Senate Republicans were expected at the start of the year to make a major effort to pick off red-state Democrats to support their legislative agenda, but two months into 2017, centrist Democrats say they aren’t being wooed at all.
While President Trump has invited centrists such as Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) to the White House, Senate Republican leaders have made almost no effort to court them on the president’s top priorities: healthcare and tax reform.
{mosads}Manchin, the only Democrat who voted to confirm former Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Trump’s controversial pick for attorney general, said he had his first meeting on healthcare with a Republican colleague on Monday.
It was with Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a junior member of the GOP conference, who is worried about House Republican plans to roll back ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion. Cassidy has unveiled an ObamaCare replacement bill with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine).
Manchin, who met with Trump at the White House last month, said he hasn’t talked with any Republicans about tax reform.
“I’ve had no one reach out to me beside Sen. Cassidy,” Manchin said. “I’m happy to work with them on everything.”
He’s surprised Senate Republican leaders haven’t made more of an effort to work with Democrats to come up with healthcare reform plans to replace ObamaCare. Trump won Manchin’s home state by 41 percentage points, and the moderate Democrat faces a potentially tough reelection next year.
Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), the second-ranking member of the Republican leadership, said that there’s little motivation to work with Democrats because they have already made clear they have no interest in helping Republicans repeal ObamaCare.
“I think their comments are, ‘You own it.’ They haven’t exactly been conciliatory. We would welcome at some point working with them on [an ObamaCare] replacement,” he said, noting that some healthcare reforms cannot be implemented by a simple majority vote under special budgetary rules that circumvent filibusters.
Instead, GOP leaders have focused on finding a way to unify their conference around legislation that would repeal ObamaCare and replace parts of it simultaneously, or simply repeal its core pillars along the lines of a 2015 bill that President Obama vetoed.
“Don’t give up that easy, don’t give up that quick,” said Manchin, who has long expressed a willingness to work with Republicans.
McCaskill, whose home state of Missouri also voted overwhelmingly for Trump, said Senate Democrats made much more of an effort to win over centrist Republicans at the start of Obama’s first term in 2009.
“There were hundreds of Republican amendments added to the bill. If you watched the debate in committee, it was driven as much by Republican members as Democratic members,” she said of the panel hearings and markup of the Affordable Care Act in 2009.
Obama and Democratic leaders spent months courting then-Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Collins in hopes that they might vote for the bill. They also spent months negotiating with Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa), the ranking Republican on the Finance Committee at the time.
“We stalled taking up the bill for months on end because [then-Senate Finance Committee Chairman] Max Baucus [D-Mont.] kept saying, ‘Grassley is going to work with us,’ ” said McCaskill.
The Missouri Democrat said she got a call from Republican Sen. Bob Corker (Tenn.) in December to talk about ObamaCare but hasn’t heard anything directly from her GOP colleagues on healthcare or tax reform since.
“I haven’t had another Republican say a word to me,” she said. “I think the Republicans are struggling with presenting a united front at this point.”
McCaskill sits on the Finance Committee, which has primary jurisdiction over both issues, and faces reelection in 2018. She was invited to the White House lunch but couldn’t attend due to a scheduling conflict.
Bennet, another centrist Democrat on the Finance Committee who also met with Trump last month, said Republicans have not reached out to him on healthcare or tax reform.
A spokeswoman for Tester, who had lunch with Trump last month, said Republicans haven’t contacted her boss on either issue. He is running for reelection next year in a state that the president won by 20 percentage points over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Republican leaders don’t seem confident that they will be able to persuade centrists to buck Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer (N.Y.), who has insisted that Republicans drop their effort to repeal ObamaCare before trying to work with Democrats on replacement legislation.
Immigration reform is another area of potential compromise that has seen little bipartisan activity.
A senior Trump administration official told television network anchors Tuesday that the president also wants Congress to pass compromise immigration reform legislation, but there have been hardly any talks on that issue, either.
A senior Democratic aide said there have not been any serious immigration talks since the election and added that when Trump endorsed immigration reform at a bipartisan White House meeting last month, it appeared to catch Cornyn by surprise.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) acknowledges that he needs red-state Democrats to cooperate if Republicans are to fully replace ObamaCare. So far, however, he has been busy refereeing fights in his own conference.
Three conservatives, Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), warned soon after a House Republican healthcare reform plan leaked that they would oppose what they slammed as “ObamaCare Lite.”
Paul told reporters Tuesday the House plan is “an incomplete repeal” and would add “new subsidies, new entitlement programs and new taxes.”
But Republicans from states that adopted ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion say they will not support a plan that pulls health insurance coverage from constituents without providing a safety net.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) pointed out that 180,000 people in her state received healthcare coverage through ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion: “I have said repeatedly that I’m not going to leave them out in the cold, and I don’t intend to.”
She said if conservatives refuse to budge on legislation to protect people who would lose coverage through the repeal of ObamaCare, it might make sense to negotiate with Democrats.
“That would be a good strategy,” she said.
But Capito warned that Democrats have plenty of political incentive to refuse to work with Republicans in hopes of seizing on healthcare as an issue in the midterm elections if the GOP reform effort stumbles.
“I have my doubts what engagement level we would be able to achieve, but that’s not to say we shouldn’t try,” she said.