Senate Republicans Throw Cold Water on ACA Subsidy Discharge Petition

Democratic members of the House were elated that enough Republicans joined them in signing a discharge petition to force a vote on a three-year extension of expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies. But in the Senate, members are hemming and hawing about whether they’d take the bill up at all.

Right now, signs point to no.

“I don’t think a three-straight, three-year extension will pass,” Sen. John Hoeven, a Republican from North Dakota, told NOTUS. “We’ve got to have reforms. It could pass the House, right? But for it to pass the Senate, we’re going to have some reforms.”

Sen. Thom Tillis said he doesn’t know whether the bill, which is likely to pass the House, will get a vote in the upper chamber. But it could be a way for the Senate to pass its own legislation to address the subsidies.

“Obviously it would fail if it was only in its current form, but I hope we can use it as a vehicle for something meaningful,” he said.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville said the bill “might eventually” get a vote, but not in the near future.

“We’re working on some stuff over here,” Tuberville said. “So, you know, they got their opinion and we got ours.”

A handful of moderate House Republicans on Wednesday signed on to the discharge petition, which is led by Democrats, and would extend the tax credits for three years without any changes. A vote on the measure is on track to occur in January, and if all co-signers vote in favor then the bill is poised to pass.

But the lackluster response from Republican senators to even consider the bill in the upper chamber throws cold water on the effort. Senate GOP leadership will decide whether to bring the bill to the Senate floor, and if there isn’t much demand from the rank and file, there won’t be much pressure for Senate Majority Leader John Thune to do so.

Thune told reporters Wednesday that leadership would make that decision if and when the measure passes the House. Thune also signaled he would not treat this measure the same way he did a discharge petition related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, which unanimously passed the Senate hours after it was passed by the House last month.

“Those are very different issues,” Thune said. “That came over here pretty much unanimously, 427-1. My assumption is the discharge petition is going to be a very partisan vote.”

Some Republican senators said it would be useless to bring the bill to the floor, since it will almost certainly fail.

Sen. Jim Justice told NOTUS that the Senate should instead continue working on a longer-term, bipartisan solution for health care, rather than taking up yet another vote on extending the subsidies. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer put forward a similar measure to extend the tax credits by three years, which failed the Senate just last week (only four Republicans voted in favor).

“The one thing that you can count on with the Senate is we’re a little slower,” Justice said. “But we’re supposed to be the wisdom. We’re not supposed to be spontaneous and everything, not that the House is that.”

Sen. Rick Scott echoed that sentiment, telling NOTUS that the Senate has already voted on a similar extension before, and that he didn’t see the point in doing so again.

“This is the way this process is supposed to work,” Scott said of the discharge petition. “They get to decide what they want to focus on and we get to decide what we want to focus on.”

Multiple Republicans said they’re hopeful the Senate’s own negotiations on health care will prove the discharge petition unnecessary. A bipartisan group of senators in talks on a number of health care proposals, namely a measure by Sens. Susan Collins and Bernie Moreno that would extend subsidies by two years and implement reforms including income caps.

Moreno attended a closed-door meeting Wednesday with the moderate House Republicans whose signatures put the discharge petition over the edge. And on Monday, a sizable, bipartisan group of senators attended a lengthy meeting that Collins said was “indicative of a true willingness to come up with a solution.”

The pair’s effort comes alongside several competing Republican-led proposals, including one from Sen. Roger Marshall that would have extended subsidies for a year, one from Sen. Jon Husted to extend subsidies by two years and another from Scott that would end the subsidies in favor of health savings accounts.

But previous iterations of Republican plans for health care haven’t been successful. Sens. Bill Cassidy and Mike Crapo proposed a measure to end the subsidies in favor of health care savings accounts; it failed alongside Schumer’s bill. Still, Hoeven said he is hopeful given how health care negotiations are now going in the Senate.

“We’re working really hard to get to some reforms on health care that we can pass on a bipartisan basis,” Hoeven said. “It could include, to some extent, the enhanced subsidies.”