Despite failing to bring a Republican healthcare bill to a vote last month, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Wednesday that he was "highly confident" that Congress would pass an Obamacare repeal bill this year, the Washington Examiner reported.
"It's closer than it is further away," McCarthy said. "We've got everyone in the room talking about it. We'll get it done."
When asked if he was being tough enough in obtaining the necessary votes, McCarthy said, "I'd rather win on the power of the idea than the power of the stick."
Politico reported that President Donald Trump and Republicans in the House have resumed their talks about finding a compromise in healthcare reform that will satisfy both moderates and conservatives in the party.
McCarthy insisted to the Examiner that the failure to bring the bill to a vote last month was "not a loss. In politics you have ups and downs … It's simply a chapter where you learn to move forward."
But The Sacramento Bee said the abrupt collapse of the bill was an extraordinary blow to the GOP leadership that had promised for seven years to repeal Obmacare and represents "the most high-profile" defeat for the California congressman.
The paper insists that McCarthy's future is now at a crossroads, as he is faced with a fractured caucus that is difficult to control and must somehow resolve "this tension between [his] broad expressions of can-do optimism and the bleaker vote-wrangling reality [that] has marked other chapters of his leadership life."
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