Democrats at the Senate are expected to go all out as they protest the Republican health care bill. The Democrats are keen on using stall tactics as a way of bringing to attention how the GOP is rewriting the affordable care act as well as some of the policies outlined in the new bill. There are four measures the Democratic Party in the Senate will explore. To begin with, the party will reject almost all the unanimous-consent requests. The unanimous-consent is designed to provide quick action on bills or clauses within a bill that have bipartisan support from both sides.
According to an aide from the Democratic Party, the move is designed to slow down any action on the health care bill and if the clauses will pass, the measure will serve as a show of dissent on some of the other contentious issues. The Democratic Party has also said that it will use a series of parliamentary procedures to bring out what it called an “open process” that should be used to pass the health care bill as opposed to the method the Republicans are using at the moment. The party has also said that it will be submitting a number of unanimous-consent requests that are designed to force the bill passed already by the House to Committee.
This is expected to delay votes on the legislation and increase the level of transparency that the Democratic Party hopes will force the Republicans to defend to the public their “no hearing strategy.” The final measure will involve highlighting some of the issues in the health care bill late in the evening. The issues will be highlighted through a series of speeches. Despite all the efforts, it is important to note that none of these measures have the ability to hold back the health care bill indefinitely. However, there is no doubt that more transparency will be brought into the picture. It is emerging that the Republican Party led by majority leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, is writing the health care bill privately in what many Democrats say is an attempt to try and hide it from public scrutiny.
Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, said that the Republicans should be ashamed about the level of secrecy with which they are using to write the bill. Schumer also added that these were only the first of many measures to come all designed to shed light on the manner in which the GOP was handling Trumpcare and its true intentions that are being hidden from the public eye. There are also a number of GOP lawmakers who have expressed their concern about the closed-door approach being used to write the bill but none of them have publicly rejected it. The Republican National Committee said that the closed-door approach in writing the health care bill was a purely partisan tactic that was designed to placate the far left. Whether it will work or not remains to be seen but there is no doubt that a showdown is looming in the Senate.
