American Health Care Act vote scrapped marking legislative failure for Trump

From the day the Affordable Care Act was signed by former president Obama, it has faced blistering criticism from republicans and they have promised to bring it down as soon as they came to power. As a matter of fact repealing the ACA better known as Obamacare was one of the biggest promises that Donald Trump made during his campaigns.

Right at the beginning of his Presidency, Donald Trump along with GOP leaders set a repeal legislature in motion named American Health Care Act that will repeal and replace ACA, former president Obama’s biggest domestic achievement. But right before the new legislature was supposed to be voted on, it was pulled back. GOP leaders didn’t want to face the embarrassment and criticism that would surely have followed if they lost the vote in the House floor.

The repeal legislature faced opposition from the start. Democrats criticized it saying that it favored the rich over the poor. Healthcare providers as well as hospitals and insurers were also vocal in their protests. Ultra conservative republicans considered the bill too feeble and that it wasn’t doing enough to bring the insurance costs down while the moderates believed that it was going too far by doing away with minimum standards that insurance providers had to follow.

Though republicans control both the House and the Senate, the various factions within the party couldn’t reach an agreement. Days before the legislature were to come up for voting, President Donald Trump tried to make last minute deals with the conservative Freedom caucus. But in order to woo them, he ended up losing more votes from the moderate republicans. In the end, they just didn’t have the numbers to pull through.

“I will not sugarcoat this, this is a disappointing day for us,” Ryan told reporters Friday afternoon. “Doing big things is hard. All of us, all of us, myself included, we will need time to reflect on how we got to this moment, what we could have done to do it better.”

This will definitely weaken the President’s position this failure would bring his supposed deal making capabilities into question. This however wasn’t the first time he has faced failure in his young presidency. The travel ban on people from 6 Muslim majority countries was an executive decision and was stopped by the courts. This repeal was a legislative showdown and it exposed the deep divide within the Republicans.