Conservative activists, media frame health-care battle as Trump against the world
By David Weigel July 19 at 9:11 PM
As they scramble to resurrect the Senate GOP’s last chance to repeal the Affordable Care Act, conservative activists and media figures have settled on a message that could fall flat: Do it for President Trump. From Tuesday night through the announcement of yet another Republican meeting on their repeal bills, pundits and outside groups cast senators as “traitors” if they did not deliver a victory for the president.
“Republicans don’t really want this to be repealed and don’t really want Trump to win,” Rush Limbaugh told his listeners on Wednesday. “They never sell the plan.”
“These people are being true to their school, just not true to their party, and maybe not true to their country,” said “Fox and Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade, before asking a guest why Congress had “let Trump down.”
It wasn’t clear what leverage conservatives had left. Key Republicans such as Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) were just re-elected to six-year terms. Calls and protests against the repeal bills vastly outnumber any actions to support them — on Wednesday, dozens more protesters courted arrest by sitting and singing outside Republicans’ Senate offices. Despite several rewrites of the basic bill, major insurers have continued to oppose it, and to oppose the “consumer freedom amendment” favored by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.).
“All of our effort is on the three senators who voted for the 2015 repeal but are telling people they won’t vote for it now,” Club for Growth President David McIntosh said in an interview, describing the new website ObamacareRepealTraitors.com and its attacks on Murkowski, Portman and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.). “They’re not up in cycle, but they’re in Trump states. I’ve been using the analogy of [former senator] Arlen Specter — are they going to be loyal to the Republican Party, or starting out on their own path?”
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/07/19/conservative-activists-media-frame-health-care-battle-as-trump-against-the-world
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