>>Given the majority and no filibuster, there is absolutely NO REASON that any conservative legislation should struggle in the House...<<
You’re wrong, for one very big reason. Any bill the House passes also has to pass the Senate to become law. And as long as McConnell stays with the filibuster, Schumer runs the Senate.
So Ryan has been forced, so far, to tailor bills so that they can be passed under the reconciliation procedure, i.e., with 51 votes. But that procedure prevents him from drafting many conservative positions because they don’t qualify under reconciliation. And doing that costs some conservative votes. That’s exactly why a clean repeal Obamacare bill hasn’t happened. It doesn’t qualify under reconciliation, nor do many other conservative health insurance proposals.
Which is exactly why I think Trump’s latest gambit is aimed directly at McConnell and his “shoot yourself in the foot” filibuster nonsense.
“You’re wrong, for one very big reason. Any bill the House passes also has to pass the Senate to become law.”
The last time that I checked there was nothing that prevented the House from passing legislation, regardless of what the Senate wanted to do with it.
In fact, there’s a process called a “conference committee” where both houses of Congress pass differing bills and then they get reconciled and then voted on as a single bill.
But you never get to conference committee, you never even get to a filibuster (and then the opportunity to kill the filibuster), if the House just throws up its hands because a Senator from New York doesn’t like his legislation.
If the House had the leadership it had 18 years ago, we’d be CHEERING those leaders, regardless of how the Senate acted.