On Wednesday, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick blasted GOP leaders for deliberately blocking Republican amendments to the Affordable Care Act, claiming the move was designed to keep the bill off the floor.
The Debate Over ACA Amendments
Fitzpatrick said the GOP leaders tailored the debate around a series of Republican ObamaCare amendments to ensure they would fail. He added, “Fear of a bill getting 218 votes on the floor is not a reason to keep it off,” and “It’s a reason to put it on the floor.”
He is among the handful of centrist Republicans pushing to extend ACA tax credits before they expire at the end of the year. On Tuesday, GOP lawmakers offered several amendments to a larger Republican health care package, but the Republicans controlling the Rules Committee deemed them out of order. Fitzpatrick said that was done by design to squash the proposals before they could reach the floor. He explained, “What they wanted to do was to take my bill, my text word for word, and put a poison pill attached to it, and we said no.”
Speaker Johnson’s Response
Speaker Mike Johnson disputed Fitzpatrick’s characterization, saying GOP leaders were merely demanding that the cost of the ACA amendments be offset by changes elsewhere in the budget. Johnson told Punchbowl News, “They’ll tell you that I worked really hard with them to try to … craft an amendment that would work. In the end, they opted not to do that.”
Johnson added that the House needed a pay-for under the rules, and for whatever reason, the leaders decided they did not want to do that.
Centrists Push for a Discharge Petition
The centrist Republicans rejected the Speaker’s account. Fitzpatrick said they were employing the policy baseline strategy that GOP leaders have used throughout the year, including on President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which doesn’t require offsets for extensions of current policy. Because the ACA subsidies are current policy, no alternative way to pay for it would be needed, they argued.
He also noted that Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-Va.) filed an amendment with her bill, including another pay-for to fight ACA fraud-one of the approved pay-fors-and that it was rejected. Fitzpatrick said, “They were worried that this bill, the Fitzpatrick-Golden bill brought to the floor, word for word, would pass. That’s what they were worried about.”
He added, “That’s a terrible reason not to bring a bill to the floor, is fear that it’s going to pass. That’s called democracy, that’s called making the House work.”
The failure of the GOP ObamaCare amendments infuriated the centrist Republicans. Just hours after Tuesday’s Rules Committee meeting deemed their proposals out of order, four of those Republicans went to the House floor and signed a Democratic discharge petition to extend the subsidies for three years with no other reforms. Fitzpatrick said, “The only thing worse than a clean extension with no reforms and no income caps is doing nothing.”
Key Takeaways
- GOP leaders allegedly suppressed ACA amendments to prevent a floor vote.
- Speaker Johnson claims the move was about budget offsets, not politics.
- Centrists filed a discharge petition to extend subsidies for three years without reforms.
The episode highlights deep divisions within the Republican Party over how to handle the Affordable Care Act and illustrates the lengths to which lawmakers will go to shape the legislative agenda.
