US President Donald Trump on Sunday sought to spread blame for the failure of his first attempt at passing major legislation , the replacement of former US president Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law.
As internecine squabbling continued in the Republican Party, the president’s targets included conservatives in US Congress, Democrats and, possibly, US House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan.
On Twitter on Sunday morning, Trump wrote: “Democrats are smiling in [Washington] DC that the Freedom Caucus, with the help of Club for Growth and Heritage, have saved Planned Parenthood & O[bama]care.”
He was referring to the advocacy group Club for Growth, as well as the Heritage Group think tank and likely its advocacy offshoot Heritage Action for America, all conservative groups with influence on the members of the Freedom Caucus.
That hard-right House group’s withdrawal of support along with some Republican moderates caused Ryan and Trump to pull the health bill before a vote on Friday last week.
Provocatively, Trump lumped such groups together with congressional Democrats and mentioned Planned Parenthood, a federally funded provider of women’s healthcare services that is a lightning rod for anti-abortion groups.
Debate also continued about whether Trump or members of his administration had orchestrated an unusual attack on Ryan on Saturday, despite professions of unity from both the White House and the House speaker’s camp. Trump and Ryan spoke by telephone for an hour on Saturday.
In the morning, the president used Twitter to tell the public to watch a show on Fox News at 9pm, Judge Jeanine.
The former judge, prosecutor, district attorney and Republican political candidate from New York Jeanine Ferris Pirro then opened her show by saying: “Paul Ryan needs to step down as speaker of the House. He failed to deliver the votes.”
Trump’s senior adviser, Steve Bannon, is a former publisher of the hard-right Web site Breitbart, which has been harshly critical of Ryan.
Mick Mulvaney, formerly a member of the Freedom Caucus and now Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, denied any move against the speaker.
“Never once have I seen him blame Paul Ryan,” Mulvaney said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “The people who are to blame are the people who would not vote yes.”
Mulvaney was one of the officials lobbying House Republicans to pass the bill, which was pulled less than one hour before lawmakers were due to vote.
“We haven’t been able to change Washington in the first 65 days,” Mulvaney said. “I know the Freedom Caucus. I helped found it. I never thought it would come to this.”
He would have been prepared to vote for the legislation, he said.
Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union about whether Trump had a motive to attack Ryan indirectly by flagging up the Fox News show, New York Republican Lee Zeldin, who supported the bill, said he believed the Trump “wouldn’t know that’s what was going to be said.”
About Ryan, he added: “I think he should stay as speaker.”
The leader of the Freedom Caucus, Mark Meadows of North Carolina, said on ABC’s This Week that healthcare reform was not dead, despite the failure of Ryan’s American Health Care Act (AHCA) and the president’s indications that he is ready to move on to tax reform.
“It’s like saying that Tom Brady lost at halftime,” Meadows said, in reference to the New England Patriots’ Super Bowl comeback win against the Atlanta Falcons last month.
“I still believe that there is a good chance, if moderates and conservatives can come together, that we repeal and replace Obamacare, bring premiums down, cover more people,” he said.
Asked about rumors that he himself could replace Ryan as speaker and if he supported Ryan, Meadows dodged both questions.
“There is no conversations [sic] going on right now with regard to replacing the speaker,” he said. “It’s all hands on deck with regard to Obamacare, tax reform, the border wall.”
Former Republican speaker, Newt Gingrich, who became close to Trump during the last year’s election, was critical of the president’s approach to legislative action.
“Don’t set up an artificial deadline to fail,” he said on Fox News Sunday, referring to Trump and Ryan’s failed promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act on its seventh anniversary.
“Paul Ryan is a brilliant policy guy,” Gingrich said, but he added: “The congressional leadership still wants to behave as if they are in a pre-Trump world and Trump trusted them. They were saying to him: ‘We have the votes.’”
Ohio Governor John Kasich, an opponent of Trump in last year’s primary and a consistent critic, also said healthcare reform was not dead, but admitted that his party was badly split.
“I think there was a tug of war inside the administration,” he saidon CNN, adding that Democrats should share blame for not working with Republicans.
Lawmakers could not now “walk away, close their eyes and lock the door,” Kasich said.
Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination on a platform of universal healthcare coverage, was predictably scathing of Republican efforts at reform.
It was “disastrous piece of legislation,” he said.
US Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, speaking on ABC, said Democrats would work with Republicans to tweak the Affordable Care Act if they dropped the goal of repealing it.
“We never said it was perfect,” Schumer said. “The American people hated ‘Trumpcare.’ The more they learned about it, the more they didn’t like it, and I want to salute all the ordinary people out there who called and wrote and picketed.”
Trump has said the act, popularly known as “Obamacare,” will simply “explode” by itself. Democrats say that stance undermines healthcare services.
“For the president to say he will undermine it, that’s not presidential. That’s petulance,” Schumer said.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
As former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) wrapped up his visit to the People’s Republic of China, he received his share of attention. Certainly, the trip must be seen within the full context of Ma’s life, that is, his eight-year presidency, the Sunflower movement and his failed Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, as well as his eight years as Taipei mayor with its posturing, accusations of money laundering, and ups and downs. Through all that, basic questions stand out: “What drives Ma? What is his end game?” Having observed and commented on Ma for decades, it is all ironically reminiscent of former US president Harry