Back in 2016, Speaker Paul Ryan and the House leadership held public hearings, conducted negotiations inside the House conference, and published texts of the proposed legislation to repeal and reform ObamaCare. The American Health Care Act that emerged from this process had both a political and policy purpose.
Its political purpose was to create a bill that could survive the House, survive the Senate, survive a conference and make it to Mr. Trump’s desk to fulfill one of his and the party’s biggest political promises.
The policy purpose was to lay a foundation on which Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and his SWAT team of reformers, such as Indiana Medicaid specialist Seema Verma, could help Congress clean up the rest of ObamaCare over the next two years—moving away from the 2010 law’s 2,000 pages of legal babel and toward a market-based system.
With momentum from that accomplishment, the Trump White House and the Republican-controlled Congress would roll forward into the next item on the ambitious, first-year Trumpian agenda: an historic tax-reform bill to clean up the tax code and restore growth of the kind last seen in the 1980s and ’90s.
From there, Congress would move on to the other pieces—infrastructure, the funding needs of the military, and cleaning out the sludge in the financial system produced by Dodd-Frank.
Never forget Congress is not a normal workplace. All this has to be done inside the confines of the congressional calendar. Anything rolled into 2018, including tax reform, was at risk of members turning toward their re-election interests and away from the president’s agenda.