The ‘Resistance’ Lost On Health Care In The House. Can It Win In The Senate?

In other words, Heller is pretty conservative considering how blue his state is.

On Friday, he said he opposed the Senate bill “in this form.” There are likely to be revisions, although it’s not clear if those changes will be made to appeal to the concerns of more moderate Republicans like Heller or conservatives such as Rand Paul of Kentucky, who feels the bill does not repeal enough of the original Affordable Care Act.

And Heller is now about to feel political pressure from the right, too: A pro-Trump group called “America First Policies” is considering running digital, radio and TV ads demanding that Heller back the Obamacare repeal bill. A day after Heller’s press conference, American First was already going after him:

Hugh Hewitt, an influential conservative radio talk show host, blasted the Nevada senator as a “hollow man” and warned that Republican voters will abandon Heller next year if he prevents Obamacare’s repeal. Trump himself appears to be leaning on reluctant Republicans and trying to tie the Obamacare repeal to the broader struggles of the Affordable Care Act’s state-based markets.

“I cannot imagine that these very fine Republican senators would allow the American people to suffer a broken ObamaCare any longer,” he said on social media Saturday.

So, to keep Heller opposed to this legislation, liberal organizers say they will keep pushing him. The liberal group Indivisible Project has named a “Trumpcare Ten,” a bloc of GOP senators it views as most likely to oppose the legislation. The group is urging its members to contact these senators and has set up an online tool for users to send an email to Heller’s chief of staff, deputy chief of staff and main health-care staffer. Nevada activists from groups such as Planned Parenthood will hold a protest outside of Heller’s Reno office on Thursday.

“We don’t plan on pulling back until Sen. Heller actually votes no,” said Laura Martin, associate director of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada. “The fact that he said ‘as written’ when talking about his vote … shows he is open to voting ‘yes’ on a very, very bad bill.” She added: “We have said from the beginning Congress needs to find ways to expand coverage, not take it away. We will keep calling, visiting his office, educating Nevadans and supporting Nevadans on Medicaid as they share their personal stories until a vote is taken or the bill is shelved.”

Heller has three other potential challenges to getting to a “yes” vote that are in some ways outside of the liberal resistance. First, Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval of Nevada has been strongly defending the Medicaid expansion and saying it is vital to the state. Second, the AARP is running ads in Nevada against the repeal. AARP is not traditionally liberal but strongly dislikes this bill, feeling it hurts the elderly. And finally, the electoral stakes of Heller’s decision on health care are more immediate now: He’s drawn a serious opponent in his 2018 re-election bid, Nevada Rep. Jacky Rosen, a Democrat, who announced last week that she will run against him. If he votes “yes” on health care and Nevada voters don’t like it, they have a viable alternative.

Heller’s vote is significant, since three Republicans can kill the Obamacare repeal effort. But how he positions his opposition is also important. His early stance, casting the bill as not reducing premium costs and being too aggressive in cutting Medicaid, is hard to reconcile with the concerns of Paul and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. If liberal activists can keep Heller in effect defending the bill with Democratic-style rhetoric, that will make it hard for GOP Senate leaders to make changes that would accommodate him that don’t irritate more conservative Republicans. If Heller continues to sound like he did on Friday, that will be a huge victory for the liberal resistance and potentially torpedo the Obamacare repeal effort.