michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today, President Trump has backed away from his call to replace the Affordable Care Act with a Republican alternative. Alex Burns on why the president’s own party talked him out of it. It’s Wednesday, April 3.

alexander burns

So last week was as close to a moment of total happiness as President Trump has had in a long time.

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archived recording 1 President Trump’s legal team as well as many of those who are close to the president are saying they feel the Mueller report fully vindicates the president after nearly — archived recording 2 There’s no way to take this letter other than a huge win for the president. archived recording 3 To say White House officials are happily telling the American people I told you so, well, that would frankly be a bit of an understatement. archived recording (donald trump) And after three years of lies and smears and slander, the Russia hoax is finally dead. The collusion delusion is over.

alexander burns

That’s what makes it all the more surprising that his administration decided to dive right back into one of the most politically damaging fights of his whole presidency, which is health care.

archived recording 1 The Trump Justice Department just announced a major reversal on Obamacare. archived recording 2 Today, he called the Affordable Care Act horrible and is mounting a push to kill it off. archived recording 3 Fresh off his Mueller investigation victory, some of his biggest supporters are questioning the timing. archived recording 4 Here you have a huge messaging win for the president and the White House with this Mueller summary. Why now? Why do this? archived recording 5 Why now, maybe even why at all?

michael barbaro

And how does he dive back into that politically damaging fight?

alexander burns

He directs the Justice Department to take sides in a lawsuit that has been making its way through the federal courts. It was brought by Republican legal officials in a number of states. It has been ruled on by one judge in Texas that the Affordable Care Act is invalid.

archived recording A federal judge in Texas has just struck down Obamacare. True story. Judge Reed O’Connor says the individual mandate, the part of the law that requires you to participate, is unconstitutional. And because it cannot be separated from the rest of the law, which it cannot be, the entire law is invalid.

alexander burns

It is seen as a really long-shot challenge to the Affordable Care Act, something that, in all likelihood, will probably not result in the law being struck down as a whole, but the White House was going to have to decide at some point whether they were going to defend the A.C.A. at the highest levels of the legal system or whether they were going to take sides against a law that’s on the books that Congress failed to repeal when it had the chance. And that’s what they did.

archived recording (donald trump) We think it will be upheld, and we think it will do very well in the Supreme Court. And if the Supreme Court rules that Obamacare is out, we will have a plan that’s far better than Obamacare.

michael barbaro

And my sense is that under normal circumstances, the White House almost reflexively defends laws put on the books by Congress.

alexander burns

It’s a pretty extraordinary step for the president to take sides, not just against a law that’s already on the books, but really the biggest piece of social legislation that’s been passed in recent history. And he does it at the urging of some of his most conservative advisers in the White House, including the chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney —

archived recording (mick mulvaney) And it’s hard to know where to begin when you’re talking about how bad the current health care legislation is for small business.

alexander burns

— who, before he was a member of the Trump administration, was a hardliner in the House of Representatives waging war on the Affordable Care Act from Capitol Hill.

archived recording (mick mulvaney) It’s almost as if the folks who wrote this piece of legislation last year either have no idea how small business works or they don’t care how small business works. Either way, the current health care legislation is a complete disaster for small business, and —

alexander burns

The argument that Mulvaney and others make is that if the president is going to run for re-election as a guy who made promises and kept his promises, especially to conservative voters who still care a lot about getting rid of Obamacare, he has got to take every chance he has to go against it.

michael barbaro

And given the dynamics of Congress, this is perhaps his best chance?

alexander burns

Maybe his only chance, because Democrats now control the House. There is really no shot for Republicans to pass a bill repealing the Affordable Care Act. So if they’re going to take it down, they’re going to take it down in the courts.

michael barbaro

O.K., well, what is the response to this announcement?

alexander burns

Well, Democrats are totally elated.

archived recording (nancy pelosi) This is actually an opportunity for us to speak to the American people with clarity. archived recording (chuck schumer) It’s a stark reminder of the difference between our two parties. Democrats are fighting to expand and improve health care coverage and lower costs while Republicans are trying to take it all away and raise costs.

alexander burns

They have spent, at this point, several days on the defensive about some of the claims that they made about what was likely to be in Robert Mueller’s report. They are desperate to get away from their own divisive fights about the nature of liberal health care policy. You have had, in the presidential primaries, in the House of Representatives, even in the Senate where Democrats aren’t in control, just endless tugs of war between moderate liberals, very liberal Democrats, far-left Democrats over what kind of health care system the country ought to have in an ideal world. Should it be European-style single-payer health care? Should it be a system that just totally does away with private health insurance? All these kinds of divisive debates on the left that have had Democrats tripping over each other. But President Trump weighs in the way he does on the Affordable Care Act, and all of a sudden all those conflicts hit pause.

