hinges on,” said Rep. Greg Walden, who led House efforts in 2017 to get rid of Obamacare. “So that might be a possibility going forward.”

Democrats, meanwhile, could not be more thrilled by the Trump administration shining a spotlight on what they see a massive GOP liability, and moved swiftly to capitalize on the opportunity.

On Tuesday, they draw a stark contrast between the parties by unveiling a package of bills to shore up the Affordable Care Act and make insurance subsidies available to more middle class consumers. On Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced Democrats will try to force a vote on defunding the DOJ’s efforts on the case.

Democrats are confident the public is on their side. A national poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that opposition to Obamacare was in February at its lowest point since the law’s implementation. And a Washington Post poll in January found that 62 percent of Americans surveyed – and three-quarters of independents – have a negative view of President Trump’s health care agenda.

Both the president and GOP lawmakers are well aware of this political peril on health policy, but disagree sharply on how to address it. Trump told Republicans Tuesday that they have to come up with ” a plan that is far better than Obamacare” in order to neutralize the Democratic attacks that in part cost the GOP its House majority last year.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) agreed with the pressing need for Republicans need to craft an identity that’s not just enemies of Obamacare.

“We’re going to have a 2020 election and one of the issues will be health care,” he said. “We know what we don’t like, but we owe it to the public to say what we do like.”

Other lawmakers insisted that the onus is on Trump to set that agenda and said they’re waiting for more information from the White House.

But Meadows, who spoke to Trump on Wednesday morning, said the president provided no further guidance on crafting a health care bill other than insisting that they protect people with preexisting conditions and lower drug costs.

“He sees those two areas as the things that most people are concerned about,” Meadows said. “He told me this morning, ‘We’re going to fix it.’”

Adam Cancryn and John Bresnahan contributed reporting.

Trade

GOP senators are warning the president his trade war could fuel a recession in the 2020 campaign.

Republicans are trying to head off their next potentially explosive conflict with President Donald Trump.

In a series of private meetings and conversations with Trump over the last few months, Senate Republicans have pleaded with him not to impose a new round of tariffs on foreign automakers — fearing they could debilitate Trump-backed states and cast the economy into a recession ahead of the 2020 election.

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But Trump isn’t heeding the warnings so far.

Behind closed doors, GOP senators push back on Trump consistently when he brings up existing tariffs on steel and aluminum or potential tariffs on automakers, according to Republican senators. But Trump doesn’t back down from his position: He says the threat of tariffs gets the attention of trading partners — like China — who need to permit more imports of American products.

“The president likes tariffs as a threat. I hope he understands that the auto tariffs damage the autoworkers in the midwestern states and the southeastern states. And I know he cares a lot about them. So I’m hopeful that he won’t do that,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, where Nissan and Volkswagen have plants. But, he added: “If I were Japan and Europe, I wouldn’t relax.”

Whether GOP senators can head off another round of tariffs ultimately lies with the whims of the president. Administration officials have tried to reassure worried Republicans that the president has hit pause as he considers a trade report that would allow him to declare tariffs on the basis of national security.

But Republican senators said in interviews on Wednesday they have enormous concerns that Trump might go ahead with it anyway. That’s in part because Trump may once again make a unilateral decision. “He’s in conflict, to a certain extent, with his agencies,” said Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia, home to a Kia plant.

“To suggest that Volkswagens are a national security threat to the United States is not true and we should not be doing that. It would be very bad for our economy and very bad for our consumers,” said Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), among the most fervent tariff opponents.

Trump “has a position that he is trying to improve the overall trade culture,” said Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, which has a massive BMW plant. “I’ve tried to talk to him about the ricochet effect and negative impact [of tariffs]. I think BMW sells about 80,000 vehicles in China. Having those vehicles built in China cannot be good for us.”

But the Senate GOP is coming at the debate from a position of weakness, with limited legislative firepower at their disposal and Democrats far less worried about tariffs. So Republicans are relying on a persuasion campaign intended to let Trump know he could alienate his working-class voting base in a way that could stifle the manufacturing boom in the south and hit longstanding plants throughout the U.S. Domestic auto companies are also pressing the president to not move forward with foreign auto tariffs, according to a Republican senator who has raised the issue repeatedly with Trump.

Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is moving forward with an effort that would allow Congress to put more restrictions on tariffs, but to become law, Trump would have to sign it or Republicans would have to cough up veto-proof majorities — an unlikely scenario with Trump’s continued dominance of the GOP.

Republicans’ best hope is that Trump is really using the threat of tariffs to show China he means business and to drive a harder bargain with Europe and Japan. But they acknowledge that Trump could ignore them in the end.

“People will be happy if there’s an agreement and it actually opens some markets. If there’s no agreement and the tariffs get worse, my worry is that you could have a recession,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a close Trump ally who has a Toyota plant in his home state as well as domestic plants. “I hope persuasion will work instead of waiting for an economic problem.”

Trump is weighing the new tariffs after receiving a report from the Commerce Department last month giving him the legal justification to move forward. Trump has 90 days after the report was submitted to make a decision.

But the conflict has been brewing for weeks. In late February, Commerce officials briefed aides on the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means committees. It didn’t go well.

“It was described as the worst, most tense meeting they had participated in with members of the administration,” said an industry source.

The meeting prompted a bipartisan group of senators to fire off a letter to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross with a list of questions they wanted answered in 10 days. That included how the department, which led the investigation, defined national security for the purpose of imports of autos.

But the most substantive pushback has come from lawmakers themselves. Tennessee Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Alexander raised concerns about the tariffs in a meeting at the White House two weeks ago, according to sources familiar with the meeting.

“He’s very good about listening to us. I don’t think I’ve persuaded him very much on tariffs so far,” Alexander said. “What I said to him: ‘I want to support the North American agreement. But it will be much easier to pass and better to pass without the tariffs.”

Indeed, the constant threat of auto tariffs is clouding the path for Trump’s marquee trade achievement — the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement that is intended to replace the 25-year-old NAFTA deal. But Trump sees things differently: as a point of leverage to get foreign trading partners to offer up concessions in upcoming negotiations

The Trump administration also wants to negotiate new trade deals with the European Union and Japan, which both export significant numbers of vehicles to the U.S. Trump agreed with political leaders in both countries that the tariff threat would be pulled back as long as negotiations were occurring.

“We should in fact be operating under that non-escalation agreement. And therefore, we should not see tariffs on the European autos,” Toomey said.

Still, it’s unclear if the threat is working. The European Union has refused to negotiate on agriculture in potential talks with the U.S., which Washington is demanding. Brussels also said it will walk away from the table and retaliate if the president moves forward with tariffs. Trump has also repeatedly singled out Germany in private talks with senators, according to an attendee.

Even if it is only used as a negotiating strategy, Republican lawmakers are raising the alarm that the constant threat of tariffs to get countries to the table sets a bad precedent for future talks.

“Most of our members are opposed to auto tariffs and they’ve made that clear to the president,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the Republican whip.

Republicans have been through this before on the steel and aluminum tariffs. Some urged Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to bring legislation to the floor allowing them to block the tariffs. But McConnell never did, in part because Trump would never sign it and also because it would expose another intra-party divide.

Grassley is preparing to move legislation that would claw back tariff power for the Senate GOP. But he also knows it may never reach the president’s desk. And so even as he makes his push, he’s also taking a Zen-like approach toward the mercurial president.

“I don’t believe so,” said Grassley when asked if Trump would move forward with the new tariffs.” It’s just kind of a gut feeling.”