Trump to Senate Republicans: Oh no you're not giving up on health care, now get a deal done

I'm honestly not sure how much Mitch McConnell listens to him or cares what he says. When Trump called for an end to the legislative filibuster, McConnell rejected the idea out of hand. When Trump called for repeal and replace to be separated, McConnell at first refused and then agreed to try it only when it became clear that no replacement was going anywhere - even though it appears to be a tough road to get to 50 votes on the repeal-only bill. So now that McConnell has given up on a replacement and is content to schedule a vote on the seemingly doomed repeal-in-two-years-and-replace-with-AHCA-unless-we-can-agree-on-something-else, Trump is making it clear he won't accept that a deal on a replacement is impossible. He wants to Senate to get back in there and make it happen, and not take a summer break until they do:

“Any senator who votes against starting debate is really telling America that you’re fine with Obamacare,” Mr. Trump said before a lunch with the senators Wednesday. He gestured at one wavering GOP lawmaker, Dean Heller of Nevada, saying, “He wants to remain a senator, doesn’t he?” and warned lawmakers not to leave town in August without a deal.

Senate Republican leaders conceded defeat earlier this week on their effort to roll back and replace the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, but at Mr. Trump’s urging, they dug in Wednesday for what is expected to be the final push. Senate Republicans said they were hoping to rustle up 50 votes for a third version of the bill. Mr. Trump, telling the senators they were “very close” to a deal, signaled the White House would take a more aggressive role in wrangling the 50 votes need to pass the bill. The GOP president suggested that Republicans had it easy in voting for the 2010 law’s repeal when his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, was in office because they knew he would veto it and there would be no consequences. “I’m ready to act, I have pen in hand, believe me, I’m sitting in that office. You’ve never had that before,” Mr. Trump said. “For seven years, you’ve had an easy rap: ‘We’ll repeal, we’ll replace, and he’s never going to sign it.’ ”

Complain about Trump's lack of decorum all you want, but I love how blunt he's being in laying it to the senators here. Many liberals ripped the Republican Congress for their ObamaCare repeal votes during Obama's presidency because they said the whole thing was pointless, as they knew Obama would veto it. I often defended them, saying it was their job to pass good legislation and the president's job to sign good legislation. If they passed a repeal and Obama refused to sign it, then they were doing their jobs and he was failing at his.

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If they won't repeal ObamaCare now, then they're proving that the liberal charge against them was right all along. They really did do it only because they knew it would never happen, giving them a campaign talking point without the responsibility for the consequences of their actions. And that's exactly what Trump is confronting them with. He might as well come right out and call them phonies and cowards (and knowing Trump, he just might), since he's making it perfectly clear that they expose their own unseriousness if they back down from repeal now. I saw the other day that Charles Krauthammer had laid the Senate's failure on Trump, saying a lack of presidential leadership was responsible for the absence of a deal. I think very highly of Krauthammer but I disagree here. When you get elected to the United States Senate, your job is to pass legislation that benefits the nation and solves problems. If you refuse to do so, that's on you and only on you. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Dean Heller, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Jerry Moran and Rob Portman didn't refuse to support repeal because Donald Trump failed to lead them enough. They refused because they wanted to refuse. And if they refuse to heed Trump's call now to come back and get this done, that won't be his fault either. It will be theirs, because they're proving once and for all that they only pretended to want to repeal ObamaCare. And if it turns out that way, every damn one of them ought to lose his or her seat as soon as that can happen.