Donald Trump finally saw the resolution compelling the release of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation files hit his desk on Wednesday after his party took a bruising over it in the House of Representatives throughout October and well into November.
With Republicans also having been granted a reprieve on a shutdown that polls say was costing their party valuable political capital and driving down Republicans’ favorability ratings, one might almost think that the GOP was out of the weeds.
Not just yet.
Though Democrats caved on their demands in the negotiations to reopen the government, that particular football is still on the field. The end of the legislative calendar is now bearing down on the House and Senate with no plan yet for lawmakers to extend federal subsidies for health care plans sold on the Affordable Care Act’s public exchanges, meaning that for millions of Americans, health care monthly premiums are about to spike by hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.
To be clear, Democrats did not get out of the shutdown negotiations unscathed. Far from it: Chuck Schumer is facing calls from Ro Khanna and members of his party in the House to step down from leadership, while polls show that voters are angrier than ever at senior members of the party.
But they may also have left their foes a ticking time bomb as they regroup and push towards the midterm year, still buoyed by new polling that shows them with a clear advantage over Republicans on a generic congressional ballot.
The reason Republicans should be concerned is simple. At a time when Donald Trump is under fire from Democrats, voters, and even a few members of his own party for not focusing on driving down costs for Americans, health care costs for millions are about to soar to new heights, likely pushing many off of their plans altogether. That comes as polls show that fewer voters than ever trust Republicans and Trump to manage the economy, which is once again set to be the defining issue of the election cycle. The administration’s desperate insistence that the price of gas is down from its Covid supply crisis highs and eggs are down from a spike caused by a wave of bird flu on U.S. farms ignores the obvious fact: prices are too high. Americans are increasingly feeling squeezed in checkout lanes at grocery stores across the country.
Trump, who is busy describing the affordability crisis as fake (since he can no longer blame Joe Biden for it), is not being any help to his congressional allies. While some in swing districts want to extend the subsidies and spare voters the pain ahead of what could already be a brutal year for the GOP, Trump is busy fanning the flames of the far right by embracing go-nowhere plans to put money from health care subsidies directly in Americans’ hands, oblivious to the fact that no plan like that is ever going to pass Congress.
In 2017, Trump appeared to learn this lesson. That year, his party embarked on a failed bid to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (better known as Obamacare), and quickly found themselves with a problem: they had no plan to replace it. Or at the very least, no plan that could unify members of their own party; they eventually settled on a so-called “skinny repeal” that weakened but didn’t do away with Obamacare’s core tenet, a protection for Americans with pre-existing health care conditions. It failed in the Senate by one vote, and his party didn’t take up the issue again.
Now, Republicans could be on course to repeat that blunder with an even more divided House caucus and a 53-vote majority in the Senate that couldn’t possibly hope to pick up Democratic votes for anything that would represent a step back for their party on health care, an issue on which Democrats have held a popularity advantage with voters for years.
For those Republicans, the question is more likely to end up being whether Mike Johnson and John Thune can stomach making a deal with Democrats in the hopes of preventing that bomb from exploding and wiping out their respective front lines in the coming midterm battle. Democrats in both chambers would jump at the chance to vote on a clean bill that would extend Obamacare subsidies originally passed as part of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, though they might not get a chance. Johnson and Thune could view that as politically toxic within their caucuses, particularly in the House, where such deals have angered conservative members in the past.
But the alternative is a certainty: Republicans risk making the affordability argument unwinnable for Donald Trump and their party next year if they can’t come to an agreement on this deeply divisive issue.
