US President Donald Trump says he's disappointed after suffering a substantial political defeat with the collapse of efforts in the Senate to repeal and reform the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
The President's fellow-Republicans doomed his efforts to rewrite landmark legislation initiated by his predecessor, Barack Obama.
Now, Mr. Trump says he'll simply allow Obamacare to collapse and worry about trying to replace it later.
From Washington, Simon Marks reports.
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This was President Trump just hours before his pledge to repeal and reform Obamacare blew up in his face….serenely confident at the time that he had the votes and the support on Capitol Hill to deliver on promises that Republicans have been making to the American people for the last 7 years.
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But Mike - as in Vice President Mike Pence - was wrong.
The White House didn't have the votes.
And the administration only realized the scale of the disaster that was unfolding during a dinner the President was hosting for Republican Senators.
Two of them who had not been invited to the shindig torpedoed the legislation by announcing their opposition to it on Twitter even before White House waiters had served the Peach Cobbler for desert.
Reports say the President was stunned that his own party had pulled the rug out from under him….and so it fell to Mike Pence, the Vice President, to scold them.
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Easy for him to say that.
He's not up for re-election in November of next year.
But one third of the Senate and the entire of House of Representatives is gearing up to fight for their political lives….and many of them don't like the idea of stripping health care from millions of Americans ahead of their trip to the ballot box.
So the White House briefly promoted a new idea: just repeal Obamacare now…and worry about replacing it later.
Mitch McConnell leads the Republicans in the Senate.
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But no one was buying it, and even while Senator McConell's words echoed through the Senate, the idea died, with Republicans saying they wouldn't support that either.
So President Trump….out of options…. said he'll just stand by and allow the Obamacare program to collapse
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That may be another case of Presidential wishful thinking.
Members of the public on the streets of Manhattan certainly seemed to think it was the Trump administration's responsibility, now, to take take responsibility for the future of the nation's healthcare.
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It isn't just the President's health care proposals that are running into trouble on Capitol Hill.
Tax Reform….infrastructure expenditure…..the budget….plans to raise the nation's debt ceiling….all of them are stalled, as President Trump continues to suffer collateral damage from the Russia investigations that continue to gnaw away at his authority.
He came into office 6 months ago controlling both Houses of Congress….and yet seems unable to parlay that into long-lasting political achievements.
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