The Republican health-care effort is on hold for at least a week, perhaps more, as John McCain recuperates in Arizona from surgery. With two Republican senators, Susan Collins and Rand Paul, having already said they would vote against the motion to proceed the bill, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell needs all 50 of the others present and voting to have any hope of considering and then passing the bill (with Vice President Mike Pence breaking the tie). It's not clear at all that McConnell has those 50, but at any rate, without McCain he can't take up the bill.
We don't know when McCain will return, but the calendar is going to start getting dicey thanks to some convoluted procedural rigmarole. Time is running out for the health-care bill to be passed under the reconciliation instructions contained in the 2017 fiscal-year budget, with the fiscal year over at the end of September.
And that's just the beginning. Republicans haven't passed their 2018 budget resolution yet, and they'll need to do that at some point if they want to do a tax-cut bill.
It's not clear whether they can pass a budget with McCain in Phoenix either; indeed, it's not at all certain that House Republicans will be able to pass a budget at all. And even if they do, they'll still have to come up with a tax bill that 218 House Republicans and 50 Republican senators can support.
There's a serious logjam, one that already had the Senate canceling two weeks of their August recess, and this delay surely doesn't help things.
Meanwhile, Obamacare-supporting activists are keeping the phones jammed in Senate offices while major stakeholders lobby to defeat the health-care bill. And some analysts still consider it more likely to eventually pass than not. But very few people think a delay helps McConnell on this effort--or on the overall Republican agenda.
Editorial on 07/18/2017