Members of Congress returning home for the July 4 recess last week were met with rallies, sit-ins
and Independence Day demonstrators, as activists on the left
intensified their push to defeat Republican legislation to repeal and
replace the Affordable Care Act.
The groups on the right that once fueled the party’s anti-Obamacare fervor might as well have been on vacation.
“Not too many are focused on health care currently,” said Levi Russell, a spokesman for Americans for Prosperity, a group founded and funded by the Koch brothers.
Instead of health care, he said, the organization’s state chapters were holding town hall-style meetings about veterans’ concerns during recess week. Two other major groups, FreedomWorks and the Tea Party Patriots,
said they were planning rallies in August and September that would push
for an overhaul of the tax code; Americans for Prosperity was already
running ads toward that.
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The shift in priorities is remarkable. Since the summer of 2009, when Tea Party activists angrily confronted
Democrats who were drafting the Affordable Care Act, the Republican
Party has been driven and defined by outrage over it. But now, with the
Republican health care legislation hanging in the balance, President
Trump and congressional leaders are getting little support from what
were once the loudest anti-Obamacare voices. The lack of grass-roots
enthusiasm will make it even harder for the party’s Senate leaders to
line up votes for their troubled bill when they return on Monday.
Activists
on the right said they felt betrayed by the Republicans they helped
elect, who pledged that when they had a Republican president they would
repeal the act “root and branch,” as Senator Mitch McConnell, the
majority leader, once declared.
“This
is not anywhere close to that, and I think it has left a number of
conservative activists saying I’m not advocating for this,” said David
Bozell, the president of ForAmerica,
an organization founded in 2010, the year the Affordable Care Act was
passed, to help spread conservative ideas on social media.
These
activists want the subsidies that help people buy insurance repealed,
not just reduced. They want the Medicaid expansion eliminated, not
slowed.
“You’re
not going to get a grass-roots activist to spend their valuable time
calling their senator because, ‘Well, this is better than nothing,’” Mr.
Bozell said.
Public opinion polls
show support for repeal-and-replace slipping among the very groups that
once demanded it. Support for the Republicans’ efforts among Trump
supporters, while still a healthy 55 percent, dropped 14 percentage
points since May, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll
in mid-June. Among Republicans over all, support had dropped 11 points,
to 56 percent. Just 8 percent of Republicans polled thought repeal
should be the top priority of Congress and the president.
While
Republicans have become more lukewarm on their party’s efforts,
Democrats are more fiercely defending the Affordable Care Act.
Fifty-three percent of Democrats in the Kaiser poll had a “very
favorable” view of the health care law, while 21 percent of Republicans
had the same view of their party’s plan to repeal it. In May 2010, two
months after the law passed, 30 percent of Democrats had a very favorable view of it. Republicans were heatedly against it: 69 percent had a “very unfavorable view.”
“There’s
definitely an enthusiasm gap,” said Liz Hamel, the director of public
opinion and survey research for Kaiser, a nonpartisan research group.
“It’s not that they’re not interested in repeal,” she said. “They just
have other priorities.”
In
the June poll, 74 percent of Republicans said their families would be
better off without the health care law. But a majority expressed support
for its major provisions: 59 percent want the federal government to
continue prohibiting insurers from charging more to people with
pre-existing conditions; 52 percent said the federal government should
continue to require insurance plans to cover a list of “essential health
benefits,” like maternity care and treatment for drug abuse.
Advertising, too, has been one-sided against the Republican legislation. Groups from Planned Parenthood to the AARP have bought television and radio spots in states with wavering Republicans
imploring them to vote against the plan. Groups on the right were
mostly silent; FreedomWorks has run digital ads in Tennessee alone,
showing Senator Bob Corker, who has criticized his fellow Republicans
for proposing to eliminate the act’s 3.8 percent tax on investment
income, cozying up to President Barack Obama.
Like
Republican lawmakers, some of the groups have found that fixing complex
legislation is far more challenging than opposing it. “It’s easier to
generate a crowd when you don’t have to be in on the sausage-making,”
said Adam Brandon, the president of FreedomWorks.
“The
Democrats, their strategy is outrage,” he said. “I get that strategy. I
lived that strategy. It’s a unifying strategy to be outraged at the
other guy. The hard part is when you get in and have to deliver.”
Jenny
Beth Martin, the president and co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots,
said the group’s email blasts against Obamacare still trigger hundreds
of responses from activists angry about it. The group helped make more
than 100,000 phone calls over 48 hours when the House was voting on its
bill in the beginning of May to repeal and replace.
But, she said, “We’re not yet on the yes side with what the Senate is doing.”
Grass-roots
activists like Pat Daugherty, who once marched on Washington against
Obamacare, now sound as disgusted with Republicans in Congress as they
were in the early days of the Tea Party, when they helped primary challenges against lawmakers they derided as “Republicans in Name Only.”
“Every
Republican in Congress ran on repealing Obamacare,” said Ms. Daugherty,
a retired university administrator in Athens, Ga. “Why do we suddenly
have a hard time repealing Obamacare when Republicans are in the
majority?
“I know a lot of conservatives who are more upset with Republicans than with Democrats,” she said.
David
Zupan helped organize Tea Party groups in Ohio against the Affordable
Care Act, which he blamed for driving up health care costs and forcing
him to shutter his technology support business. Before the law, he said,
he paid $910 per month to insure him and his wife, with a $750 annual
deductible. When he renewed his policy last year, he said, the rates had
increased to $2,845 per month, with a $3,500 deductible.
Mr.
Zupan had hoped to confront Senator Rob Portman over the recess to
demand that he and his fellow Republicans push for a full repeal. Mr.
Portman has expressed concern that the Senate bill would roll back
Medicaid too far, particularly jeopardizing treatment for opioid addiction. But Mr. Zupan gave up after being unable to figure out where Mr. Portman would be.
Mr. Zupan, too, expressed a certain resignation with Republicans.
“Nothing they’re going to do to this bill is going to make it better,” he said.
“I
honestly don’t believe that the majority of the people in the House and
the Senate want limited government,” he said. “They’d rather have the
government in there controlling the 17 percent of our economy that is
health care. It means more money over all that they get to control.”
Some groups, including the Tea Party Patriots, are supporting a proposal by Senator Ted Cruz
of Texas that would allow insurers to offer plans without the full
complement of essential health benefits, which Republicans believe will
lead to cheaper premiums, as long as they offer at least one plan that
covers those benefits.
And
some activists endorsed a tweet from Mr. Trump on June 30 encouraging
Republicans to scrap the current bill attempting to replace the
Affordable Care Act and resurrect one from 2015 that just repealed it.
That bill won almost unanimous support from Republicans, but was vetoed
by Mr. Obama.
Mr.
Brandon, at FreedomWorks, said activists were beginning to think that
Republicans had voted for that bill only because they knew Mr. Obama
would block it. That suspicion — “they were just being political” —
fosters apathy now, he said.
“You
think of the origins of the Tea Party and the origins of why Donald
Trump won,” he said. “People are sick of the political show.”
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