Obamacare repeal?

McConnell boxes in Cruz, Rubio on Obamacare repeal

With backing from anti-abortion groups, the Senate majority leader attracted conservatives.

By Seung Min Kim , Burgess Everett and Jennifer Haberkorn

Mitch McConnell is close to pulling off a feat that at first seemed impossible: Coax Ted Cruz and antagonistic conservative groups to back his strategy to repeal Obamacare.

For weeks, Cruz, a 2016 GOP presidential candidate and chief McConnell nemesis, and conservative Sens. Mike Lee and Marco Rubio threatened to vote against a House-passed bill dismantling the health care law, insisting that it didn’t go far enough in the Republican quest to finally send a sweeping Obamacare repeal to the White House.

Now, nearly a dozen GOP sources say Cruz and Rubio are almost certain to support the bill that kills significant portions of Obamacare, though they hadn’t yet made their position official. Lee has already endorsed the new measure, which goes even further than the House legislation, saying Wednesday that he “wholeheartedly” supports it.

McConnell marshaled a secret weapon that ultimately would work in his favor: Anti-abortion groups.

Since the summer, the Senate majority leader had spoken with influential organizations opposing abortion such as National Right to Life and the Susan B. Anthony List to ensure they would back his move to link the Obamacare repeal with a measure to defund Planned Parenthood. The groups wield significant influence in a Senate GOP caucus that is now almost uniformly anti-abortion, and they wanted to put defunding on the president’s desk.

At the same time, members of the Values Action Team, a small group of GOP senators led by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), served as key Senate emissaries to social conservatives. And more recently, anti-abortion groups vowed to score against any senator who rejected the anti-Planned Parenthood provision, exerting additional pressure on conservative lawmakers who would have seen their sterling pro-life ratings tarnished if the defunding language was dropped.

That coordinated strategy, along with revisions to the House bill that satisfied GOP holdouts, helped McConnell push the firebrand presidential contenders toward the “yes” column on the health care legislation that always had a narrow margin of error. Lee, Cruz and Rubio were expected to issue a joint statement Wednesday endorsing the bill, although that had not been released as of the evening.

GOP leaders calculated that any vote against the joint Obamacare-Planned Parenthood package would have been politically tough for presidential contenders. How would voting against Planned Parenthood defunding play in Iowa with social conservatives? And how could someone seeking the White House say they voted against the one repeal bill that had any chance of landing on President Barack Obama’s desk?

“I don’t think anybody who considers themselves being a pro-life senator wants to be on record voting against something that would redirect funding for Planned Parenthood,” said South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the third-ranking Senate Republican.

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas added: “Running in a Republican primary and saying you’re going to vote against a repeal of Obamacare? That strikes me as counterintuitive.”

After months of delay, a slew of staff meetings and one procedural hiccup, McConnell and Senate Republicans are on the verge of clearing legislation shredding some of the most controversial aspects of Obamacare — the first significant repeal of Obama’s signature health care law to land on his desk since Obamacare passed more than five years ago.

Still, any victory would be purely symbolic. Obama has vowed to veto any such measure, and Republicans would not be able to muster enough votes to override that move.

As McConnell made his latest bid to move a repeal forward, he had faced resistance from both the conservative and moderate wings of the Senate GOP Conference. The right complained that the original House-passed language didn’t maximize Obamacare repeal and moderates were reluctant about stripping funding from the women’s health group.

Ultimately, GOP leaders deftly maneuvered around those obstacles, carving out a path for conservative senators to get to “yes” without losing any more moderates. Republicans such as Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Mark Kirk of Illinois appear to be the likeliest contenders to vote against the bill due to the Planned Parenthood provisions, but McConnell is almost certain not to lose any more GOP votes even though he broadened the scope of the Obamacare repeal.

And the GOP leaders’ moves also persuaded Heritage Action, the feisty outside conservative group whose main goal often seems to be opposing McConnell’s every move, to do a complete 180 on its opposition to the initial anti-Obamacare legislation.

