Settle in for the Slog

On Thursday, House Republicans passed a bill in what would be the first step in repealing the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.  Naturally, this caused a bit of a stir, but, really, don't freak out.  We've got a long, long way to go here and the Senate fight to get this thing passed is more likely than not going to be even worse for Trump than the one in the House.

For one thing, the Senate isn't voting on the bill that just passed the House.  All reports point to the Senate writing its own version of the bill which is going to take weeks if not months to get done.  So even if the Senate bill passes in say, a month or two from now, the likely differences between the two versions will mean a legislative conference, which is another very long draw-out process, giving everyone plenty of time to rake Trump, the House, and Senate Republicans over the coals.  So, yeah, the House bill is a bit of bad news, but in the long run, I think it's actually done them more harm than good.

The House bill was passed before anyone really had a chance to look at it or understand what its policy implications are.  Now that it's moved on to the Senate, the bill is going to be put under a microscope.  From early readings the new bill doesn't appear to be all that different from the version that got trotted out in March, so there's no way in hell the Senate is going to set themselves up for the same public backlash the House went through just to make Trump feel like he's accomplished something once the CBO weighs in and shows, yeah, millions of people are still likely to lose their insurance.

What also needs to be taken into consideration is the fact that the Senate will have to pass the bill on much thinner ground and under a much smaller majority than the House did; and even with all the built-in advantages to getting legislation through the House, we're basically starting this whole thing all over again with a much smaller margin of error.  If Trump had to go balls-to-the-wall just to barely scrape something through the House, I don't really understand why anyone thinks the Senate will have an easier time of things.

We're in for the long haul here, so don't panic just yet.  The previous incarnation of the bill was more unpopular than Congress itself (remember, Congress only has a 20% approval rating) and as the details of this new bill become clear, I doubt that number will change very much.  To just sum things up, we're talking about an incredibly disliked bill that's still barely crawling to becoming a law.  It'll be a bitter fight, no doubt, but it's not one that's going to be very easy for Trump and the Republicans to win.