Speaker Paul Ryan was not his typical Eagle Scout optimistic self.
At a closed-door conference meeting with House Republicans hours after Sen. John McCain scuttled perhaps the last best hope of repealing Obamacare, Ryan read an excerpt from “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,”
a song about sailors drowning in a 1975 shipwreck. He likened the tune to what he deemed the Senate’s tragic failure to repeal Obamacare.
House Republicans — the infamously fractious group that drove out their former speaker — are now the most functional part of government, the speaker told his members.
GOP House members lit into their Senate counterparts Friday, fingering them — and only them — for the death of a seven-year campaign promise. After taking a politically poisonous vote on a controversial repeal bill, the Senate failed to unite around a substantial policy replacing President Barack Obama’s health care law, leaving House Republicans exposed.
Now House Republicans are heading into a five-week summer recess visibly frustrated by their lack of accomplishments.
“The House did its job… The Senate needs to deliver,” said Rep. Steve Russell (R-Okla.), on his way into the morning meeting. “We’re all on this plane, and if it crashes, we all go down together.”