Thread: Trump's triumph: ObamaCare repealed by the House

Trump's triumph: ObamaCare repealed by the House

By Newt Gingrich Published May 05, 2017 Fox News

Gingrich's advice to Republicans on selling health care bill

What happened Thursday in the House of Representatives was an extraordinary victory for President Donald J. Trump.

The Art of the Deal has clearly come to Washington.

The effort to repeal ObamaCare seemed to have foundered on a handful of votes.

The enthusiasm that it could be passed easily collapsed when different members decided they were not comfortable with one provision or another.

Efforts to modify the bill to please the conservative Freedom Caucus led the Tuesday Group moderates to back off from the bill.

The legislative ping pong that ensued between the organized conservatives and organized moderates caused members in the middle of the two coalitions to begin getting nervous.

Speaker Paul Ryan correctly pointed out that we were watching a party which had spent six years as the opposition majority painfully learning to be a governing majority.

Ryan, working with his close friend, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus (a fellow cheesehead from Wisconsin), however, just kept plugging away.

While the health care bill seemed blocked by lack of a few votes, the budget passed, a number of other issues moved forward, and work on the job-creating tax cut bill progressed.

And then this week the dam broke.

Suddenly, members began to find amendments and modifications that enabled them to vote for the repeal of ObamaCare.

Mark Meadows, leader of the Freedom Caucus, deserves a lot of credit for having insisted since the first try failed that a compromise could be found.

Tom MacArthur, leader of the moderate Tuesday Group, also deserves praise for keeping the lines of communication open. Both Meadows and MacArthur worked tirelessly to ensure collaboration with the White House in order to construct a bill that could get majority support.

Politico illustrated the Meadows-MacArthur’s working relationship in a story published Friday:

“Many House Republicans rolled their eyes at the prospect of the two lawmakers from opposite ends of the party striking a deal. But the duo talked almost every day over a several-week stretch, even touching base on Easter. Eventually, they came up with a framework that Meadows believed could deliver 15 to 20 additional conservatives votes.”

Yet all those efforts would have failed if President Trump had not supplied the magic of his personality, persistence, energy, imagination, and creativity. The president relentlessly reached out to individual members, listened to their concerns and ideas, and then brainstormed with them to find solutions.

The really impressive thing about President Trump throughout this mini-saga though was his steady, steadfast determination to keep grinding forward until he got the job done.

My friend and adviser, Randy Evans often points out that winning teams win.

As Randy said after the vote Thursday, President Trump is teaching Republicans how to win.

Newt Gingrich is a Fox News contributor. A Republican, he was speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999. Follow him on Twitter @NewtGingrich.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/...-by-house.html

My friend and adviser, Randy Evans often points out that winning teams win.

As Randy said after the vote Thursday, President Trump is teaching Republicans how to win.

This is such an astute and important statement. It is so true. For decades we send our candidates to DC, they talked good on the trail, but when they get there, they become do-nothings, paralyzed by the fear of criticism if they do something and it doesn't go exactly the way they hoped, so the better path is the path of least resistance, talk big, play it safe, do-nothing, then throw up your hands and blame someone else for the problem you failed to solve. Good at stopping some bad stuff, but terrible at solving anything.

And why is this? I think it's simple. They don't know what they're doing. They don't know anything about taxation, yet they're in charge of our tax laws. They don't know anything about trade or immigration, yet they're in charge of our trade and immigration laws. They don't know anything about poverty, yet they're in charge of the laws that create and fund it. They don't even know anything about jobs, yet they are responsible for the business egulations, labor, tax, trade and immigration laws that have run tens of millions of jobs out of the United States and allowed for the importation of labor that's put tens of millions of other Americans in the soup lines.

They need to read up, they're the ones who need to spend some time using their basic common sense to understand how regulated free enterprise actually works, because it works by the numbers. It's all numbers. And if they knew about that and understood that, we wouldn't be in this mess. And it's now always numbers the way you might think, it's not "cheap labor", cheap labor is a negative, not a positive. You want low prices, this is fine, that is good, but not too low, because then there's not enough price to pay for the cost, plus a profit, but this is all determined by supply and demand based on fair trade and competition. But you don't want low wages, that is NOT fine, that is bad, because low wages means no one can afford to purchase your products. Low wages means all your businesses go broke!

You want market prices, whatever those are, and as high a wage as can be paid by different industries and businesses. You want low taxes or no taxes on production, because taxes on production compound and are expensive to comply with, and mess up the numbers of a business, they skew the price, they skew the numbers, they actually rob the workers and investors who are key to the survival of the business. When you have consumption taxes, like the FairTax, then all of these distortions are diverted. The final consumer happy with their decision to purchase with money in hand to do so, pays as they go. No economic distortions because they're paid at the final point of sale with a conscious tax-included price decision, no impact on or distortion of the production process, no mandates, no compliance costs, no interference in business decisions, no money wasted on lobbying schemes and plots to exempt this or give me a loophole for that, or etc., etc., etc. that has led to the mess we're in.

Trump was curiously right both times. He was right when he said "let Obamacare collapse, lets cut corporate and business tax rates". He was also right when he said "lets fix Obamacare, and use the savings to help underwrite our corporate and business tax rates so we can bring our jobs home". For Trump, it was a win-win. He won either way. But he decided to go for the score, he decided to go for a win that would ..... yes, fix something, to move on to fix something else, to enable fixing something more, to fix our country and make it great again. Now with a win under their belts in the House, two wins actually, 1 win on repealing health insurance from McCarran with a huge unreported victory of an historic 416-7 vote and 1 win on passing the phase 1 health bill out of the US House of Representatives, they will gain the courage and unity to fix more stuff where legislation is needed.

Yes, winning is hard and scary sometimes, but boy does it feel good. The House got the touchdown with the repeal of McCarran, ironically the biggest bill of all that to date remains unreported by all media, and a 2 point conversion with the passage of the health care bill itself. Why give the repeal of McCarran the touchdown points and the health care bill the conversion points? Well, because the health care bill without McCarran would just be a different version of the present situation, it wouldn't increase competition and lower premiums. The key to lower premiums is not the health care bill itself, it's the repeal of health insurance from the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945.

Great job, US House of Representatives. You've earned your pay so far this year. You kept our government running, got $1.6 billion for border security, complied with the Budget Balance and Control Act, repealed McCarran with an historic vote, and yes passed the Phase 1 Health Care Bill on to the US Senate.

Oh, and you've debunked the whole "TIES TO RUSSIA" scam, you've unearthed a highly questionable FISA warrant issued on a completely innocent US citizen based on a phony "dossier" from a former British spy who is now making a living running political misinformation campaigns for money, discovered "unmasking" of US citizens for political purposes during "incidental surveillance", exposed Comey as a Culprit, and are well on your way to identifying the "leakers" of classified information.

Not bad for 106 days. Not bad at all, in fact, pretty damn good, when you stand back and consider the implications.

THANK YOU!! THANK YOU VERY VERY MUCH!!