"ObamaCare is the law of the land": Sure sounds like the GOP is giving up on health-care reform now

So … that’s it? An ill-conceived two-month effort in the House falls short and Republicans throw in the towel on seven years of trying to replace ObamaCare? The White House doesn’t want to offer its own alternative? McConnell has nothing in the pipeline he might want to suggest?

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What?

You’re glad you “got it out of the way”? Republican voters handed them the House in 2010, the Senate in 2014, and the White House in 2016, and we got exactly 63 days of meaningful effort to unseat O-Care.

Here’s how seriously the party you voted for took this process:

Here’s Ryan’s press conference followed by two minutes from an almost giddy Nancy Pelosi. Watch at around 6:30 and you’ll see him talk about moving on from health care to tackle tax reform, border security, and so on. The spin from Republican leaders this evening, including from Ryan here, is that today’s result only means that ObamaCare will proceed to deteriorate further until inevitably some sort of legislative fix is necessary. Well, maybe. Premiums are rising, but CBO projected a few weeks ago that ObamaCare’s markets were more stable than Republican criticism allowed. Even if Trump and Ryan are right that O-Care is destined to crumble in the next year or two, I think Brit Hume’s much more in tune with the political fallout from that than they are. ObamaCare was a Democratic problem until today; now, with the GOP having failed to replace it with something better, it’s more of a bipartisan problem than Republicans might like to admit. When the country faces a crisis on a president’s watch, it typically doesn’t look back to his predecessors for a solution. If ObamaCare tanks, the question will be, “Why didn’t Trump stop it?” That may not be fair. But it is what it is.

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