“Sens. Cruz, Lee and Rubio deserve credit for refusing to settle for the House-passed bill, which would have left the main pillars of the law in place,” the group’s Chief Executive Officer Michael Needham said Wednesday. “To be clear, there is more work that needs to be done to make full repeal a reality, but the Senate’s effort provides momentum to help make that a reality in 2017.”

Privately, senior GOP aides dismiss the influence of Heritage Action; leadership long believed that support from the anti-abortion groups was more critical.

Heritage Action floated the idea of dropping the Planned Parenthood language, an attempt that senior Republicans viewed as giving Cruz and other conservatives an excuse to vote against Obamacare repeal and criticize McConnell. But the Susan B. Anthony List and National Right to Life wouldn’t have any of it.

In an interview, Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser admitted that the anti-abortion groups clashed behind the scenes with Heritage Action over how to construct the bill. She credited a Senate GOP Conference that is nearly uniformly anti-abortion and McConnell’s shrewd negotiating tactics for getting “everyone playing together in the same sandbox” — to force Obama to veto language that would have defunded Planned Parenthood.

“We were not on the same page,” Dannenfelser said of Heritage Action. “We were in constant conversation. There was no reason to dump” the Planned Parenthood language.

Even so, she said: “We had great concern that it was going to fall apart.”

The endgame comes after McConnell and anti-abortion groups agreed to uncouple the Planned Parenthood fight from must-pass bills like a government funding measure — and avoid the political backlash of a shutdown battle.

National Right to Life and Susan B. Anthony List didn’t want to risk taking the focus off of the Planned Parenthood sting videos — which advocates said proved that the organization was trafficking in “baby parts” — by embroiling Washington in a battle over government funding. Planned Parenthood has denied that it made any profit from donating fetal tissue.

Meanwhile, other Senate Republicans played key roles in the Planned Parenthood fight. Blunt and other members of the Senate Values Action Team, including Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, Joni Ernst of Iowa and Tim Scott of South Carolina, were also in communication with the anti-abortion groups, ensuring that conservatives on and off the Hill had a unified Planned Parenthood strategy.

“We understand we have a president that strongly supports Planned Parenthood and what they do,” Lankford said Wednesday. “We get that. But we also don’t want this issue to go away. We want to continue to be able to raise it over and over again and say, ‘Is this what Americans really believe?’”

As a potential repeal vote neared, the anti-abortion groups got more aggressive. When Thune publicly floated the prospect of dropping the Planned Parenthood provision to help shore up the vote count, National Right to Life burst into action, telling senators it would not only score a vote to defund, it would score a vote to remove the defunding measure.

National Right to Life’s score, which is typically based on only a small number of votes, is of pivotal importance to many rank-and-file Republicans. The group has an active grass-roots base in states vital to maintaining control of the Senate. And it seemed unlikely that a Senate Republican would risk the scorecard with National Right to Life, for a bill that would never become law anyway.

The move worked. Within 24 hours, McConnell publicly affirmed that Planned Parenthood would be defunded as part of the bigger Obamacare repeal measure.

“We were always going to score this issue and this bill,” said Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee. “It’s a no-brainer.”

Though Senate GOP leaders are on the cusp of carrying Obamacare repeal over the finish line, they’re doing so at the expense of concerns from moderates displeased about the Planned Parenthood defunding.

“I want that provision to drop,” Collins said Wednesday. “I would never say that any group, including a pro-life group, has too much influence. I mean, they have every right to advocate their cause. But what I will say is, I think it detracts from the message of repealing and replacing Obamacare.”

Still, losing a moderate or two is worth it for Senate Republican leaders, who have earned praise from their rank and file for how they’ve tackled the reconciliation fight.

“McConnell’s handling of the Affordable Care Act has been superb from the beginning,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), who often clashes with his leadership. “He’s still keeping our conference together on this issue. I think it’s really good leadership from him.”