House to take critical step toward repealing ObamaCare

The Senate approved the legislation early Thursday morning, and the House is expected to follow suit before adjourning until the inauguration.

Congressional Republicans are eager to move the budget before President-elect Donald Trump takes office next week, and have been coordinating their moves with the incoming administration.

Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) insisted on Thursday that the House GOP and Trump are on the same page. The president-elect this week urged Congress to follow a repeal vote with a replacement as soon as possible.

“We are in complete sync. We agree we want to make sure we move these things concurrently, at the same time repeal and replace,” Ryan said at a Capitol news conference.

House Republicans can only lose 23 of their members and still pass legislation on their own. Earlier this week, there were enough wary conservatives and centrists to put the whip count in question.

But by the eve of Friday’s vote, the budget looked likely to pass a day after the Senate approved it on a party-line vote. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was the only Republican to vote against the budget resolution along with all Democrats.

It’s likely a handful of House Republicans will similarly oppose the measure, but not enough to tank it.

Sources in the conservative House Freedom Caucus predicted the budget would pass, as did several members of the GOP vote-counting operation.

“It’s going well,” said Chris Bond, a spokesman for House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.). “We’re looking forward to a good vote.”

Two influential conservative groups, Heritage Action and the Club for Growth, are urging Republicans to support the budget and are including the vote on their annual scorecards. Members of Scalise’s whip team reminded members of that in arguments to lawmakers still on the fence.

Only three centrist Republicans voted against repealing the healthcare law last January, one of more than 60 times the House passed a bill to undo the law in the last six years.

The House is likely to see at least twice as many defections on the GOP side on Friday, even though it’s the first time a repeal vote could actually lead to the end of ObamaCare.

A handful of conservative lawmakers are already on record saying they will vote no on the GOP budget, griping that it doesn’t do enough to tackle federal spending and debt or that leadership has not laid out enough details of how it will go about replacing ObamaCare. They include Freedom Caucus members like Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) and Ken Buck (R-Colo.), as well as another conservative, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.).

“More people are reluctant to support it because they’re taking the first step on a journey and leadership won’t tell them where it’s going to end,” Massie told The Hill on Thursday. “But for me, it’s the numbers.”

“The numbers are too high,” added Buck. “They say to me, ‘The number’s not the important part; it’s the repeal, the reconciliation.’ But if the number’s not the important part, then make it lower.”

The roughly 40-member Freedom Caucus is divided over the issue. Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.), a Trump supporter, told The Hill he will support the budget, arguing that Republicans promised during the campaign they would repeal the health law.

“I want to vote for a budget that balances, but I also want to get the repeal going as soon as possible,” he said. “I really don’t believe we’re going to come up with anything that will satisfy the other side. If we put forth our replacement at the time we repeal or a year from now, the fight’s going to be the same.”

DesJarlais, however, said he didn’t hold any grudges against some centrist colleagues who are pressing Ryan to replace ObamaCare at the same time the GOP repeals it.

Colleagues “in Pennsylvania or New York, they have a different group of constituents that they answer to,” DesJarlais said. “For me in Tennessee, we didn’t do Medicaid expansion and they went 65 percent for Trump. I respect that