archived recording (nancy pelosi) Oh, no, please. archived recording (SINGING) Happy birthday to you!

alexander burns

And the timing on the Democratic side is sort of comical in that it is literally Nancy Pelosi’s 79th birthday —

archived recording Happy birthday to you.

alexander burns

— the morning after this Justice Department announcement comes out. And when you have Democrats singing “Happy Birthday” to her, there was this sense in the caucus that she had gotten the best gift a president could have given her.

michael barbaro

What is the reaction from Republicans in Congress?

alexander burns

Well, real dismay and surprise and sort of horror.

archived recording Even Republicans appear bewildered by President Trump’s promise to make the G.O.P. the party of health care.

alexander burns

And not just from the few remaining relatively moderate Republicans.

archived recording Some Republicans are nervous about that, including House minority leader Kevin McCarthy. According to Axios, McCarthy called the president and told him the decision made no sense, saying the health care battle helped Democrats win the House and several state capitals last year.

alexander burns

Every Republican analysis of the midterm elections concluded that they lost the House because of health care more than any other individual policy issue. So if you are Kevin McCarthy, the new House minority leader, you are just appalled at the idea that your members are now going to have to have this fight all over again.

michael barbaro

Right. We had talked about this with you during the midterms — that there had been this huge public shift on Obamacare and that voters who might have previously been against it now do not want it taken away.

alexander burns

That’s right. It was less of a thank you to Democrats than a punishment for Republicans, that Democrats never got the political boost back in 2010, 2012, 2014 that they hoped they would get for passing a big new social benefit. But what they did ultimately get was the benefit of voters turning against Republicans who wanted to take those benefits away. So Obamacare as a term, as a law, still kind of a mixed bag politically, but there are elements in that law, like protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions, that are enormously popular. And Republicans look back on the last campaign, the one that ended really rather badly for them, and see that as, more than anything else, the fatal political mistake they made.

michael barbaro

So why would President Trump, the leader of the Republican Party, who had to have watched that same midterm that you’re describing, why would he do this if the takeaway of that midterm is that the Affordable Care Act is no longer toxic and might even be liked by a wide cross-section of Americans?

alexander burns

In the president’s public statements, and as far as we can tell based on his personal thinking, he recognizes that health care is a huge political vulnerability for Republicans, that the last thing they did on health care, that big repeal drive, was politically devastating to them. And his proclamation that they need to become the party of health care clearly reflects an understanding that a problem needs to be fixed.

archived recording (donald trump) So we’re going to get rid of Obamacare. And I said it the other day. The Republican Party will become the party of great health care. It’s good. It’s important.

michael barbaro

I guess I can see President Trump’s argument there. It feels kind of legitimate. Wouldn’t it be smart for Republicans heading into the next presidential election, 2020, to recognize that there are things that voters like about the Affordable Care Act? But in order for it to be a benefit for the Republicans and not the Democrats, they need to convince voters that the Democratic plan is a bad one and that Republicans will give them a better one.

alexander burns

Right. But giving voters a better version of health care provided by the Republican Party has always had to mean more than just getting rid of the system that currently exists. It’s this strange kind of bifurcated mental space that Republicans have been living in politically, where they want to run against Democrats for trying to blow up the health care system and replace it with single-payer, and, on the other side, they want to get rid of much of the existing health care system and replace it with something to be named later.

michael barbaro

In other words, they don’t really have a plan to replace it.

alexander burns

They don’t, and they kind of never have, not a consensus plan that’s supported by a broad cross-section of the party and voters. And that’s why when the president came out with this position through the Justice Department and then suggested that Republicans in Congress ought to come up with something great, the backlash from Republicans at the highest levels of the congressional party was swift and severe. The view among congressional Republicans was that this was just sort of a total fantasy coming from the president. The idea that they would not only come up with a plan and come up with a plan that would be popular and meet the standards that the president has laid out in rally after rally, but that they would do it within a year and then run on it in 2020 just seemed like it was cut from whole cloth.

michael barbaro

Is there also a feeling among Republicans toward the president along the lines of, dude, we just want to stop calling attention to this issue. It’s a losing issue for us. Stop drawing attention to it.

alexander burns

Oh, absolutely. And if the concern among folks like Mick Mulvaney is that walking away from the fight looks like surrender, the view from a lot of Republicans on the Hill is they’ve already lost. They can talk about how they lost, or they can talk about other stuff, and the president is choosing to talk about defeat.

