Ted Cruz is still ready to use any means necessary to repeal Obamacare.

But even his fellow conservatives aren’t all jumping on board – a sign that the Republican repeal or bust movement is struggling while Obamacare continues to enroll millions of people with health insurance.


While Cruz wants to use a draconian budget measure to repeal Obamacare with just 51 votes in the Senate, he looks to be increasingly out on a limb. Utah Republican Mike Lee, a leader in the conservative movement, isn’t sold on the so-called budget reconciliation procedure to gut the law. Rand Paul says he’s for repeal but is hedging on exactly how to do it.

Mitch McConnell, who may enjoy a 54 vote Senate Republican majority by January, won’t commit to using the simple majority vote to kill Obamacare. And none of the Republican 2016 presidential candidates are pushing hard for the more radical Senate procedures to repeal the health care law.

Interviews with a wide range of key figures in the Senate and within the conservative movement show that while the party may be united rhetorically on repealing Obamacare, Republicans are surprisingly squishy on exactly how to do it.

The most popular response is to say, “yes, I’m for repeal,” but without saying how. Paul spokesman Brian Darling says the Kentucky senator “is committed one hundred percent to a full repeal,” but added that “using regular order or reconciliation or both is an inside the beltway fight.” And Steve Daines, the newly elected senator from Montana, said through a spokesman only that he “supports fully repealing Obamacare” and “will closely examine how to most effectively achieve that goal.”

And that doesn’t even address the moderates like Maine Republican Susan Collins, or politically vulnerable blue state Republicans who are up for re-election in 2016. Collins just got re-elected, and now her spokesman, Kevin Kelley, says Collins “doesn’t think it’s feasible to outright repeal the entire law” and that Congress should spend its time just trying to fix its worst flaws.

The only sure thing for Republicans at this point is that there will be a vote on a standalone repeal bill, probably early in the year. And even though virtually all Republicans will vote for it, the bill will fall short of a filibuster-proof 60 in the Senate.

The real question is what happens after that. If the Republicans decide to declare all-out war, as Cruz wants, they could set up a simple majority vote on repeal under the budget reconciliation rules. The upside of this move is that it would get to Obama’s desk — and he would veto it, which is exactly what many conservative activists want. The downside, however, is significant: Such a move would quickly dominate the Senate, divide Republicans and become a PR disaster.

The other option is just to focus on the most unpopular pieces of the law, like knocking out the individual mandate, the medical device tax, the definition of full-time work as 30-hours a week, and possibly a “risk corridors” provision that gives extra payments to health insurers that attract too many sick patients.

That’s the approach McConnell and other Senate GOP leaders have talked about the most, and Republican aides say that strategy would have the advantage of attracting Democratic votes.

But Cruz is the most vocal member of a small group that believes any serious repeal attempt must use every possible legislative tool to put a bill on Obama’s desk — not just the 60-vote strategy that they know will fail. Cruz, the architect of last year’s government shutdown over Obamacare, told Fox News on election night that “I think we should start by using [budget] reconciliation to pass complete and total repeal.”

Marco Rubio, another potential 2016 presidential candidate, is one of the few leaving the door open to the budget reconciliation approach. He told a Denver talk show host last month that “I think we need to do it any way we can to get it done.”

Heritage Action’s Dan Holler said the use of reconciliation “signals a seriousness” that the GOP would wipe the law off the books if they win the White House in 2016. At least one of the new GOP senators, Mike Rounds of South Dakota, is on board with that plan, at least in a rhetorical way. Rob Skjonsberg, who managed his campaign and is now the director of his transition team, says Rounds wants to “repeal and replace as much of Obamacare as possible through the budget process.”

But the skeptics seem to outnumber the Cruz camp at this point. Lee, a tea party favorite, wants to have “as many bites at the apple as possible,” according to an aide — but he also wants more information on how much of the health care law the Senate could actually repeal through budget rules. The process can only be used for legislation that has some impact on spending and revenues — which includes most of the biggest pieces of Obamacare, like the individual mandate and subsidies for health insurance, but not all of it.

There’s even a growing divide among conservative groups. One prominent anti-Obamacare activist, who requested anonymity to talk candidly about internal discussions, said his group is having second thoughts about the 51-vote strategy. That’s because it could make it easier for Democrats to call Republicans hypocrites for using the same procedural maneuver the Democrats used to pass Obamacare in the first place — the manuever Republicans have attacked ever since.

“Don’t give [Obama] a chance to say the Republicans are doing the exact same thing the Democrats did when they were in power,” the activist said.

Many newly elected senators are dodging the issue altogether so far. Most of them, including Joni Ernst of Iowa, Cory Gardner of Colorado and Tom Cotton of Arkansas — all of whom campaigned as diehard opponents of the law — wouldn’t say if they supported the simple majority budget strategy.

And Cruz probably can’t count on Shelley Moore Capito, the newly elected West Virginia senator. She says she wants to “keep what works and get rid of what doesn’t” and wants to work with the other GOP senators on the “best path forward.”

Even the Senate committee chairmen-in-waiting aren’t taking a stand just yet. Orrin Hatch, the incoming Senate Finance Committee chairman, is “currently examining all options and talking with his colleagues on how to best approach this issue,” according to spokeswoman Julia Lawless. The others — Jeff Sessions, the likely new chairman of the Budget Committee, and Lamar Alexander, who will head the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee — aren’t saying what they’ll do.

They’re going to face a lot more questions in the next few days. Republican Senate aides say the beginning outlines of a plan – and the level of interest among the Republican conference – will start to come together on Thursday, when the group holds its policy lunch off the Senate floor. It will be the first policy-focused meeting since the election.

One big factor will be the preferences of the Republican senators who will have to run for re-election in swing states in 2016, who may not want the all-out war against a law that is already providing benefits to millions of people. “We’ve got a lot of people up in 2016,” one aide said. “They are going to have a bigger sway on how the Republican conference will address this.”

Those include Rob Portman of Ohio — who’s also toying with a presidential run of his own — as well as Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Mark Kirk of Illinois, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.

None of them would say what strategy they prefer, so people will have to read a lot into what they’ve said in the past. On a Nov. 5 conference call with reporters, Toomey suggested he might side with the piecemeal camp. “I still think we will be much better off when we completely repeal Obamacare, but I don’t expect the current president to sign that bill, so I think we should focus on dismantling what we can,” Toomey said.

McConnell has been back and forth on the reconciliation strategy — first insisting that the GOP can’t repeal the law while Obama is in office, then suggesting he’d be open to the reconciliation strategy after coming under fire from the right. Now, McConnell’s aides say he won’t decide until he’s talked to more Republican senators. So for now, conservative activists are still scratching their heads over his statement at his post-election press conference last week: “If I had the ability … I’d get rid of it.”

But McConnell also made a point of talking about narrow repeal targets, like the individual mandate and the medical device tax. And Senate Republican Conference Chairman John Thune is firmly in the piecemeal camp. “There are things that you can target and try to do this piece by piece. And we’ll see: we’ll push the limits and see what we can do,” he told reporters last week.

Even Cruz knows the Republicans may end up with a piecemeal strategy. If they put full repeal into the budget reconciliation bill and Obama vetoes it, it will be time to “take the death by a thousand cuts approach, piece by piece,” according to Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier. But for Cruz, it’s all about trying the 51-vote repeal strategy first — and it’s not clear that he’s going to have a lot of company.

Jennifer Haberkorn, Paige Winfield Cunningham and Burgess Everett contributed to this report.