House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) defended Republicans’ amended plan to repeal and replace Obamacare Tuesday and said he shared “the President’s frustration” about the budgeting process, as expressed in a pair of presidential tweets.
Early on Tuesday, apparently frustrated by a five-month budget agreement which he achieved nearly none of his policy goals, Trump advocated for an old fashioned government shutdown to knock some sense into Congress — or a change to filibuster rules.
The reason for the plan negotiated between the Republicans and Democrats is that we need 60 votes in the Senate which are not there! We….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 2, 2017
either elect more Republican Senators in 2018 or change the rules now to 51%. Our country needs a good "shutdown" in September to fix mess!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 2, 2017
At a GOP leadership press conference, Ryan said “I share the President’s frustration” that appropriations bills had to receive enough bipartisan support to avoid a Senate filibuster. But the Speaker put on a brave face to portray the compromise budget as a win, emphasizing its defense and border patrol spending.
“I feel very good about the wins that we got with the administration in this bill,” Ryan said. “Look, I negotiated the first Murray-Ryan agreement a number of years ago. Under the Obama rules, if you wanted to help the military, if you wanted a pay raise for the soldiers, if you wanted to buy new airplanes and new ships and more munitions, a dollar for that, you had to have a dollar for domestic spending. We just broke that parity. That’s the biggest victory we could have had.”
“We knew that with a five-month bill, the wall is really more about next year, and that fight’s going to be this summer,” he said, acknowledging the biggest disappointment for Trump. “But we wanted to get the administration a really good down payment on border security.”
Earlier in the press conference, Ryan said that the President had been “nothing but helpful” in selling Republicans’ new attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare.
An amendment proposed by Reps. Mark Meadows (R-NC) and Tom MacArthur (R-NC) would allow states to eliminate Obamacare’s Essential Health Benefits and price protections based on health status, if they establish high-risk pools in their place. President Trump said definitively in an interview with CBS’ John Dickerson Sunday that the bill would cover patients with pre-existing conditions. He didn’t mention that it allow premium prices to increase dramatically for those patients, a change from Obamacare.
“There are a few layers of protections for pre-existing conditions in this bill,” Ryan said. “What’s important is we want to have a situation where people can afford their health insurance. We want to have a situation where people have a choice of health insurers. That’s not happening in Obamacare.”
“The purpose of our bill is to get more choices to lower prices while preserving the protections for pre-existing conditions,” he added later. “So that is a very important thing. We’re excited about this policy. We’re making very good progress with our members and the President has been instrumental in that.”
Shorter Ryan: Republican controlling all the offices is not enough. We should have a Simple Republican Minority create bills/pass laws as it pleases.
Ryan is a doofus. If these remarks represent his “public face,” one can only imagine what he says in private what with Trump’s ever changing and ill-informed positions. Carrying water for Trump is “beyond Ryan’s pay grade.” He should go shack up with Boehner.
"We want to have a situation where people have a choice of health insurers. That’s not happening in Obamacare.”
It could; two words: public option.
At NYT
I’d like to see a good, long anal probe administered followed by a good, long dose of Dulcolax. Stupidest GD man the Electoral College has ever elected.