Senate Republicans on Thursday said that they will come up with their own version of legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare rather than vote on the bill that House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and colleagues in the lower body of Congress have spent weeks hammering into passable shape.
Twelve lawmakers are working on a Senate proposal that may incorporate elements of the bill passed Thursday by the House, the Washington Examiner reported, but it will not be based on the current measure.
“There will be a Senate bill, but it will look at what the House has done and see how much of that we can incorporate in a product that works for us,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) told the Examiner.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said he was “told” lawmakers will “draft a Senate bill.”
And Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-TX) told the Examiner that the group of lawmakers has already been meeting for weeks, as House leadership frantically tried to whip enough votes to pass their own bill.
“It was kind of a moot issue if the House wasn’t going to be able to pass a bill and now they have and I’m proud of them for doing it,” Cornyn said, as quoted in the report. “Now it’s up to us to pass a bill 51 senators can agree to.”
So they are going to nuke the filibuster.
Awesome.
Reconciliation, no?
Also, they really only need 50, with Pence as the tiebreaker.
But the HouseTrashers are gettin’ their ‘attaBoy’ Buds from HeWhoMustBePlacated…
The plan is to use reconciliation.
But whatever happened to the notion that these bills must originate in the house?
And then the new bill will need to go back to the house for another vote. Won’t that be fun. The major concern in the senate is the reduction in medicaid funds. By the time the house gets this hot potato back, it could end up being more costly than the ACA. It already does not save all that much in the context of the total budget.The freedumb caucus will love that.