Senate Democrats, who spent weeks thinking they had won the fight to keep the Affordable Care Act in place, are mobilizing alongside progressive activists for 11 more days on the defensive.
The multilevel campaign to block the Republican bill consists of everything progressives did to stop previous iterations — from “melting the phones” of Republican senators to waging sit-ins at their offices.
This time, activists admit, feels different and more desperate. There’s fear that Senate Republicans learned from their first failed attempt at repeal, as House Republicans did in March. There’s some bitterness directed toward Senate Democrats, who cut a deal on the debt limit with President Trump — one that infuriated Republicans, but also created an opening on the calendar before the GOP’s Sept. 30 deadline to pass a bill with a bare majority.
“That was a blunder on the part of Democrats,” said Angel Padilla, the policy director of the grass-roots Indivisible coalition. “Why not wait until September 30 to cut that deal? We would have otherwise been talking about the debt ceiling and disaster relief.”
Democrats, who remain cautiously optimistic they can stop the repeal bill, rejected the idea they had botched their timing. Republicans, starting with the president, had never really given up on trying to repeal the ACA.
“This has been about fulfilling a political objective from day one,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said. “As soon as the parliamentarian’s ruling came down, they were going to be under a lot of pressure to get something by the end of the [fiscal] year. Everybody can put blame somewhere, but it’s squarely on Republicans’ shoulders that they’re trying to ram this through, in an unprecedented way, over the last two weeks of the month.”
Republicans, light on outside support for their own bill, were hoping to sow more division on the other side. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), one of its key co-sponsors, had introduced it at a news conference just hours before Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) rolled out a “Medicare for All” proposal backed by 16 Democrats. Graham told reporters Tuesday Republicans were more energized to pass a GOP-only bill after Democrats introduced their legislation.
“It was a gift from the political gods,” Graham said. “Bernie made this issue easy.”
Sanders had worried about distracting from the repeal push, and delayed his legislation several times to ensure he wouldn’t. In a Tuesday tweet, a Sanders spokesman pointed out Medicare for All was nearly three times as popular as the Graham-backed plan to block grant Medicaid, depending on the poll. In interviews, Democrats on both sides of the single-payer issue absolved their colleague.
“A number of Democrats have introduced a number of bills which are clearly aspirational, so I don’t see what this has to do with it,” said Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.), who did not endorse the Sanders bill.
“They were going to do this anyway,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) said. “The bill existed beforehand. They were taking a lot of heat from the president for not getting it done.”
As of Tuesday afternoon, arguments about strategy were having little impact on the grass-roots mobilization. Every group that had organized against the last repeal push had picked up its pace — though some, noted Padilla, were pivoting back from the fight over giving legal status to undocumented immigrants.
Indivisible had reactivated a phone call tool that helped activists target key senators, and spiffed up its TrumpCare Ten website. CREDO Action, another coalition member, was urging members who had already made more than 50,000 calls against “Trumpcare” to start calling again. Ultraviolet, a progressive women’s group, was “bird-dogging” Republicans in person to confront them on flip-flops from their past health-care positions.
“If we can slow it down and inundate them with calls, we can stop this,” said Amy Siskind, an activist who assembles a weekly emailed list of ways that Trump is altering America’s governing norms. “I’m coming up on week 45 without a day off.”
“People who cried tears of relief when Trumpcare was defeated last time are recording videos for John McCain and Lisa Murkowski,” said Ben Wikler, the Washington director of MoveOn.org. “They’re going to remember how well that was received. That was something new for a lot of people — organizing to thank Republican senators. It’s hard to express how furious those people will be if Republicans turn around and take away their health care.”
Some of those activists were already turning up by Tuesday. At the rally outside the Capitol, where a dozen Senate Democrats took turns urging voters to protest the bill, a 38-year old Charlottesville activist named Rebecca Wood said she had rallied for the ACA at least 41 times.
“I cried every time, until the night when I thought we won,” she said.
Democrats, who had worried about activists not taking the next repeal push seriously enough, spent Tuesday thanking them for re-engaging.
“Just when you thought it was safe to go home and relax!” Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) told activists outside the Capitol. “Just when you thought you could take off your fighting shoes!”
“It’s like a horror movie — Nightmare on Capitol Hill, part five,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said.
“We have to fight sometimes,” Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) said. “Let’s not throw up our hands. Let’s roll up our sleeves.”
