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DDonald Trump finally saw the proposal Forcing the release of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation The files arrived on his desk on Wednesday after his party’s crushing defeat in the House of Representatives throughout October and November.
Republicans have also been given up on the shutdown, with polls showing their party’s valuable political capital is being wasted and Republican favorability ratings declining, one could almost think the GOP was out of the weeds.
not just yet.
Although Democrats agreed to their demands in talks to reopen the government, the special football is still on the field. The end of the legislative calendar is now bearing down on the House and Senate, with lawmakers having no plans to increase federal subsidies for health care plans sold on public exchanges under the Affordable Care Act, meaning that for millions of Americans, health care monthly premiums are That’s going to be an increase of hundreds if not thousands of dollars.
To be clear, Democrats did not come out of the shutdown negotiations unscathed. Far from it: Chuck Schumer is facing calls from Ro Khanna and members of his party to step down from leadership in the House, while polls show voters are more angry than ever at senior party members.
But he may also have left a ticking time bomb for his enemies as they regroup and head into the midterm year, still buoyed by new polling that shows him with a clear advantage over Republicans on the general congressional ballot.
The reason Republicans should be concerned is simple. At a time when Donald Trump under fire From Democrats, voters, and even some members of his own party for not focusing cutting costs For Americans, health care costs are about to reach new heights for millions, leaving many people likely to be left without their plans altogether. This comes as polls show that fewer voters than ever trust Republicans and Trump to manage the economy, which is once again going to be the defining issue of the election cycle. The administration’s insistence that gas prices have dropped from their peak amid the COVID supply crisis and that egg prices have dropped from spikes caused by a wave of bird flu on American farms ignores the obvious fact: Prices are too high. Americans are increasingly feeling the pinch in checkout lanes at grocery stores across the country.
Trump, who is busy pretending the affordability crisis is fake (because he can no longer blame Joe Biden for it), is doing his congressional colleagues no favors. While some influential districts want to expand the subsidies and spare voters the pain they are facing ahead of an already brutal year for the GOP, Trump is busy stoking the fires of the far right by adopting a plan to put money from health care subsidies directly into the hands of Americans, oblivious to the fact that no such plan is ever going to pass Congress.
In 2017, Trump appeared to learn this lesson. That year, his party launched an unsuccessful effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (known as Obamacare), and soon found themselves in a problem: They had no plan to replace it. Or at least, no plan that could unite members of his own party; They ultimately agreed to a so-called “skinny repeal” that weakened but did not eliminate the core tenet of Obamacare, protections for Americans with pre-existing health care conditions. It failed in the Senate by one vote and his party did not raise the issue again.
Now, Republicans may be on their way to repeating that mistake with a more divided House caucus and a 53-vote majority in the Senate, who cannot possibly hope to pick up Democratic votes for anything that would represent a step backward for their party on health care, an issue on which Democrats have enjoyed popularity among voters for years.
For those Republicans, the question is more likely to end up being whether Mike Johnson and John Thune will be able to compromise with Democrats in the hopes of preventing that bomb from exploding and erasing their respective front lines in the coming midterm battles. Democrats in both houses will take advantage of the chance to vote on a clean bill that would extend the Obamacare subsidies originally passed as part of Biden’s inflation reduction act, though they may not get the chance. Johnson and Thune may find it politically toxic within their caucus, especially in the House, where such deals have angered conservative members in the past.
But the alternative is certain: If Republicans cannot come to an agreement on this deeply divisive issue, Donald Trump and his party risk making the affordability argument unwinnable next year.