The NRSC Shoulda Campaigned in Wisconsin
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Ron Johnson might have started the TrumpCare revolt rolling out of McCain-style personal pique:
Johnson’s announcement last week—along with three other lawmakers—surprised Washington insiders. But, according to Wisconsin Republican insiders, it shouldn’t have been.
After all, less than a year ago, those same Washington insiders left him for dead.
While the rest of the country was focused on the bruising presidential race last year, Johnson, a plastics company CEO-turned-senator, was locked in a re-election contest nobody expected him to win. For at least a year, the D.C. conventional wisdom held that no incumbent had a worse shot at getting re-elected than he did.
An especially painful sting came on Oct. 3, when Politico Pro broke the news that the National Republican Senate Committee—the powerful party arm aligned with Senate leadership and responsible for getting incumbents re-elected—had canceled its plans to spend $800,000 in the final weeks of the campaign on TV ads boosting Johnson.
An anonymous NRSC aide told the publication they needed to “adjust reservations and strategy” for the good of the party.
And that meant leaving Johnson to fend for himself.
I still can’t believe Feingold lost to this guy. Personal to Ron Johnson: handing Mitch McConnell a humiliating defeat is the best revenge.
Meanwhile, the Post confirms that the CBO score was a major blow to the legislation:
As Senate leaders feared, the bill’s fate took a turn for the worse Monday, when the CBO released an analysis concluding that the Senate bill would cause an estimated 22 million more Americans to be uninsured in the coming decade — just 1 million fewer than similar legislation passed by the House in early May.
A lobbyist close to Senate Republicans said the score was a devastating blow to McConnell. Senators felt they had been “sold a bill of goods,” the lobbyist said, and had expected the Senate bill to have greater distance from the House bill.
“It knocked the wind out of all the sails,” said a GOP aide.
I’m sure that McConnell and the Republican leadership expected a much better CBO score — after all, this is what passes for heealth policy intellectuals in the Republican Party were telling them. But, in fact, people without any money are not going to buy insurance plans that cost 6 grand a year to use. The only way to get a bill through the Senate will be to get the uninsured number under 20 million, and doing that with a bill tat can pass the House won’t be easy.