House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) on Friday laid blame for the failure of a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare on Republican members of the House, and said he would move on to other issues that “people have even more agreement on.”
“You have all heard me say this before, moving from an opposition party to a governing party comes with growing pains,” Ryan said at the beginning of a press briefing. “And, well, we’re feeling those growing pains today.”
Noting that “the President gave his all in this effort,” Ryan instead pinned blame on the bill’s failure on the members of his own House Republican caucus.
“There is a block of no votes that we had, that is why this didn’t pass,” he said, after one reporter asked him if he blamed the conservative House Freedom Caucus for obstructing the bill.
“They were sufficient number of votes that prevented it from passing and they didn’t change their votes,” he continued. “We were close. Some of the members of that caucus were voting with us, but not enough were. And therefore – and I met with their chairman earlier today, and he made it clear to me that the votes weren’t going to be there from their team. And that was sufficient to provide the balance to not have this bill pass.”
Ryan was non-committal on plans to mount another effort to repeal Obamacare, saying at one point that “there are other parts of our agenda that people have even more agreement on, on what to achieve.”
“We’re going to be living with Obamacare for the foreseeable future,” he said.
Congratulations America, your life expectancy has just gone up a few years.
This idiot Ryan acts as if he has no responsibility to deal with fixing obamacare Americans get punished for not supporting him.
Ryan,try to become a man and an American.
Speak openly and publicly with some of the Democrats about what needs repaired and don’t say no before you think.
Well this is good news, Democrats need to be vigilant. The Republicans are going to do their best to sabotage Obamacare administratively and Democrats will need to be ready to push back on Republican attempts to blame any fallout from the sabotage on Obamacare.
Aptly put, Ryan, even if you don’t mean it that way. But in the spirit of reconciliation going forward, let me say, in the names of the people who would in fact have died if you’d succeeded, fuck you.