michael barbaro

Right. Instead of talking about what I had imagined Republicans would be talking about for the next couple of months and maybe even the next year, which is the Democratic fight over “Medicare for all,” the Democratic fight over whether private insurance should even exist — I had expected that that would be the consuming discussion in the political world and in the political campaigns to come when it came to health care.

alexander burns

So did I, and I think so did a lot of Republican candidates down the ballot preparing for 2020. There was always going to be tension in the Republican message about Democratic radicalism on health care, because if you are running in 2020 on the idea that Democrats are going to blow up the current system and replace it with European-style medicine, you’re kind of implicitly defending the status quo system as it exists under Obamacare. It’s an extraordinarily awkward position for Republicans to be in. Can you be opposed to Democratic proposals to make the health care system even more liberal, even more regulated or structured by the government, without essentially defending the system that Barack Obama put in place? We don’t know how they’re going to walk that line. We don’t know to what extent they’ll even try. But the president’s current approach, which is to say that Democrats will do something drastic and bad to your health care, and I’m not quite going to tell you what I’m going to do yet, doesn’t seem sustainable.

michael barbaro

So what happens in the last 24 hours or so to this Trump-led project to try to strike down, repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act?

alexander burns

Well, after days of other Republicans expressing public discomfort with where the president was headed —

archived recording (mitch mcconnell) So I made it clear to him we were not going to be doing that in the Senate.

alexander burns

— Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, conveyed in no uncertain terms to the White House that this was a non-starter in the Senate, that the president was free to do what he wanted to do on health care, but that Senate Republicans were not going to be taking the lead on this. It was not a fight they wanted, period, full stop.

archived recording (mitch mcconnell) So we don’t have a misunderstanding about that. We will not be doing comprehensive in the Senate.

alexander burns

The president seemed to have gotten the message.

archived recording President Trump on the retreat. archived recording (donald trump) No, I wanted to delay it myself. I want to put it after the election.

alexander burns

And his response was to go onto Twitter and to declare that they are totally going to do all the things that he said they were going to do, but at a much later date, after the 2020 election.

michael barbaro

Right. He cited the date 2021. We will do all this right after the election.

alexander burns

Right after an election when, in his construction, he would be re-elected, Republicans would hold the Senate, and they would take back control of the House. So that’s not just a delay of game. That is setting a whole bunch of other conditions on what would need to happen to get there.

michael barbaro

Were you surprised, Alex, that the president backed down on this so quickly?

alexander burns

I was surprised by how fast it happened. I wasn’t surprised that he sort of came up with a really big theory of what should happen next and then eventually let it disintegrate, because we’ve seen that pattern a number of times. But to pick a fight this big and to stick with it for so little time is the definition of politically counterproductive.

michael barbaro

So now, we are basically back where we started. The Affordable Care Act is likely to remain the law of the land. So what did we learn from this weeklong ordeal?

alexander burns

Well, the biggest thing we learned is that the politics of health care have been turned on their head in the last couple of years, and that the Affordable Care Act is no longer a liability for Democrats, and that Republicans, whether they want to acknowledge it or not, have largely abandoned the fight.

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The fact that you had the senior-most members of the congressional party saying so clearly to a president they helped elect and have loyally supported, we don’t want to touch health care — it would have been sort of unimaginable to someone five years ago that that would happen with a Republican president in office.

michael barbaro

Alex, thank you very much.

alexander burns

Thank you.

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alexander burns

Tomorrow’s my birthday, so this is like a little birthday special.

michael barbaro

Yay! Is that on the mic?

lisa tobin

Happy birthday tomorrow!

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back. [MUSIC]: Here’s what else you need to know today.

archived recording (theresa may) Despite the best efforts of M.P.s, the process that the House of Commons has tried to lead has not come up with an answer. So today, I’m taking action to break the logjam.

michael barbaro

In her latest attempt to rally support for Brexit after a series of embarrassing setbacks, British prime minister Theresa May said she would seek a new delay for leaving the European Union and would begin negotiating a Brexit plan with her political rivals in the Labour Party.

archived recording (theresa may) I’m offering to sit down with the leader of the opposition and to try to agree a plan that we would both stick to to ensure that we leave the European Union and that we do so with a deal.

michael barbaro

The attempt to work across the aisle with the Labour Party suggests that May cannot win enough support within her own Conservative Party to pass her Brexit plan.

archived recording (theresa may) The ideal outcome of this process would be to agree an approach on a future relationship that delivers on the result of the referendum that both the leader of the opposition and I could put to the House for approval, and which I could then take to next week’s European Council.

michael barbaro