05/04/2017 04:52 pm ET
Senate GOP leaders will try to write their own bill, but aren’t even sure they can.
WASHINGTON ― Within minutes of the House passing a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) took to the Senate floor to congratulate the other body, and pronounce the legislation all but dead.
“The Senate will carefully review the House bill, and now we’ll go to work on a Senate bill,” said Alexander, who chairs the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee that will play a key role.
“There is an urgency, but we want to get it right,” Alexander said, emphasizing the “get it right” part repeatedly.
Republicans in the House managed to barely pass their American Health Care Act Thursday, just before taking a week off, but it required numerous fits and starts and an all-out lobbying effort by House leaders and the White House. In the end, they did so without holding any hearings on the measure or getting cost estimates from Congress’ nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
“There’ll be no artificial deadlines” in the Senate, Alexander said. “We will make sure we know what our bill costs when we vote on it.”
Unlike in the increasingly fractious House, senators are better at talking to one another, and Alexander said after leaving the floor that he thought GOP senators very much wanted to come up with their own plan. But he stopped short of predicting success.
“The mood, at least in the Republican caucus, is we’d like to get to yes if we can. Now we have many different opinions, and no one doubts this is difficult,” Alexander said.
He was even less willing to say whether Republicans in the Senate could agree with colleagues in the House on a compromise version, should the Senate pass something.
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