With
hours to go before the House is set to (finally) vote on Paul Ryan’s
health-care bill, the Trump administration is putting a full-court press
on recalcitrant Republicans to rally votes. Last night, the White House
sent senior officials including Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Budget
Director Mick Mulvaney, and Chief Strategist Steve Bannon to Capitol
Hill to deliver an ultimatum to wavering House members: Pass the bill or
Trump is moving on to other priorities. The message was intended to put
blame for a failed vote on Congress.
The
failure to repeal and replace Obamacare would be a stinging defeat for
Trump. But it would be an even bigger defeat for Paul Ryan, who has all
but staked his Speakership on passing this bill. And in the hall of
mirrors that is Washington, the big winner to emerge out of the
health-care debacle could be Steve Bannon. That’s because Bannon has
been waging
war against Ryan for years. For Bannon, Ryan is the embodiment of the
“globalist-corporatist” Republican elite. A failed bill would be
Bannon’s best chance yet to topple Ryan and advance his
nationalist-populist economic agenda.
Publicly,
Bannon has been working to help the bill pass. But privately he’s
talked it down in recent days. According to a source close to the White
House, Bannon said that he’s unhappy with the Ryan bill because it
“doesn’t drive down costs” and was “written by the insurance industry.”
While the bill strips away many of Obamacare’s provisions, it does not
go as far as Bannon would wish to “deconstruct the administrative state”
in the realm of health care. Furthermore, Bannon has been distancing
himself from the bill to insulate himself from political fallout of it
failing. He’s told people that Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn — a West
Wing rival — has run point on it. (Bannon did not respond to a request
for comment.)
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