It is no secret that, too often, change occurs slower than we’d like in Washington. The President’s healthcare law is a prime example. The House has passed over 60 pieces of legislation repealing, defunding, or delaying Obamacare in part or in full, only to see those bills quashed in the Senate. Harry Reid successfully kept nearly every politically tough issue from ever reaching the President’s desk – resulting in only two vetoes for the first six years of Obama’s Presidency.
Even after Republicans gained control of the Senate in January of last year, progress wasn’t immediate. The do-nothing Senate Democratic majority of years past became the do-nothing Senate Democratic minority; filibustering countless bipartisan, House-passed bills and preventing this President from answering for the broken promises of Obamacare – until now.
This week, for the first time, Congress successfully sent a bill directly to the President’s desk repealing key provision of Obamacare – including the law’s employer and individual mandates, as well as more than a dozen of the law’s most onerous taxes – while also ending taxpayer funding for the nation’s largest abortion provider: Planned Parenthood.
We accomplished this using the reconciliation tool: a once-a-year budgetary maneuver that allows legislation to advance through the Senate without the threat of a filibuster.
Unsurprisingly, the President vetoed the bill less than 48 hours later, but this was an important moment for conservatives nonetheless. With this legislation, we put President Obama on defense – forcing him to explain to the American people his support for a scandal-ridden abortion provider and a fundamentally flawed health care law. What’s more, we set a precedent for what our conservative majorities can accomplish in 2017 with the help of a willing partner in the White House and we proved that President Obama is the one person standing between the dismantling of Obamacare and the restoration of a culture of life.
This battle is far from over. In the coming weeks, we will hold a vote in the House of Representatives to override President Obama’s veto. To be sure, it will be an uphill battle to garner the votes needed, but I know this much: it is worth the fight.