House agenda skips abortion, border bills

hill.com ^ | January 29, 2015, | Cristina Marcos

[Morgana]

The House vote next week to repeal ObamaCare in full will include a critical difference this time: instructions for committees to develop a GOP healthcare reform alternative.

The announcement came as part of a February memo from House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to Republicans outlining the next month's agenda. Absent from the list are contentious bills on abortion and immigration. [Read the memo below.]

Next week's ObamaCare vote will be the fourth stand-alone, full-scale repeal vote in the last four years. The vote will serve as an opportunity for the new House GOP freshmen who pledged to repeal the healthcare law to formally vote on it for the first time.

The vote comes in addition to the nearly 60 other votes to otherwise undermine the 2010 healthcare law. But instructions for a formal GOP alternative would be a major step for the party since the law was enacted.

Two major items were notably missing from McCarthy's memo on when bills pulled from the floor in the last week would possibly return.

McCarthy did not offer any update on a measure to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, which was yanked last week following an outcry from GOP women and centrists over language regarding rape exceptions.

Moreover, McCarthy didn't elaborate on when a border security bill, which was supposed to get a vote this week, would hit the floor again. Leadership pulled the measure due, in part, to a truncated workweek caused by inclement weather, as well as a questionable whip count resulting from conservatives' skepticism.

[RKBA Democrat]

So they’ll have a meaningless vote on obamacare, and it won’t see the light of day in Senate. A late term abortion bill that could have passed was left off as was a border bill.

Glad these guys have our backs, huh?

/s

[Ingtar]

What, pray tell, is there in that mess worth keeping?

[pfony1]

The “alternative” to Obama-care is NOT necessarily Obama-care-lite.

I’d like to see the GOP replace Obama-care with a tax-advantaged Health Management Account, where unspent fund can be rolled into the next year.

And I’d like to see truly competitive catastrophic injury insurance, which would be sold across state lines with many choices, so the buyer does NOT have to buy protection against male-pregnancy, for example...