A Republican senator indicated that a compromise on delaying the individual mandate in Obamacare is in the works on the House side, where the CR that currently defunds Obamacare is likely to land again.
Today is the cloture vote on the bill passed by the House last week. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has been speaking on the Senate floor since yesterday’s afternoon, yet it’s not a filibuster with the ability to stop or delay the vote and that will occur regardless at about 1 p.m.
Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said this morning on CBS that whether Cruz’s long speech hurts or helps the party “depends on the outcome.”
“All of us are unified and hoping that Obama will be — Obamacare will be delayed, defunded, you know, that we can do something relative to the individual mandate, that we can do something relative to the medical device tax. It’s obviously the tactics that are being deployed,” he said.
On a yearlong delay of the individual mandate, he said, “we still have some time.”
“I do think the House is already, as we know, looking at sending something back that’s a little different than a pure defunding,” Corker said, noting the individual mandate.
“I think you know that congressional members and their staffs have ended up being dealt with a little differently than the rest of the country. So I think there are numbers of things that we might accomplish over this next week as long as we don’t cause this to go beyond the time of the government needing to be funded.”
When asked whether Cruz was staging the talk-a-thon for his own personal ambition and future presidential run, Corker wouldn’t speculate.
“I mean, people are here for different motivations, and I think to try to ascertain what somebody’s individual motivation is, you know, probably it’s not a good thing for me to do,” Corker said. “But, look, I came here to try to help create our country move — an opportunity for our country to move ahead, to put in place good public policy, and hopefully over the course of the next several days we’ll have an opportunity to do that.”
On CNN, Corker said “Republicans all are very concerned about the policies that are occurring through this healthcare bill.”
“We’re concerned about employment, people moving to part-time work, and so there’s been a difference relative to strategy or tactics, but I think everybody’s concerned about this,” he said.
“And you know, we had a nice lunch meeting yesterday and talked about this and, you know, people are taking different approaches. But at the end of the day, I do hope we end up with good policy changes over the course of this next week. I think we have the opportunity for that to occur… I do hope we end up with the possibility of a delay of the individual mandate. We’re doing that for companies. Now why not this? Maybe a delay in the subsidy since you cannot verify people’s income at present.”
Join the conversation as a VIP Member