Ryan complicates politics of Obamacare repeal by including Planned Parenthood defunding

Rss@dailykos.com (joan Mccarter) · Thursday, January 05, 2017, 5:08 pm

House Speaker Paul Ryan is making Obamacare repeal through budget reconciliation—already a hugely complicated task—just a little bit harder politically by adding Planned Parenthood defunding to it.

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Paul Ryan said Thursday that the House will vote to defund Planned Parenthood this year in the same reconciliation bill they’ll use to repeal Obamacare. That means Republicans will need just a simple majority of members to pass those measures.
“Planned Parenthood legislation would be in our reconciliation bill,” Ryan said to reporters at a press conference, when asked “how and when” the House will pass legislation to defund the organization.

That complicates things for Mitch McConnell in the Senate, where there's no room to lose Republican votes. In December 2015, when Republicans included Planned Parenthood defunding in their Obamacare repeal reconciliation "dry-run" bill that eventually met with President Obama's veto pen, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) voted against it after her amendment to strip the PP defunding language was defeated. There's one potentially lost on repeal.

Sen. Rand Paul is possibly another. He voted no on the first procedural vote on repeal Wednesday, and is working with House Freedom Caucus members about how to derail this process. He's not doing it out of love for Obamacare, nor are the House maniacs, but because the package would add to the deficit.

For those keeping count, that's two out of 52 Senate Republicans potentially defecting. McConnell needs 51, and if he wants to have this ready to put on popular vote loser Donald Trump's desk on January 20, he might not have the votes (Vice President Joe Biden will still be president of the Senate until that day, and sure won't provide the tie-breaking vote). But the actual defunding of Planned Parenthood—not the symbolic one they voted for last year, knowing it was going to be vetoed—might lose a few more Republicans, including Lisa Murkowski of Alaska who sided with Collins last year to try to strip that defunding language. Ryan’s making this harder, and making it harder for fellow

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